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.