Argentina

Argentine Catholicism was established by conquest and confirmed by constitution. The 1853 text obliged the federal government to sustain the Roman Catholic faith and, until 1994, required the president to be Catholic, an arrangement that gave the church a public standing it retained through every subsequent upheaval. The relationship was not always warm: Juan Peron, who had governed with church support, was excommunicated in 1955 after legalising divorce and expelling clergy, and the crisis contributed to his overthrow. Under the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 the hierarchy's conduct became the church's deepest wound, with military chaplains present at detention centres and bishops largely silent, while individual priests, catechists and the two French nuns abducted from the Church of Santa Cruz were themselves disappeared.

Argentina also holds the largest Jewish community in Latin America, built by migration from the Russian empire and by the Jewish Colonisation Association settlements in Entre Rios, and it received both Nazi fugitives and Jewish refugees after 1945. Popular religion runs alongside the official kind and frequently outside it, in the roadside shrines to Gauchito Gil, a nineteenth century deserter executed and venerated as a folk saint, and in the devotion to San La Muerte, which the church rejects.

Three things distinguish Argentine religion from that of its neighbours. The first is Article 2, which survived the 1994 reform when the confessional requirement on the presidency did not: the state still sustains the Catholic Church financially, paying stipends to bishops and subsidising seminaries, and repeated bills to repeal it have failed. Argentina thereby has an established church in fact while being a country where the same church lost the 2020 abortion vote, having already lost same sex marriage in 2010, the first such law in Latin America. The second is the unresolved attacks on the Jewish community: the Israeli embassy was bombed in 1992, killing twenty nine, and the AMIA community centre in 1994, killing eighty five, in the deadliest attack on Jews anywhere since the Second World War. No one has been convicted, the investigation was corrupted, and the prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in 2015 the day before he was to testify. The third is the scale of devotion the church does not control.

Gauchito Gil draws hundreds of thousands to Mercedes in Corrientes each January, the shrine of the Difunta Correa in San Juan is surrounded by donated water bottles and vehicle number plates, and neither figure is canonised nor likely to be. The church tolerates the first and opposes the second, and both continue regardless.