This beautifully written book is a model of how to weave together the social and political histories of Catholic priests and the communities in which they lived during the last two centuries in Argentina. María Elena Barral, also author of De sotanas por la Pampa. Religión y sociedad en el Buenos Aires tardocolonial, is a leading representative of the renovation of the scholarship on the Catholic Church in Argentina.
Curas con los pies en la tierra focuses on how local communities forged bonds with their priests, the Catholic Church, and Catholicism, according to the political context of each era. Even though the book examines historical ways to be a cura (priest) by providing biographies of ten priests from the eighteenth century to the present, the core thread of this work shows how parishioners mobilized their priests politically and socially. Rather than showing Catholic priests predominantly marshaling people into political developments, the vignettes that populate this book shed light on how leaders (the priests) were led by, or followed, the predominant feelings and demands among their parishioners. This story from below does not “turn” social history into politics or vice versa, but as the feligreses (parishioners) are the subject of this book, their own categories blend both aspects according to their cultural understanding of their relationships with priests.
Politics, understood locally, regionally, nationally, and, particularly for the twentieth century, in a Latin American context, provides the scenario for these biographies. Readers can examine how the personal strategies of these priests were shaped, as well as countered, by the Spanish colonial regime, the May Revolution of Independence, nineteenth-century popular politics, the solidification of the Argentine state in the late nineteenth century, integrismo (conservative Catholicism), the ups and downs of the many Peronisms and military dictatorships, and the legacy of the martyrs of the 1970s, among other features of Argentine history.
Biographies of priests, who mostly are not well known by the public, constitute the chapters of the book. Yet, these chapters offer several references and connections between these stories and very well-known religious and political leaders. Despite this biographical perspective, the structure of each chapter is the narration of social conflicts. Barral skillfully inserts historiographical debates into the fabric of the narrative by portraying how priests acted in these clashes, which makes this book very accessible for larger audiences. Priests became middlemen, mediators of small- and large-scale conflicts over religious and secular jurisdiction, as well as economic resources in the colonial period and, later, across the larger span of Argentine politics.
The late colonial conflict, par excellence, was the alboroto, which Barral examines through the actions in 1782 of an “alborotador” priest, Fernando Quiroga y Taboada, against the Alcalde of Gualeguay, Entre Ríos. Here the priest was the instigator of conflict, which led his community to expel him. The vecinos (the reputable men of the community) were able to defeat Quiroga y Taboada, who challenged their desires about where to build the town chapel and plans to change the community's patron saint. Barral wittily writes that “Quiroga atrasaba”—that he turned back the clock (29)—because his claims of jurisdiction were outdated according to how colonial authorities and local communities considered royal patronage and the role of ecclesiastical authorities in the Americas. Parish priests were also losing ground in their communities during the late colonial period as new leaders emerged.
In the early nineteenth century, priests lost additional ground, this time in relation to military leaders, but still some of them remained in positions of power and renewed their leadership by bringing legitimacy to the new politics. This was the case with Julián Navarro, who followed the revolutionary army of Buenos Aires from Rosario to Chile as chaplain and then politician. He oversaw the ceremonies of blessings of the new flags of the homeland as well as the incorporation of vírgenes generalas, or Virgin Mary devotions into military units.
While priests continued to be significant for imagining the political community, they now faced challenges about how to mediate political differences. With the advancement of factional politics, priests for the first time confronted some of their parishioners in terms of party affiliation. In the late nineteenth-century times of secularization and expansion of the national state, priests found new ways to enter social life and face both liberalism and the emergent socialism. One of these experiments was led by textile entrepreneur Jules Steverlynk. He founded Villa Flandria in 1926 and invested in the application of the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum to the organization of work time and free time of cotton laborers in early twentieth-century rural Buenos Aires Province.
The last three chapters focus on the first Peronism, the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (MSTM, or Movement of Priests for the Third World), and the Grupo de Curas en la Opción por los Pobres (OPP, or Group of Priests in the Option for the Poor). Barral transcends her specialization in colonial and nineteenth-century history to build a narrative that examines commonalities beyond political difference and across generations. For instance, she emphasizes that both Peronist and anti-Peronist priests shared a passionate way of embracing or rejecting Peronism during the 1950s. In the 1970s, a certain ideology, or sensibilidad beyond Peronism and Catholicism could make overlapping identities as priests, nuns, and also activists decided for the option of the popular classes within the MSTM. In contrast to the passion of first Peronism and the MSTM model of movement, the OPP developed a conciliatory tone as well as presented itself not as a movement but as a network operating since the restoration of democracy in the mid 1980s. This has been done while continuing with the sensibilidad of the 1970s and remembering the martyrs of that era. These last chapters are a pleasure to read, as they move beyond the disciplinary constraints of historical writing.
