Abstract
Throughout the twentieth century, Catholic institutions in Argentina experienced a period of consolidation, followed by evidence of decline and crisis. The reinforcement of the Romanization process at the beginning of the twentieth century, combined with the integralist emphasis of Catholicism at the beginning of the century, led to the strengthening of the Catholic presence in the country. The number of institutions and consecrated agents responsible for them continued to consolidate, as measured by the Statistical Yearbooks of the Church. However, this consolidation was followed by the beginning of the decline. This article focuses on the Catholic institutions that the Church itself monitors over time through its Statistical Yearbooks. It analyzes the number of dioceses and parishes, the number of priests and religious congregations, and the administration of the sacraments. The article examines the challenges currently facing the Catholic Church in Argentina, including the decline in the number of priests, religious people, and participation in the sacraments. Overall, this article offers a comprehensive view of Catholic institutions in Argentina from the twentieth century to the present. It highlights the consolidation, evidence of decline, and crisis that the Church has faced over the years and provides insight into the challenges it continues to face today.
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Source: own elaboration based on Argentinian Ecclesiastical Guides of AICA
Source: own elaboration. For the dioceses, Argentinian Ecclesiastical Guides of AICA. For bishops, Argentinian Ecclesiastical Guides of AICA; Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiae (Statistical Yearbook)
Source: Donini (1961) for 1912, 1957, and 1960; Pontifical Yearbook (1949) for 1948; Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiae (Statistical Yearbook)
Source: Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiae (Statistical Yearbook)
Source: Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiae (Statistical Yearbook)
Source: Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiae (Statistical Yearbook)
Source: Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiae (Statistical Yearbook, AnnStEcc); World Values Survey (WVS) (1984, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2006, 2013, 2017). Latinobarometer (LatBar) (1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2018). Americas Barometer (BarAm) (2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017, 2019). Argentinian Social Debt Observatory (ODSA) (2011, 2013, 2018, 2021). CEIL-CONICET (2008, 2019)
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Notes
These include territorial prelatures, territorial abbeys, apostolic vicariates, and apostolic prefectures, as well as apostolic administrations (see Code of Canon Law, Canons 368–374).
Under the concept of “particular churches,” the Catholic Church refers to the local or sectoral expressions of the universal Catholic Church. This concept is complemented by that of an “ecclesiastical circumscription” since not every group of faithful led by a bishop or a priest qualifies as a particular Church. This hinges particularly on the role of the bishop or priest as a pastor responsible for the care of the faithful. Consequently, every particular Church is organized within an ecclesiastical circumscription, but not every ecclesiastical circumscription becomes a particular Church.
See an interactive map updated to the year 2010: https://mapa.poblaciones.org/map/70301/#/@-33.648688,-69.982911,0z/l=125501!v0!w0
The ecclesiastical provinces, in turn, can be grouped into ecclesiastical regions to promote cooperation and common pastoral action among bishops within the same geographical area. The particular churches in Argentina are currently organized into 8 pastoral regions: Northwest (NOA), Northeast (NEA), Cuyo, Center, Litoral, Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Patagonia-Comahue.
Of the total current Argentine episcopate, 14 are archbishops, and 54 are emeritus bishops.
Within parish territories, in addition to the parish church, there are also chapels, which usually do not have resident priests but depend on priests from the parishes or chaplains appointed by the dioceses. This means that most chapels are visited by a priest with varying frequency, making the clergy’s contact with parishioners more fragile (spiritual guidance, administration of sacraments, presence in parish groups, etc.). Some chapels are located within institutions such as schools, hospitals, retreat houses, etc. The pluralization of religious offerings in the territories, leading to the strengthening of the “competitive religious market” (Bobineau and Tank-Storper 2015), has spurred the creation of Catholic chapels by the diocesan hierarchy, aimed at preventing the loss of their followers to other Christian denominations. This study does not present data on these types of institutions as it focuses exclusively on institutions that result from the territorial division and provide stable pastoral care, namely, parishes and dioceses.
It is important to clarify that these data on priests per parish are global figures. This does not mean that there are approximately 2 priests in each parish currently. Instead, some parishes are served by more than one priest, while in other cases, a parish may be served by only one priest.
For the case of diocesan and regular priests, available data is from 1945 onwards, while for both types of parishes, from 1970 onwards.
Members of religious congregations or religious orders are men and women who have chosen a publicly consecrated life following the guidelines of what they call the “charism” of their founders. They live in community and embrace the three vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience. Religious institutes are divided into orders and congregations, with the differences between them being formal. In the case of the former, which historically predate the congregations, their members make solemn vows. All members of orders are referred to as “regulars,” and if they are female, they are called “nuns.” The other religious institutes are called religious congregations, and their members are known as “religious with vows.” For practical purposes in this writing, we will tend to identify the entire collective as congregations since they are, in fact, more numerous than the orders. For practical purposes, when referring to the overall group of men and women who have chosen to be members of religious congregations, we will use the abbreviation “RL” (religious life); when referring to religious congregations, we will use “RC.”
During the colonial period, there were also the Bethlehemite fathers and the Brothers of Saint John of God, who had fewer members and a more limited presence (Di Stefano and Zanatta 2000: 98). Both orders were involved in hospital-related activities. The Bethlehemite order ceased its operations around 1824, while the hospital order of Saint John of God underwent various transformations and was reintroduced in Argentina in 1941.
