Marko Đorđević
Narodni muzej - Niš

A RELIGIOUS OVERVIEW OF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Summary

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the pillars of the Dominican society. Its temples and cultural influences can be found stretching from the coast and the capital city to the remotest parts of the island. Social changes imposed by the aggressive liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century have not managed to usurp the dominance of Rome in the political, symbolic and cultural fields. Even the Dominican convertites, that is, the non-believers, preserve the basis of Catholic cultural patterns and tradition. However, the rapid surge of Protestants in Latin America (including the Dominican Republic), occuring as a result of the conversion of the Catholics, unprecedented since the sixteenth-century Europe and Martin Luther, and particularly pronounced in the last few years of globalization (after the fall of the Berlin Wall), is rapidly altering the confessional profile of the Dominican Republic.

Key words: The Dominican Republic, the Carribean, Religion, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism