Article 2, the Bombings and the Devotions Rome Does Not Approve

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.