Venezuela

Venezuela is Catholic by a wide margin on paper, with a steadily growing evangelical minority, and it has one of the lowest rates of observance in the region. The gap between affiliation and practice is filled by devotions that the hierarchy does not control.

The best known is the cult of Jose Gregorio Hernandez, a physician who died in a street accident in Caracas in 1919 and whose reputation for treating the poor without charge produced a popular veneration that never waited for official approval. His image, in a dark suit and hat, is on altars, taxi dashboards and hospital walls across the country, and he is invoked for healing above all. Rome beatified him in 2021, a century after his death, which ratified a cult the population had already established.

The other is the tradition centred on Maria Lionza, which is genuinely Venezuelan in composition and has no exact parallel elsewhere.

The institutional church has been in open conflict with the state for most of the period since 1999. Bishops have denounced government policy and been denounced in turn from the presidential podium, and the Vatican's attempts at mediation in the political crisis produced no settlement. The church has meanwhile become a principal provider of food and medicine through Caritas during the humanitarian emergency, which has given it standing that political opposition parties lost.

Emigration on a very large scale has carried Venezuelan devotions across the region, and shrines to Jose Gregorio Hernandez and to Maria Lionza now exist in Colombia, Peru, Spain and the United States.

The mountain of Sorte in the state of Yaracuy is the centre of a tradition that fuses indigenous, African and Catholic material into something specific to Venezuela. Tens of thousands of people travel there each October, and ceremonies are held at the river and on the mountainside through the night.

Maria Lionza herself is described in several ways, most often as a figure associated with the mountain, the waters and the animals, whose origin story is told in variant forms involving an indigenous chief's daughter and an anaconda. She heads what is called the three powers, a trio completed by Guaicaipuro, an indigenous chief who resisted the Spanish, and Negro Felipe, a Black figure of the independence period. That trio is the structural signature of the tradition: indigenous, African and creole, held together rather than ranked.

Below the three powers the spirits are organised into cortes, courts, each with its own membership and character. There is an indigenous court of chiefs, an African court, a court of liberators from the independence wars, a medical court headed by Jose Gregorio Hernandez, and, controversially, a court of malandros, dead street criminals from the Caracas barrios who are invoked by people living in the conditions that produced them.

Practice centres on mediumship. A materia is the medium through whom a spirit speaks, directed by a banco who manages the session. Consultations concern health, work, protection and family matters.

This is a living tradition with practitioners in the hundreds of thousands, and the description here is of its structure as documented by Venezuelan ethnographers. Some of what is done at Sorte is not for publication, and it is not published here.