| Abstrakt: |
Without wishing to reduce pope Francis to a mere product of the ecclesial context in which he was formed and operated until 2013, to retrace the recent history of the Church in Argentina may help to understand the feeling and culture of the new bishop of Rome. In this southern American country, in fact, from the 1930s the Catholic Church has played a leading and very contradictory role, marked in any case by the idea that the core of national identity consisted in adherence to Catholicism, to which the 'people' would always be faithful, as opposed to the (economic and /or cultural) elites, bearers of modern ideologies (liberalism, Marxism). This view was shared by both the majority and fundamentalist sectors of the institution, which considered the army as the embryo of the corporatist 'Christian order', and most of the reform movements, wary of the class analysis. This explains the convergences and clashes between the argentinian Church, in its various parts, and Peronism, a political phenomenon as 'typical' of the country as varied. The echo of the 'myth of the Catholic nation' lights up, albeit to varying degrees, the support of the majority of the bishops to the military coup of 1976, the troubled relations between the episcopate and the government of the radical Alfonsin, the more 'natural' closeness tojusticialista Menem and the always tense dealings with Kirchnerism. Today, though Catholicism has not lost importance in the society, thanks to popular religiosity, also Argentina knows a process of secularisation, which takes on the traits of a 'cultural' belonging to the majority belief and of subjectivism in the faith, with a distancing from ecclesiastical institution and doctrinal precepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
