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Science, Catholicism and politics in Argentina (1910–1935)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2020

MIGUEL DE ASÚA
MIGUEL DE ASÚA*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina. Email: mdeasua@retina.ar.
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Abstract

In fin de siècle Argentina a secularist ideology of science was part of the positivist world view espoused by liberals and socialists. Between the years 1910 and 1935, a period in which the Catholic Church experienced a significant cultural expansion, the activities of the Catholic naturalist Ángel Gallardo and the astronomer and priest Fortunato Devoto challenged the so far prevailing idea of science as opposed to religion. This paper explores the connections between the scientific, religious and political aspects of those figures in order to get some insights into the complexity of the relationships between science and secularization in societies with a Catholic majority.

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Research Article
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The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 139 - 158
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Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2020

On 16 April 1910, just before dawn, Father Fortunato Devoto pointed his binoculars towards the eastern skies from the top of the episcopal palace in the capital city of the province of Buenos Aires. As the acting director of the La Plata Observatory, he was the first person to see Halley's Comet from Buenos Aires.Footnote 1 The reporter who interviewed him for a popular illustrated weekly, puzzled perhaps by the seeming contradiction of finding a Catholic priest in a secular temple of science, compared the premises of the observatory to ‘a cemetery’.Footnote 2 The cometary appearance which captured the imagination of the world was overshadowed in Argentina by the fêtes of the first centenary of the revolution of independence from Spain. Among the several learned meetings convened in Buenos Aires to celebrate the patriotic anniversary, the first International American Scientific Congress stood as a reliable mirror of the country's scientific culture in the twilight of the belle époque.Footnote 3 The only priest to present a communication to the congress was Fr Henri Sisson, a French Dominican who that same year had published a comprehensive account of his adoptive country.Footnote 4 His contribution (‘Humanitarianism in Argentine civilisation’) would have passed unnoticed were it not that his passing reference to ‘the dangers of immigration and anarchism’ provoked an irate reaction from Sara Justo, a socialist and early feminist leader.Footnote 5 The paltry visible Catholic representation at the meeting reflected the wide gap between the institutional church and a strongly secularized scientific world. But for those who could see them, there were signs that this state of affairs was about to change: the president of the section of biological sciences was the prestigious Catholic engineer and naturalist Ángel Gallardo and the secretary of the astronomy section was Father Devoto, who delivered an informal talk about the solar and lunar tables in the astronomical calendars he was editing at that time.Footnote 6 Both of them would play an important role in the building of scientific institutions in the 1930s in Argentina.

In his 1978 General Theory of Secularisation the late David Martin gave a historic and cultural turn to the sociology of religion, advancing his now famous patterns of secularization related to a typology of sociocultural contexts. It will suffice to recall here that he distinguished the American and British from the French (Latin) pattern. The latter corresponds to those baroque autocracies which went through revolutions inspired by secular ideologies; in these cases ‘coherent and massive secularism confronts coherent and massive religiosity’.Footnote 7 What undergirds this distinction is a basic difference between Protestant pluralism and Catholic monopoly.Footnote 8 Along these lines, Charles Taylor has also distinguished two ‘ideal types’ of secularization patterns. One of them (‘palaeo-Durkheimian’) corresponds to the baroque Catholic societies of continental Europe characterized by total identification of one church with society; the other type (‘neo-Durkheimian’) is typical of Anglo-Protestant societies, in which belonging to any of several churches carries a simultaneous commitment with a ‘church’ somehow associated to the national political identity.Footnote 9 Latin American countries obviously went through something like the French (Latin) or palaeo-Durkheimian model of secularization, with some significant differences among them – the conflict between state and church was more acute in neighbouring Uruguay than in Argentina. In a previous paper, I adopted a long-term view to analyse the interactions between science and Catholicism in Argentina.Footnote 10 Three periods can be distinguished: (a) the rather amiable interactions during the Habsburg and Bourbon Spanish colonial rule and early independent period; (b) the highly conflictive later decades of the nineteenth century, characterized by the high tide of secularizing politics; and (c) the indifferent stage of the mid-twentieth century. The secularizing thrust that took place between 1880 and 1890 in Argentina succeeded in restricting the social sphere of influence of the Catholic Church. The ‘conflict thesis’ of science and religion and the work of John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874) were widely discussed in the press and the parliamentary debates that accompanied the government's plans for abolishing religious education in state-funded elementary schools.Footnote 11 Nineteenth-century liberals and early twentieth-century socialists wielded Darwinian evolution as rhetorical weapon in secularist discourse.Footnote 12 Local history of science, framed in the mould of Continental positivist historiography, consecrated the identification of secularization and science and played down those historical actors and processes redolent of church incense and candles.Footnote 13

In this paper, I will show how the culturally ingrained assumptions of a secular science promoted by liberals and socialists were challenged by the rise of politically active Catholic scientists in a period of church expansion. After providing some necessary background information about the political, ecclesiastical and scientific history of Argentina between 1910 and 1935, we shall follow the scientific careers and analyse the views on science and religion of the naturalist Ángel Gallardo and the astronomer Fortunato Devoto, in order to examine the relationships between the Catholic Church, science, politics and secularization during that period. More broadly, this essay will show that, by examining societies with non-anglophone patterns of secularization, we can open new perspectives in the understanding of the relationships between science and religion.

