Raul Silva Henriquez

Born in Talca, Silva Henríquez was the sixteenth of nineteen children. His father, Ricardo Silva Silva, was a farmer and industrialist of Portuguese descent, and his mother was Mercedes Henríquez Encina. After studying at the Catholic University of Chile where he obtained his doctorate in law, Silva joined the Salesians of Don Bosco on 28 January 1930. He studied at the Salesian Pontifical University in Turin and earned a doctorate in theology and in canon law. He was ordained to the priesthood in Turin on 3 July 1938.

On 24 October 1959, Pope John XXIII named Silva Bishop of Valparaíso. He received his episcopal consecration on 29 November from Archbishop Opilio Rossi, with Archbishop Emilio Tagle Covarrubias and Bishop Vladimiro Boric Crnosija SDB, as co-consecrators. He was named Archbishop of Santiago on 14 May 1961.

He was one of the cardinal electors in the 1963 papal conclave, which elected Pope Paul VI. He participated in the conclaves of August and October 1978, which elected Popes John Paul I and John Paul II respectively.

Silva attended the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. In October 1964, he joined the prelates who signed a petition asking Pope Paul VI to support the Council's drafts of declarations on the Church's attitude toward the Jews and on religious liberty and to resist conservative attempts to weaken them.

When Fidel Castro visited Chile in 1972, Silva gave him 10,000 Bibles to distribute in Cuba.

He was an outspoken opponent of General Augusto Pinochet, the military ruler who came to power in a 1973 coup and ruled until 1990, though he initially imagined he could use his friendship with Pinochet to moderate his policies. He eventually became the regime's chief critic. In April 1974, on behalf of Chile's bishops, he issued a statement denouncing the regime for political persecution and economic policies that burdened the poor, calling for ideological reconciliation. He called for the restoration of democracy, aid victims of political persecution in finding employment, and provided legal assistance to political prisoners. He compared Pinochet's oppression of the Church to that experienced by the early Christians at the hands of the Roman Emperors. In the absence of political opposition that had been silenced, imprisoned or exile, the church under his leadership became "the effective resistance to the regime". When the government shut down an ecumenical group fostering social conciliation that Silva founded, Silva re-established it the next day as the Vicariate of Solidarity, headquartered inside the cathedral in Santiago. When the government adopted a conciliatory tone and allowed Silva to visit political prisoners, he collected information on human rights abuses and government-sponsored torture that served as the basis for a report after Pinochet fell from power that listed more than 3,000 Chileans who were killed in prison or disappeared. Government supporters threatened him by desecrating his parents' grave and shooting at his house.

Silva is believed to have played a key role in persuading the governments of Chile and Argentina to allow Pope John Paul II to mediate their border dispute and avoid war in 1978.

In December 1978, the Vicariate for Solidaity was awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights. The Bruno Kreisky Prize for Services to Human Rights in 1984.

Pope John Paul II accepted his resignation as Archbishop of Santiago on 3 May 1983, after twenty-one years of service. Pinochet's wife Lucía Hiriart greeted his retirement with the words "¡Al fin Dios nos ha escuchado!" (At last God has heard us!"). When Chilean Church officials criticized the Pinochet regime the next month, it defended dissent and called for reconciliation, but dropped Silva's direct criticism of the government and his calls for democracy. In 1986, when U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who sponsored a 1976 amendment banning military assistance to Chile and a critic of the Chilean government, visited Chile. Silva met with Kennedy while his successor as archbishop refused to.

He founded the Academy of Christian Humanism in 1988, an outgrowth of his effort beginning in 1975 to bring intellectuals together to discuss politics, society, economy and culture in Chile.