Ecclesia contra Peronum, 1954–1955

Abstract

The year-long campaign to silence and weaken the Church was unpopular.¹ It stupefied most Peronists, who stood apart from the ranks of bishops and Church organisations and who still took at face value Perón ’ s self-portrait as the agent of Church social doctrine. There was no mass anticlerical sentiment for government to exploit. The state campaign was masterminded by a small group close to Perón: cabinet ministers, the CGT leader Eduardo Vuletich, and the head of the Peronist Womens ’ Branch, Delia de Parodi, were responsible for most of the hectoring speeches. The press campaign was masterminded by Peronist communists such as Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Rodolfo Puiggrós, as well as an assortment of Spanish Republican refugees and professional Radical journalists.² The Peronist Party, in Congress or at large, made few contributions, dutifully echoing state propaganda, but with little enthusiasm. Peronist deputies who refused to sanction anticlerical laws were not repressed but merely invited to stay away from Congress. The enormous Catholic meetings and processions were challenged by none except the police, and by small mobs from a revamped nationalist organisation, the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista (ALN). At street level, the methods employed to undermine the prestige of the clergy were crude and unconvincing. Thugs hired to dress as priests and enter buses with prostitutes on their arms ran up against sane popular logic that clergy choosing such company would have first removed their cassocks.³