Historia del Catolicismo en Argentina entre el siglo XIX y el XX by Miranda Lida (review)

Miranda Lida explores the history of the cultural life in Argentina’s Entresiglo, the time period that runs around the 1880s and 1920s—the transition to the twentieth century. She wants to know how the Church reacted to the social transformation of Argentina’s landscape in those years.

The main point of the book is that Catholicism had an ambiguous relationship with the modernization process. The Church did not understand or even resisted many aspects of modernization. Bishops and priests did not know what to do with the growing process of urbanization or with the migrants coming from Europe and the countryside. The Catholic elites feared social change, ignored social class divisions, and distrusted liberal democracy. However, at the same time, Buenos Aires Catholicism became a modern religious institution—that is, it centralized its authority; developed a bureaucratic, rational use of its resources; standardized the training of its officials; normalized the ritual life; and used mass media without hesitation. Buenos Aires’ Catholicism became cosmopolitan, receiving immigrants not so willingly and engaging in a dialogue with the European Belle Époque.

What Lida shows us is a Catholicism that suffered the social transformations within the institution. There were class struggles and political battles within the Church. Argentinean Catholicism was not alien to Argentina’s social and political turmoil.

She chooses to tell us the story from the perspective of the porteño elites, as we call in Argentina the people who were born in the “port” city of Buenos Aires. She uses primary sources such as official documents, association newsletters, Catholic newspapers, and magazine articles. This is one of the strengths of the book; it is well documented, detailed in such a way that it becomes a source for future researchers.

One of the many ways of describing modernity is that it brought about the distinction of different spheres of life; politics, economy, and science became autonomous “spheres of values,” not subjected to any kind of supervision from outside of their own realms. It meant, in Argentina, that the state, businesses, and universities challenged the authority of the Church in their own realms—authority that had remained unchallenged until the Entresiglo. To the different spheres of values that modernity brought about, the Church answered with its own “Catholic spheres”: to industrialization and workers’ unions, with Catholic Workers’ Circles; to modern democracy, with a Christian Democratic party; to mass culture, with Catholic books, magazines, publishing houses, and newspapers; to scientific development, with Catholic universities and academic organizations; to transformations in the domestic sphere, with Catholic initiatives for children and women.

That modern Catholicism, modernized in spite of its own wish, is what Lida names “Catolicismo de masas,” or mass Catholicism. Her call to link Catholicism with mass culture is a great insight. Mass Catholicism was a reaction to a problem: “What should we do with mass society and its politics, culture, economy, poverty, recreation, and transportation transformations?” The book brings light to the process in which Catholicism of the little town—Catholicism for the few—was going away. The world was changing, and so was Catholicism.

Social transformations modified the Catholic world, making it diverse and plural. However, one thing did not change: Catholicism of the masses was always a public one. Social claims were always present. As Lida asks in her introduction: Does it make sense still to use the category of secularization when we talk about religion in Latin America? Her answer is clear: The “Catholicism from the end of the world” was never a privatized religion.