The transition towards the nineteenth century educational congregations is part of the Catholic Church struggle against the prevailing secularism at that time. Several measures to restore Catholicism were developed in Europe and in the rest of the nations, especially in Latin America. Priority was given to clergy discipline and formation; confraternities and other lay associations were encouraged as a way of rebuilding the inter-church network (Folquer 2012). The foundation of numerous RCs was one of the most relevant effects of the policy designed from Rome in its effort to strengthen the Church and evangelize the population.
In France alone, around 400 new women RCs were founded in the nineteenth century (Schatz 1992: 48). Spain and Italy also strongly contributed with new institutes of consecrated life.
Since the early nineteenth century the share of cloistered nuns in the overall figures of vowed consecrated life declined. However, figures have been pretty stable over the last decades. Nuns in monasteries represented in 2016 about 7% of vowed women in South America (Greenwood and Gautier 2018).
The Institute of the Sisters of Charity, which had its origins in Calabria and later gave rise to the Daughters of the Immaculate Conception, was called upon in 1893 by the Board of Directors of the Italian Benevolent Society, Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, to provide care for their fellow countrymen.
The RCs arriving from Europe quickly embarked on the task of organizing Catholicism in the new homeland. They disseminated pastoral methods, pedagogical styles, catechetical techniques, and doctrinal insights from their countries of origin. In doing so, they played a pivotal role in rejuvenating and infusing dynamism into the Catholic faith in Argentina. Moreover, those among them who had experienced the struggles against secular states in France, Germany, or Italy brought an extraordinary impetus to the intellectual renewal of Argentine Catholicism. They transplanted the themes of the European anti-liberal reaction to Argentina, giving it an unprecedented combative character (Di Stefano and Zanatta 2000: 328).
Religious institutes, although they require the approval of the bishop to establish a presence within a diocese’s territory, possess a distinct structure that transcends the territorial logic of dioceses. They operate within the framework of the tension created by having their own spaces, “charisms,” structures, and hierarchies while also participating in the dynamics inherent to the diocesan structures that govern the Church with their own logic and hierarchies.
Officially recognized New Ecclesial Movements (NMEs) by the central government of the Church number approximately 130. Their statutes, structures, and activities fall under the supervision of a dedicated office within the Vatican, known as the Pontifical Council for the Laity. For a more in-depth exploration of this subject, refer to Ana L. Suárez’s (2014).
This decline in religious life is evident in various ways throughout the Western world, which has traditionally been Catholic. For instance, statistics from the USA in 2020 revealed that the number of religious sisters was less than one-fourth of what it had been in 1965, with figures of 179,954 and 39,912, respectively (data sourced from Ecclesiastical Statistical Yearbooks 1965, 2020).
In the past, when the Church had control over vital statistics through its baptism, marriage, and death records, this was indeed possible. National statistics in Argentina do not record the religion of the deceased.
Apostasies have not been very abundant in Argentina, even when they had some relevance in the context of the abortion debate in 2018.
Otero (2011) examines the role of religion in Argentine census data. Religion was only considered in the 1895, 1947, and 1960 censuses, indicating a limited presence in statistical differentiation among individuals. This criterion played a secondary role in the nineteenth century liberal statistics, primarily included to showcase the existence of constitutionally protected freedom of belief and potentially attract immigrants, though its purpose extended beyond this singular function. Notably, Catholic-majority countries, aside from France, omitted religion from their censuses, while Protestant or state religion-oriented nations included it. As in so many other areas of vacancy in the history of statistics, new studies would be necessary to better understand the evolution of this variable and its total suppression during the second half of the twentieth century, despite (or because of) the growing expansion of non-Catholic confessions (pp. 12–13).
We have decided to utilize all the surveys that cover the widest possible time frame between 1970 and 2020 for Argentina. Only the World Values Survey does this almost entirely (since 1984) and, to a lesser extent, the Latinobarometer (since 1995). Recently, the Barometer of the Americas (since 2008) has been added, as well as two surveys conducted by the Program for Religion and Society at CEIL-CONICET (2008 and 2019), and the inclusion of religious variables regularly conducted by the Observatory of Social Debt in Argentina at the Universidad Católica Argentina. Our aim is not to prioritize any particular survey but to demonstrate the convergence of results indicating a decline in affiliation with Catholicism. This trend aligns with various qualitative research studies within the Argentine religious landscape, which point to increased religious diversity and a growing trend of non-affiliation with religious groups.
The Latinobarometer results for 2020 reveal a significant decline in Catholicism to 48.9% and Evangelism to 6.6%, accompanied by a substantial increase to 38% among the non-affiliated. We suspect that this decline may be attributed to methodological issues. As indicated in the 2021 Latinobarometer report, Argentina was the only country where the survey had to be conducted virtually due to ongoing mobility restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, the non-response rate for this question in Argentina was remarkably high at 15%, whereas in other countries, it typically did not exceed 4%. Therefore, we are presenting the results from 2018. If the measurements were valid, it would imply a significant difference of 43.2 percentage points between the 2020 Statistical Yearbook’s data and the findings of the 2020 Latinobarometer.
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Suárez, A.L., Fidanza, J.M.L. & Olszanowski, M. Catholic Institutions in Argentina from the Twentieth Century to the Present: Consolidation, Evidences of Decline, and Crisis—a Statistical Analysis. Int J Lat Am Relig 7, 338–373 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-023-00221-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-023-00221-w