RENACA, Chile - Enrique Opaso is on the front line of a battle for the soul of Chile, the most socially conservative nation in the Western Hemisphere.
In a country where abortion and divorce are still banned, the affable parish priest is determined to resist what he sees as a tide of intoxication and fornication in fashionable Renaca, a Pacific coastal resort known for its nightlife.
For the moment, Father Enrique is winning.
Almost single-handedly, he halted a recent government-sponsored program to hand out free condoms on Renaca's beach in an AIDS-prevention effort that the priest warned would corrupt the young.
"Whether they realised it or not, this would have just encouraged the kind of behaviour that leads to the spread of AIDS rather than preventing it," said the priest, sunglasses hanging on a cord around his neck.
Nearby, pelicans skimmed over huge Pacific waves that crashed onto the beach, a favourite weekend retreat for Santiago's jet set. Muscle-bound young men lay in the sand drinking beers from the bottle and chatting up skimpily clad girls giving out tickets for nightclubs in the town.
But free contraceptives were off limits. Threats by Father Enrique to burn a pile of condoms in protest forced the organisers to drop the anti-AIDS campaign in the resort.
"I'm not necessarily against condoms as such but they were being presented as the only alternative to getting AIDS. There was no mention of values like abstinence from sex, a single partner, moderation," he said.
MORAL DEBATE
The run-in over condoms is part of a wider conflict, known as "the moral debate," between Chile's Roman Catholic Church and secular liberals. As in Renaca, the clergy have the upper hand.
Church pressure has blocked government attempts to introduce divorce in Chile, the only Western democracy -- with the exception of tiny Malta -- where it is forbidden.
A draft divorce law has been languishing in parliament for years. Several dozen women receive jail sentences annually for breaking a law against having an abortion.
Frustrated at the slow pace of social reform, President Ricardo Lagos last year warned the Vatican's leading liturgy expert, Jorge Medina, to stay out of politics in a row over government attempts to introduce the "morning-after" pill in Chile.
Medina, a Chilean cardinal working in Rome, is an arch-traditionalist seen by Chile's ruling centre-left coalition as one of the main obstacles to change.
From the Vatican, he has constantly warned against introducing divorce in his homeland. He caused controversy by saying Lagos was refused an audience with the pope during a recent visit to Italy because of the government's reformist efforts.
"This gentleman never misses an opportunity to talk garbage," Interior Minister Jose Miguel Insulza said of the cardinal in February.
Although political censorship all but disappeared when former dictator Augusto Pinochet left office in 1990, restrictions remain on artistic expression that targets the church.
Chilean cinemas are still banned from showing Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," which the church regarded as blasphemous for a fantasy scene in which Jesus marries Mary Magdalene, 14 years after it was first released.
LIBERAL ECONOMY
Chile is one of Latin America's stablest countries and a free market success story in a region now lapsing back into economic and political volatility. It has the best telecommunications and least corruption in the continent.
The centre-left coalition is proud of steering the country of 15 million people back to democracy since taking over from Pinochet. But successive Chilean presidents have failed to liberalise social and family law in the face of staunch opposition from the church.
The church's main allies are the same segments of society that propped up Pinochet: conservative businessmen, the land-owning elite and rightist politicians.
Businessmen who helped make Chile a world pioneer in privatisation in the 1980s are often the same ones who promote state control over morality.
"The right-wing and related groups bought the whole economic model based on liberalism without ever taking on board the cultural and political model that goes along with it," said women's activist Lidia Casas.
Father Enrique is comfortable with that contradiction.
"Globalisation has its good points but there is no reason why Chile, which is 90 percent Catholic and a conservative country, should just give up its heritage," he said.
With blobs of sun cream on his nose, the priest celebrates Mass on the beach every Sunday in summer.
At night, he "rescues" drunken youths, some as young as 13 years old, from under a bridge near the beach, takes them to his home and then calls their parents.
To avoid the kind of accusations of paedophilia that have rocked the Catholic Church in the United States and Ireland, Father Enrique takes a married couple from the parish with him on his night missions.
OPUS DEI
Research suggests that Chileans are not as morally strict as the church would like them to be and can be as lax as liberal Scandinavia.
Some 180,000 women a year undergo dangerous backstreet abortions, say women's health groups. Married couples who split often find a legal loophole to annul their marriage.
"Church attendance in Spain is higher than in Chile. If you look at social indicators like children born out of wedlock, Chile is higher than Sweden," said Merike Blofield, who researches Chile's social and religious issues at the University of North Carolina.
The church earned the affection of Chile's poor through the work of "Liberation Theology" priests in the 1970s and '80s who opposed Pinochet's harsh rule.
But a series of appointments by the Vatican, including Santiago Archbishop Javier Errazuriz, shifted the clergy closer to the conservative camp of Pope John Paul II.
Ultra-conservative Catholic groups like Opus Dei and the Legionnaires of Christ now exercise a disproportionate amount of influence on politics through education and networking among the business elite in the last decade.
"They have managed to build elite private schools and universities and create a network of donors for their causes, which has meant that the political right has come to prioritise moral issues," said Blofield.
Opposition leader Joaquin Lavin, an early tip to win 2005 presidential elections, is an Opus Dei member. The group also has many connections in Chilean financial circles.