Theology and the social sciences, "new limits" of possibility in the transnational and missionary recompositions of Catholicism.

Abstract

After the Second World War, a process of global recomposition of Catholicism begins to be perceived in the midst of the various social, political and geographical transformations produced by the war. Among different international contexts of independence and of a break with the old orders of power, a small community of Dominican friars from the Province of Lyon settled in Senegal, confronting a complex reality of decolonization, reflection on negritude and missionary implantation in the population that was mainly Muslim. In the midst of this process an interesting circulation of men and knowledge between Latin America, Africa and Europe took place, transforming the understanding of mission and theological work into a dialogue with the social and human sciences of the moment. Without abandoning the analysis of the processes of secularization and crisis of theological knowledge of the period, our purpose is to show the interaction of theology with the social sciences, without understanding this process as a replacement and abandonment of theological work. This "hybrid" in search of preserving theology as the queen of knowledge, a constitutive element of a religious community such as the Order of Preachers, is situated in a long-lasting process emerging from the Modernist Crisis.