| Summary: | This article analyzes the production of a concept of Latin America in the ambit of the central government of the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic/Roman concept of Latin America that was disseminated at the end of the nineteenth century closely synthesizes the region’s colonial and later republican experience and deeply involves tensions associated with the rise of unprecedented divisions between politics and religion in the Catholic world at the time, thus expressing a series of expectations that were a product of secularization processes. This article thus centers on the way in which the pontifical discourse appropriated an expression created and disseminated elsewhere and gave it a content that provided a particular reading of the region’s history, as well as a specific horizon of expectations. Its reflection is based on the exploration of widely-disseminated pontifical documents, published between 1816 and 1892, in which the concept of America plays a central role. This exploration is accompanied by a contextualization of the political problems of the Atlantic world over the course of the century. The production of a concept with its own nuances speaks to the dispute over naming regions of the world in the context of an intense geopolitical readjustment and struggles over political and economic dominance, which also had a religious aspect.
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