The first conflicts between the Roman Catholic Church and the Argentine government can be traced to the ideas of the May Revolution of 1810. The Tribunal of the Inquisition was suppressed in the territories of the United Provinces of the River Plate on 23 March 1813, and on 4 June the General Assembly declared the state "independent from any ecclesiastical authorities existing outside its territory".
The framers of the 1853 Constitution, who were in many cases influenced by Freemasonry, found a middle way between an officially Catholic country and a secular society, by allowing religious freedom while keeping economic support for the Church, and employing the patronage system, by which the President selected triplets of bishop candidates that the Pope could approve.
This system was abolished in 1966, during the dictatorial rule of Juan Carlos Onganía, and replaced by a Concordat which gave the Vatican the attribution of appointing and removing bishops, leaving the President only with the right to object the appointments. In the 1994 constitutional reform the Concordat was awarded the rank of international treaty and thus given priority over national laws, although Congress is still allowed to reformulate it. The same reform eliminated the constitutional requirement for the President to be a Roman Catholic.
The protocol of the Argentine government has always been influenced by the Catholic Church. Bishops often have a place along ministers, governors and other officials in patriotic ceremonies. On the celebration of the May Revolution, the president along with their spouse and ministers is expected to attend the Te Deum celebrated by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Early times
During the first twenty years after the May Revolution, the new state did not establish official diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The Papacy did not wish to create a conflict with the Spanish Crown by showing support for the South American revolution; in 1825, Pope Leo XII denounced it. During the government of Martín Rodríguez (1820–1824), there was a (failed) project to transfer the clergy to state control and abolish tithing in favour of state financial backing for the Church.
Juan Manuel de Rosas destroyed the possibility of re-establishing relations when, in 1837, he dictated that no civil or ecclesiastic authority in Buenos Aires Province must acknowledge or obey pontifical documents dated after 1810-05-25 without an authorization granted by the foreign relations department.
After Rosas's fall, Justo José de Urquiza proposed the Holy See to create a diocese of the littoral provinces, to avoid the intervention of the bishopric of Buenos Aires, but the Vatican did not accept the Concordat proposed in 1857.
1880s Possibly the first major conflict between the Argentine State and the Catholic "Church" arose in 1884, when President Julio Argentino Roca supported Law 1420, dictating compulsory universal secular education, and the law of civil marriage. The opposition of the Church led to the expulsion of the Nuncio, the removal of dissident bishops, and a breakup of diplomatic relations with the Vatican, which were re-established during Roca's second term.
The civil marriage law was approved in 1889 under the presidency of Miguel Juárez Celman. The Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Federico Aneiros, sent a document to the priests instructing them to explain church attendants that civil marriage was simply concubinage (in its modern sense, cohabitation). The Vatican sent instructions to resist the law; the Capitular Vicar of Córdoba told people to ignore the law, and several priests who had administered the sacrament to couples married under the civil law were punished.
Conservative period In October 1934 the International Eucharistic Congress was held in Buenos Aires. The Papal Legate was the then-Secretary of the Vatican, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (who would become Pope Pius XII in 1939). After the Congress, Argentina was granted a cardinal and three new archbishops, which showed the local and Vatican concern about the advancement of National Socialism. With this sensitive topic in hand, the Church pressured the government on the issue of re-establishing the possibility of religious teaching in public schools. The conservative Agustín Pedro Justo administration lent ears to these requests.
Peronism The government of Juan Perón (1946–1955) was one of changing relationships between the Church and the State. At first, the new Peronist movement was linked to the Armed Forces. The Army and the Church considered themselves barriers against the ideologies of Socialism and Communism. The Church also supported a doctrine of "social justice" that shared with Peronism the idea of a State that mediates in class conflicts and evens out social inequalities.
However, some factions of the Church objected Perón's "statism", that is, the intervention of the national government in private society, sometimes invading the sphere of influence of the Church, as in the case of welfare plans and public education, the latter being the most contentious issue. By a law dictated in 1943 during the previous dictatorial government, public schools were forced to provide religious education classes. In 1946, the Argentine Senate approved a legal re-affirmation of all the decrees passed by the military junta. This law was debated in the less docile Chamber of Deputies, and was finally passed thanks to the vote of the Peronists, who submitted to the will of the Executive Branch. The arguments presented were nationalistic and anti-liberal, identifying Argentine nationality with the deep Catholicism of the motherland, Spain, and also emphasizing religion as a means to create a personal conscience and an ordered society.
The religious education law, however, limited the powers of the Church: teachers, curricular contents and textbooks were designated by the State, after consultations with the Church if need be. Besides this, the rest of the school subjects were independent of religious influence, and therefore followed the secular tradition of Argentine education. The Peronist government also introduced subjects such as sports, hygiene and sanitary care, which the Church deemed excessively concerned with bodily matters. Finally, education became a vehicle for quasi-religious propaganda for the personality cult of the president and his wife Eva. In June 1950 Perón appointed Armando Méndez San Martín, an anticlerical (accused by the Church of being a Freemason), as Minister of Education.
