Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
witchcraft is a kind of social leveler and is used to protect personal
or property rights.
Witchcraft is also important in diagnosing illness and performing
healing rites. Voodoo specialists, male houngan and
female mambo, mediate between humans and spirits through
divination and trance. They diagnose illness and reveal the origins
of other misfortunes. They can also perform rituals to
appease spirits or ancestors or to repel magic. In addition,
many voodoo specialists are accomplished herbalists who treat
a variety of illnesses.
Unlike Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, voodoo lacks
a fixed theology and organized hierarchy. Each specialist develops
his or her own reputation for helping people. Former president
Francois Duvalier recruited voodoo specialists to help
him control all aspects of Haitian life. Although Duvalier indicated
that he retained power through sorcery, voodoo is essentially
a decentralized, family-based cult, and Duvalier failed to
politicize the religion to any great extent.
Roman Catholicism
Before the Haitian Revolution, the church played a minor
role in colonial life. Plantation owners feared that religious
education for slaves could undermine their basis for control,
and they expelled the education-oriented Jesuits in 1764.
Roman Catholicism gained official status in several postindependence
Haitian constitutions, but there was no official
Roman Catholic presence in the country until the signing of a
concordat with the Vatican in 1860. The Vatican had previously
refused to recognize the Haitian government. The concordat
provided for the appointment of an archbishop in Port-au-
Prince, designated dioceses, and established an annual government
subsidy for the church. An amendment to the concordat
in 1862 assigned the Roman Catholic Church an important
role in secular education.
Initially, a small number of priests and members of religious
orders ministered primarily to the urban elite. Until the midtwentieth
century, the majority of priests were francophone
Europeans, particularly Bretons, who were culturally distant
from their rural parishioners. Roman Catholic clergy were generally
hostile toward voodoo, and they led two major campaigns
against the religion in 1896 and 1941. During these
campaigns, the government outlawed voodoo services, and
Catholics destroyed voodoo religious objects and persecuted
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