During the Perón years Pastor Canclini was President of the Evangelical Baptist Convention and an activist in the liberal resistance to the dictatorship’s manifold assaults upon civil and religious freedoms. Although he observes that much has changed since Vatican II, he argues convincingly that under Perón the tribulations of Argentina’s non-Catholic peoples—one million of them in 1947—were largely attributable to the extreme intolerance and drive for political power that had permeated the Catholic hierarchy after 1930. He characterizes Perón’s religiosity as, at most, a shallow folk Catholicism, and shares the common view that the regime’s pro-Catholic policies were dictated by the baldest expediency. Treatment of the major conflicts of the period is topical and entirely descriptive; perhaps the most disruptive issue of all, the battle to preserve Law 1420 and lay education, receives only cursory examination amidst chapters on more transitory matters. Pastor Canclini concludes with a telling account of Perón’s attempt, in the waning months of his rule following his rupture with the Catholic hierarchy, to extract gestures of support from the religious minorities he had hitherto treated so highhandedly.
The book suffers from imbalance and lack of analysis. Students will find interest in the documentation, much of it from the author’s personal collection and printed in full. It’s chief merit, however, lies in the judiciousness of the presentation, for Pastor Canclini comes through as a generous civil libertarian rather than as a narrow sectarian spokesman.