"Democratic" Catholics were opposed to a full integration of religion and State, but rather preferred a separation between State and Church that granted all schools (public and private, including confessional ones) to receive state funding. These Catholics were in the minority and had no representation before Peronism.
During his second term, Perón resented the Vatican's aspiration to promote the formation of Catholic-based political parties (i. e. Christian Democracy parties). In 1954, out of political rather than ideological reasons, the government suppressed religious education in schools and attempted to legalize prostitution, to pass a divorce law and to promote a constitutional amendment to separate State and Church. Perón publicly accused bishops and priests of sabotaging his government.
On 1955-06-14, during the Corpus Christi procession, the bishops Manuel Tato and Ramón Novoa spoke against Perón, turning the celebration into an anti-government demonstration. Perón demanded the removal of the bishops to the Vatican. During the night, violent Peronist groups attacked and burned churches in Buenos Aires.
Anti-Peronists in the military, who were mostly Catholic, and factions of the Church, had been long encouraged by this building tension. On 16 June, two days after Corpus Christi, airplanes of the Navy fleet, with the motto Cristo vence ("Christ wins") painted on them, bombed Plaza de Mayo, killing hundreds of civilians, in the first move towards the coup d'état which would ultimately depose Perón, the Revolución Libertadora.
Concordat On 16 October 1966, the Argentine Chancellor Nicanor Costa Méndez signed an agreement with the Vatican, represented by the Nuncio Humberto Mozzoni. By this Concordat, which replaced the old Patronage system, the Argentine Church would have the right to create or modify dioceses in the national territory, to directly appoint archbishops and bishops, and to keep correspondence freely with the bishops, the clergy and the Argentine Catholics in general. The Concordat was ratified in the Holy See on 28 January 1967.
1976–1983 See Dirty War#Participation of Catholic Church members
In 1976, a human rights lawyer accused Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (the later Pope Francis) of conspiring with the junta to kidnap two Jesuit priests. Despite no hard evidence linking him to the crime, Cardinal Bergoglio, who headed the Society of Jesus in Argentina, had conflicts with priests advocating violence against the new military dictatorship. As head of the Jesuits, he secretly worked to save over 1000 dissidents from persecution by the military Junta, earning reconciliation with critics like the Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo.
During the dictatorship, chaplain Christian von Wernich was convicted of complicity in 7 homicides, 42 kidnappings, and 32 instances of torture. Some Catholic priests supported the Montoneros, with figures like Father Alberto Carbone preaching Marxism. Juan Ignacio Isla Casares, a Catholic youth leader, orchestrated the ambush and killing of five policemen with Montoneros' help near San Isidro Cathedral in 1975.Rojas, Guillermo. 30,000 desaparecidos. realidad, mito y dogma : historia verdadera y manipulación ideologica. p. 246 (Santiago Apóstol: 2003).MacLachlan, Colin M. Argentina: What Went Wrong (Praeger Publishers). p. 136
Since the return of democracy (1983) President Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989) had a rough relationship with the Catholic Church. Before 1987, the Civil Code recognized de facto separation of husband and wife, but did not allow remarriage. A law of divorce was approved by the Chamber of Deputies in 1986. The Catholic Church pressured the Senate to stop it, threatening to deny the sacraments to those who would vote for it. The Senate finally passed the law on 3 June 1987. During this year the relationship with the Church was also damaged by the call to a new Pedagogical Congress that led the Church to fear a cut on the state subsidies to private schools, and by legislation reforms that equalled legitimate and "natural" (illegitimate) children, which the Church considered to affect the concept of a Christian family.
President Carlos Menem (1989–1999) was linked to conservative Vatican organizations (such as the Opus Dei) and was a staunch supporter of the Church's position on abortion, for which he was awarded a special decoration by Pope John Paul II, even while he was heavily criticized by prominent bishops because of the poverty and unemployment caused by his economic measures.
President Fernando de la Rúa (1999–2001) was also a devout Catholic, and did not have major problems dealing with the Church.
Kirchner administration: 2003–2015
President Néstor Kirchner (elected in 2003), while professing belief in the Catholic faith, often had a troubled relationship with the hierarchy of the Church. Kirchner belonged to the center-left wing of Peronism and placed emphasis on certain progressive views that conflicted with those of the Catholic Church.
Conflicts on sexual and reproductive rights
The Argentine national government passed laws and began a program to the effect of providing assistance on sex education to all citizens, including the provision of free combined oral contraceptive pills and condoms. The Church opposes artificial contraception and has placed conditions on its acceptance of sex education in schools.