Church and politics in transition

The year 1916 marked the end of the long conservative era in Argentina, which had opened in 1880.Footnote 14 The Radical Civic Union (hereinafter UCR, after its name in Spanish), a middle-class reformist party, guided the country for the next fourteen years during the presidencies of its leader, Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–1922), and his more conservative successor, Marcelo T. de Alvear (1922–1928). Against the background of the beginning of the Great Depression, Yrigoyen's second term of office (1928–1930) was interrupted by the military coup led by General Félix Uriburu. Uriburu's short rightist and nationalistic rule (September 1930–February 1932) – a failed attempt at establishing a corporatist state – was followed by a return to a more politically liberal orientation with General Agustín P. Justo (1932–1938), elected president in rigged elections under a coalition of conservatives, anti-Yrigoyenist radicals and independent socialists.Footnote 15

By the beginning of the First World War, Argentina had gone through two decades of breakneck economic and demographic expansion; by 1930 growth was keeping pace with that of Canada and Australia.Footnote 16 Between 1904 and 1913 the net flow of immigration to the country was never less than 100,000 persons per year and in some years it reached 200,000.Footnote 17 In 1914, 1,576,000 people lived in Buenos Aires; about half of them were foreigners.Footnote 18 Immigration came mostly from Italy and Spain, but the flow from non-Catholic lands was not insignificant. While the foundational thinkers of the country, such as Domingo F. Sarmiento and Juan B. Alberdi, had seen immigration as the only available answer to the challenge of creating a modern nation out of the empty wilderness of ‘the desert’, by the turn of the century the ruling elites showed increasing signs of anxiety vis-à-vis the explosive transformation of society; as early as the 1880s literature gave expression to these fears.Footnote 19 Answers to the challenge ranged from the law that allowed the executive power to expel any immigrant considered ‘undesirable’ (1902) to efforts at integration and nationalization through the patriotic rituals implemented in public elementary schools designed to turn children fresh off the boat into fully fledged Argentine citizens.Footnote 20 The visit to Buenos Aires of the Infanta Isabella, the heir to the Spanish throne, during the centennial celebrations of independence was a symbol of the reconciliation with Spain and of the felt need to recover the Hispanic heritage, systematically despised by Francophile fin de siècle intellectuals. This change in the atmosphere was given expression in the work of a group of influential writers and thinkers, such as Manuel Gálvez, Ricardo Rojas, Carlos Ibarguren and Leopoldo Lugones, who fostered a type of nationalism predicated upon traditional Hispanic values. While some of them remained faithful to the ideals of conservative political liberalism (Ángel Gallardo was among them), others would eventually shift to an overtly authoritarian and militaristic style of nationalism, verging on fascism.Footnote 21 Many of the immigrants who huddled in the slums of Buenos Aires were anarchists and socialists who led the organization of labour unions and stirred social unrest.Footnote 22 The wave of strikes and uprisings and the consequent repression reached its peak in January 1919 in Buenos Aires (‘Tragic Week’) and in the labourers’ revolt in Patagonia (1920–1922), both under governments of the UCR. If, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, secular feeling had been the hallmark of the Europeanized elite, by the first decade of the twentieth century anticlericalism was not uncommon among the immigrant masses from rural areas of Mediterranean Europe.

The secularizing laws of the 1880s, a victory of the liberal conservative elite of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires then in power, had further restricted the social influence of an already weak Catholic Church, isolated from Rome and dependent upon the state.Footnote 23 By the beginning of the 1890s, the lay leaders who had fought to stop the tide of secularization by involving Catholics in politics had died and with them the ideal of a Catholic party. Catholic lay and clerical activism shifted from political to social concerns, as shown by the creation of the Workers’ Circles by the German Redemptorist priest Friedrich Grote and other initiatives aimed at the creation of a Catholic labour movement strong enough to withstand the challenge of socialism and anarchism.Footnote 24 While membership in Catholic unions during the 1915–1930 period amounted to 40,000–45,000 affiliates, by 1920 the socialists could boast around 100,000 supporters.Footnote 25 Lay Catholic intellectuals such as Santiago O'Farrell, Alejandro Bunge, Arturo M. Bas, Juan F. Cafferata, Joaquín Cullen or Emilio Lamarca were social reformers preoccupied by questions of the law, economy and society. There were no Catholic natural scientists in Argentina before the twentieth century. While by the turn of the century the energies of the church in Argentina were spent on the social question, the hierarchy reached some kind of accommodation with the liberal elites in the face of the threat of radicalism and anti-clerical sentiment; this implicit settlement was at the back of the lavish donations for charities and church buildings and the sumptuous diplomatic display on the world scene of the belle époque – a stage upon which Gallardo would move at ease.Footnote 26

