Argentine Catholic Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century: an Analysis in Perspective

Abstract

Religious culture is presented as a significant plot with delimited borders, although  inserted in a broader cultural framework, and sustained in a set of devices that allow its reproduction, appropriation, and re-actualization. The process of secularization has made it possible to distinguish religious culture as a singular artifact, and no longer as the warp that was behind all discourses and representations, as in the societies of the Ancien Régime. At the same time that the figure of the “intellectual” was born in the end of the nineteenth century, and the bourgeois public sphere became the stage of his performance, the churches also needed intellectuals. Democratization in the West meant that the Church became one more participant in the public dispute over the possession of truth. And the rules of violence or exclusion as a mechanism to impose it were no longer sufficient. The religious hierarchy aspired to “reconquer” the secularized culture during the nineteenth century. The universe of Catholic intellectuals tends to be thought of, rather than with specific categories, as if it were a cultural archipelago. However, a perspective observation reveals how much they participated in the problematic frameworks of their time. The article proposes to analyze the role of Catholic intellectuals throughout the twentieth century in Argentina, considering various problematic axes: the relationship between laity and hierarchy, the link between Catholicism and nationalism, between religion and modernity, as well as the appreciations of the different generations of confessional writers on popular culture, mass culture, and Peronism. The concept of the Catholic intellectual introduces us to the lineage of debates about the condition of the intellectual (man of letters, organic intellectual, defender of higher values, committed, party man, official, etc.) and exhibits the restrictions of the field in which he moves: one in which the Catholic hierarchy exercises a central role. This field allows us to understand what were the possibilities, limits, audacities, and fears of Catholic intellectuals.