Abstract
When one thinks about church/state relationships in Latin America, one tends to concentrate on the efforts the Catholic Church makes to maintain its influence over public affairs, facing a state apparatus aimed at restricting it. In Argentina’s case, the competition for relevancy in the public arena, more than a struggle, can be likened to a dance. The Catholic point of view in the Argentine political scenario cannot be fully understood unless we consider its dancing partner—the state, or national government. Tango is a dance meant for two. These two protagonists wheel artistically over the stage in a complex and varying relationship that becomes imbued with tension and undergoes transformations, in step with the beat of the music.
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Notes
- 1.
Emphasis is placed on the Córdoba City example. Located 700 km northeast of Buenos Aires, by population size it is the second largest city in the country (INDEC 2012).
- 2.
A tango-dancing event.
- 3.
The differentiation of specific social subsystems, each with its own sphere of incumbency, free from interference by the others, is one of the modern-day features. A result of this separation was the differentiation between the political and religious spheres (Casanova 1994).
- 4.
After the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church standardized the formation of its priests. The colonial church in Argentina lacked resources to implement this change. Since the National Constitution (1853) had established the Catholic Church as an “official” one, President Mitre understood that it was his responsibility to undertake that long-delayed reform.
- 5.
In the case of Argentina , by liberals we mean an economic elite that fosters free commerce, and a small state, but it’s usually conservative when it comes to opening the political space up to popular participation. In order to keep in mind these particular features of Argentinean liberals I refer to them as “local liberals.”
- 6.
With this challenge to local authority by the Catholic hierarchy, another boundary problem arose between a secular state and ecclesiastical organization. Some government officials wanted it approved, since the bishop as a wage-earner was considered to be a disobedient public official (Roitenburd 2000).
- 7.
Just like the state registry of births, marriages, and deaths, the public education system is free, lay, and obligatory.
- 8.
Modernization is here understood to be a process of rationalization, urbanization, industrialization, etc. (Gorski and Altinordu 2008, 57).
- 9.
150 miles south of the city of Córdoba.
- 10.
As the political movement founded by Juan Perón is known. The official name is “Partido Justicialista,” roughly translated as “Party for Justice.” Peronismo, a populist political movement similar to those of Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, is still one of the main actors in Argentina ’s political life. Latin American populism is hard to categorize under the traditional ideas of “conservative ” or “progressive,” since usually the different countries merge liberal and conservative policies into their positions.
- 11.
That was the name given to the administrative reforms emerging from the Peronist government, which shaped the 1950 constitutional reform.
- 12.
This Decree, signed by President Aramburu, while awarding autonomy and three-party government to state-run universities (changes which had been sought since the 1918 Reform), had opened the door to private universities.
- 13.
Ousset’s main treatise, Marxism-Leninism, was translated into Spanish in Argentina (by Iction Publishing House in 1963), with a prologue by Cardinal Antonio Caggiano, the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
- 14.
One of the most notorious guerrilla armies in Argentina ’s contemporary history.
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Morello, S.J.G. (2017). “It Takes Two to Tango”: The Religious and the Secular in Argentina’s Political Dance, 1860–1960. In: Vaggione, J., Morán Faúndes, J. (eds) Laicidad and Religious Diversity in Latin America. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44745-2_4
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