A great deal of scholarly attention has been focused on the role of the Catholic Church in leading the fight against authoritarianism in Latin America and elsewhere, a direction that prompted many of these churches to leave their traditional, conservative roles behind and move in a more politically progressive direction. However, there has been relatively less attention paid to how churches have responded to different kinds of authoritarian regimes and how confrontational church strategies have changed over time. Focusing on the contemporary case of the Cuban Catholic Church, I use evidence gathered from extensive fieldwork in Cuba to create a new set of definitions that distinguishes between strategies of direct confrontation and indirect confrontation and offer a new theoretical framework for comparative theory about religion and contentious politics.I argue that the Cuban Church has formulated a strategy of indirect confrontation that has allowed the church to engage in contentious politics while protecting its institutional interests and continuing its mission of evangelization. Placing the Cuban Church in comparative analysis with the national churches of Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Poland, and Venezuela, I argue that a combination of regime type, institutional church reforms, and the world-historical time period during which the church began its contentious activities have a direct influence on the church's choice of confrontational strategy. Churches that became confrontational under right-wing authoritarian regimes during the 1960s and 1970s were more likely to pursue strategies of direct confrontation than churches facing left-wing authoritarian regimes from the 1980s to the present, which were more likely to pursue strategies of indirect confrontation. Progressive church leaders that began confronting right-wing regimes in the 1960s and 1970s had in liberation theology a politically contentious theology that called for direct confrontation against the ideology of "the national security state" promoted by the military dictatorships that ruled their countries. The Vatican's turn toward more conservative politics under the papacy of John Paul II in the 1980s influenced churches to pursue indirectly confrontational strategies against leftist authoritarian regimes where liberation theology could not serve as a viable confrontational ideology and autonomous grassroots political mobilization declined as a pastoral activity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]