Both these well-researched and trenchantly written books mark valuable additions to recent attempts to assess the part played by the Catholic church in the political history of modern Argentina. Austen Ivereigh addresses this subject more broadly and briefly, Lila Caimari with a more specific and lengthier focus on the period of Perón. Both books add new data on the development of the Argentine church during the nineteenth century. They analyze the conflicts between church and state over education in the 1880s; the liberal-clerical accommodation of 1890-1930; the role of church leaders in the rise of the nationalist movements in the 1930s; the influence of Jacques Maritata in the late 1930s and 1940s, and that of “social Catholicism” under Miguel de Andrea; and the legislation of 1947 that ratified the 1943 decree restoring religious teaching in the schools.
Complementing the recent study by Mariano Plotkin (Mañana es San Perón: propaganda, rituales políticos y educación en el régimen peronista, 1946-1955,1994), Caimari examines the content of school textbooks under Perón in the early 1950s. She provides biographical sketches of three influential priests of this period: Hernán Benítez, the confessor of Eva Perón; Julio Meinvielle, the rabid anti-Semite of the 1930s and “spiritual adviser” of the incipient guerrilla groups in the early 1960s; and Gustavo J. Franceschi, a corporatist avant la lettre in the early 1900s, who is often considered a leading intellectual mentor of the 1943 authoritarian military coup. Ivereigh, by contrast, adds a brief analysis of the early nineteenth century (including what he describes as the “scholastic” revolution of May 1810) and continues his story up to the end of the 1950s.
The central objective of both books is to explain why the Peronist regime of 1946-55, which began with close relations with the church, ended in violent conflict with it. The two authors arrive at broadly similar conclusions: the chief origins of the conflict, in a word, sprang from the regime’s increasing theocratic orientation and its efforts to “Peronize” Argentine society. On these issues, the authors present much new and fascinating material, but no strikingly new theses.
Caimari’s outstanding work can be faulted on little more than an occasional issue of detail and some small inconsistencies. On page 126, for example, her text describes the large increase in state funding in 1946 under the rubric culto, but an accompanying graph indicates that the increase occurred the previous year—an important discrepancy in light of the events of these two years. On page 292, the author suggests that the church was too weak for the common interpretation of the competition between church and state for power and clientele (leading ultimately to conflict between them) to be persuasive; only seven pages later, she illustrates a crucial aspect of such competition, describing how the two sides (through institutional subcomponents) fought for control over the nation’s youth.
Ivereigh, an author of substantial intellectual and scholarly weight, exposes himself to easy challenge through his partisanship and lapses into tendentiousness. He writes (sometimes stridently) as a Catholic apologist: few works on modern Latin American history begin, as Ivereigh does, with an exegesis of St. Thomas Aquinas; few historians of Argentina struggle, at least with this intensity, to absolve the Argentine church from the common charge of reactionary authoritarianism.
On Ivereigh’s scholastic assumptions, Catholic teachings represent the only true road to democracy and pluralism; but few readers will be converted to this possible truth by the example of Catholic politics in Argentina. Ivereigh’s hero is the priest Franceschi, whose periodical, Criterio, in the 1930s and 1940s campaigned for what the author represents as real (that is, Catholic) democracy. To suggest my disagreement with Ivereigh on these issues, I quote Caimari on Criterio and Franceschi: “During the 1930s, the periodical was a pillar of authoritarianism and economic antiliberalism,” and Franceschi, its director, “the defender of papal and episcopal orthodoxy” (p. 93).
