Throughout this book, Hernández Sandoval emphasizes the schism between the leadership of different Catholic parishes that supported conservative, anti-communist, and even military governments, and the missionaries who worked directly among the citizenry and who defied prevailing structural and political restraints and at times participated directly in armed altercations and struggles. Hernández Sandoval argues that the Catholic Church addressed social and political challenges and made reforms part of a “broad transnational approach that spans the five decades from the 1920s to the 1960s and moves beyond, but does not discount, national boundaries—in the process reconstructing the ideological and institutional connections between Rome and Guatemalan Catholicism.” By following this process, Hernández Sandoval can “uncover the origins of progressive Catholicism” (p. 3).