Catholic social action also found expression in the several unstable organizations of the laity which succeeded each other in the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century and were inspired by the ideas of Continental Christian democracy.Footnote 27 In the 1920s, Catholic culture flourished with new institutions such as the Centre of Religious Studies for Ladies (1919, hereinafter CER, after its name in Spanish), the Courses of Catholic Culture (1922, hereinafter CCC), and the journal Criterio (1928). As had been the case with the Catholic social and labour movement, this effervescence of lay cultural enterprises was in the event bottled up by the hierarchy, who tried to bring it under its control.Footnote 28

The strong crisis concerning the nomination of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires that took place during Alvear's presidency was a signal that the paradigm of a weak church at the service of a strong state was changing. The Vatican repeatedly rejected the nomination of Msgr De Andrea, Bishop of Temnos (1920), the government's candidate, who was friendly to liberal democracy (in line with the patronato inherited from colonial times, the government sent a shortlist of nominees to Rome to be approved).Footnote 29 Much of the negotiations was conducted by Ángel Gallardo, by then Alvear's minister of foreign affairs.Footnote 30 After three years with a vacant see, the government was compelled to accept De Andrea's resignation of his candidacy and the nomination of a compromise candidate, the Franciscan Fr José M. Bottaro; in return, the papal nuncio was declared persona non grata. The protracted conflict was a serious challenge to the prevailing regalist settlement. The new assertiveness of the Argentine Catholic Church was tied to its acquiescence with the increasing Romanization of the world church, and locally with the growing enthusiasm of laity and clergy alike for the model of integral Catholicism tied with authoritarian versions of nationalism which would mark the relationships between church and state in the interwar years and beyond.Footnote 31

Austen Ivereigh has aptly described the ‘Catholic Renaissance’ of the Argentine Catholic Church in the first decades of the twentieth century as a consequence of the transition from the almost Gallican church of the liberal state consolidated in 1880 to the ‘integral Catholicism’ of the 1930s and early 1940s.Footnote 32 Interpretations focused on the development of social Catholicism have seen the changes in the three first three decades of the twentieth century as the transition from a ‘federative’ plural church with leadership of the laity, modelled upon German social Christianity, to an Italian type of church in which clericalism, Romanization, unification and obedience to the hierarchy were the characteristic traits.Footnote 33

The secularist impulse that characterized the 1880s in Argentina began to grind to a halt in the 1890s and barely survived in the 1930s. In this transitional period, the Catholic Church experienced a renovation in all aspects of its life. For the first time in the history of the country, a number of Catholic scientists became publicly visible. This phenomenon is of peculiar interest, because it seemed to contradict what had become a common-sense assumption resulting from the hegemonic influence of secularizing positivism, that the very idea of religion having anything to do with science was inconceivable. Science in Argentina had been a key element in the material and symbolic blueprint of liberal nation building: museums of natural history, astronomical observatories, geographical societies and public-health institutes embodied the gospel of progress and civilization. There were no Catholic scientific institutions.Footnote 34

Gallardo

It is against this backdrop that Gallardo, born into a wealthy patrician family of Spanish origin, must be understood. A lifelong Catholic, Ángel Gallardo (1867–1934) participated as a youth in the 1890 armed revolt that gave birth to the Civic Union (later UCR), and though he later formally quit the party, he nevertheless remained within its orbit. When, in 1919, President Yrigoyen called him to preside over the National Council of Education (hereinafter CNE, after its name in Spanish), he was already a distinguished personality. He went on to serve as representative of his country in Italy for a year (1921) and then as minister of foreign affairs during Alvear's presidency (1922–1928) when Argentina ‘glided gently in years of prosperity, without shocks or difficulties’.Footnote 35 Between September 1927 and January 1928, Gallardo made a diplomatic farewell tour in the course of which he was entertained by almost all the heads of state of Western Europe. During the presidency of Justo, he served for two years as rector of the University of Buenos Aires (1932–1934), at that moment shaken by student unrest. At the time of his death, Gallardo belonged to most scientific institutions and learned academies in Argentina; he had crossed the ocean back and forth seven times, walked with kings and, as expressed by one chronicler, experienced ‘the spiritual peace of a savant and a believer’.Footnote 36 His funeral was attended by President Justo, his ministers, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and other civil and ecclesiastical personalities.Footnote 37

