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The Comité épiscopal France - Amérique latine (CEFAL) has operated for several decades as a marshalling yard for sending French priests to the favelas of São Paulo or to the Andean plateaux, at the request of local bishops frightened by the aura of the Cuban revolution. The book tells the story of how the French bishops largely improvised a collective response to this impetus supported by Rome, relying on a generation of young priests who, once there, fell in love with a mythical Latin America, embodied at the time by the "bishop of the poor" Hélder Câmara, the revolutionary Ernesto Guevara or the archpriest Ivan Illich, who had settled in Cuernavaca, who trained hundreds of European and North American missionary clerics. Very quickly, with the establishment of military dictatorships and the rise of liberation theology, the CEFAL was forced to choose sides. French clerics were increasingly imprisoned, accused of being agents of world communism. At once the official body of the episcopate and a sounding board for Third World activists, the Comité navigated in a political and religious context that had become more radical, and it was unable to prevent the assassination of two of its members, Gabriel Longueville and André Jarlan.This book is an invitation to discover an unwritten transatlantic history, that of a « Latin American moment » in France which, through an imaginary world and commitments, gave rise to misunderstandings but also to lasting friendships. Passers-by between two worlds, these men with their often unusual trajectories came into contact with political, social and ecclesial tensions.

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