Gallardo never showed any enthusiasm for integral Catholicism and in his public career acted as if the church should be subordinate to the state. But the conflict built around the nomination of De Andrea put his allegiances to the test.Footnote 38 Later, he declared that at that time he had ‘intimately prayed to God to allow a solution with detriment neither to the Fatherland nor to the Church’.Footnote 39 Although he seems to have made every effort to reach a negotiated outcome between the state and the Catholic Church, at no time did he hesitate to loyally follow Alvear's policy.Footnote 40 A few years earlier, in 1918, Gallardo had also shown his prioritization of the civil sphere over the ecclesiastical. As director of the CNE, he supported a regulation (in the end relaxed) that prescribed that teachers in elementary and secondary schools should be graduates from Argentine institutions, thus excluding from those positions the foreign priests who taught in private Catholic schools.Footnote 41

Throughout his life, Gallardo was a democratic conservative and a nationalist. Nationalism seems to have been in him a sentiment closely related to traditions, duty and the love of the land and its creatures – a different thing from the kind cultivated in the 1930s and 1940s by far-right Catholics, many of them transatlantic camp followers of Charles Maurras's Action française. Gallardo was certainly situated towards the right of the political spectrum and he did not hide his strong anti-communist convictions, but he always remained within the bounds of liberal democracy.Footnote 42 If we are to take him at face value, his passing admiration for Mussolini, whom he met twice, and his press declarations about fascism (which he saw as ‘sympathetic for its patriotism, its nationalist ideal, and its disinterested spirit’) were those of a hidebound conservative in the 1920s.Footnote 43 In August 1926, a socialist representative in the Chamber of Deputies accused him of having ‘a profound admiration for the political system’ dominating Italy at that time. Gallardo candidly admitted that his spirit ‘might be reactionary’, but his ‘democratic faith was absolute, frank, and incontrovertible’, and he considered any ‘anti-democratic suggestion’ a ‘true crime’.Footnote 44

Gallardo's speech at the moment of his nomination as rector of the University of Buenos Aires on 11 May 1932 was a manifesto of nationalistic faith, in tune with the spirit of the age. Though he decried ‘aggressive and xenophobic nationalism’, he declared that the very reason for the existence of the university was ‘the patriotic and national ideal’ and ‘the shaping of an enlightened national conscience’, besides the cultivation and progress of abstract science.Footnote 45 Two years after this unambiguous declaration, Gallardo accepted heading the local board of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway.Footnote 46 As a result of the global depression and local circumstances, the British-owned railway companies were experiencing large losses. In order to reach an agreement acceptable to them and the government, President Justo set up an official commission in which Gallardo should sit as representative of the companies – an arrangement that did not materialize for he died shortly after.Footnote 47 The growing wave of anti-British feeling that swept the country in those years (partly as a result of the 1933 commercial treaty with Britain, urged by Argentina to maintain the quota of meat exports and generally seen as favouring the British) was propelled by far-right nationalist intellectuals and integral Catholics.Footnote 48 One of them, Ibarguren, at one time a good friend of Gallardo's, considered that the treaty ‘reinforced the old submission of the Argentine economy to the British empire’.Footnote 49 Gallardo's position was subtly but crucially different from this; his nationalism was nearer to Justo's conservative liberal state than to a fascist conception of society.

Biologist and naturalist

Gallardo obtained his degree in engineering in the University of Buenos Aires (1894) and subsequently got a doctor's degree in the natural sciences from the same institution (1902). Much of his published work rests on the intersection of these fields. In the communication he read to the 1900 International Congress of Mathematics in Paris, he argued for the application of statistics to the problems of biological variation, inheritance and evolution.Footnote 50 Gallardo taught botany and zoology in the schools of Exact and Natural Sciences, of Agronomy and of Pharmacy of the University of Buenos Aires and presided over the SCA and the Argentine Society of Natural History.Footnote 51 He organized the first Latin American Scientific Congress (1900) and was vice president of the 1910 International Congress of Americanists in Buenos Aires. Undoubtedly, his most durable institutional commitment was as director of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires (1911–1918). Although his efforts to move the museum from its cramped old quarters to a new location that the institution badly needed were unsuccessful, he was able to recruit qualified naturalists and promoted the growth of the collections.Footnote 52

Gallardo studied natural history in Buenos Aires under Karl Berg, a naturalist born in Courland who succeeded Burmeister as director of the Public Museum in Buenos Aires, but he learnt his biology in Paris, where, during his first and second European voyages (April 1895–March 1896, November 1899–June 1901) he became acquainted with the zoologist Yves Delage and took courses with Gustave Loisel, Léon Guignard, Alfred Giard and Félix Le Dantec (Delage, Giard and Le Dantec were vocal secularists and anti-clerical supporters of the Third Republic).Footnote 53 The kind of biological problems he tackled would be those discussed in this circle of natural scientists, who for the most part sustained a neo-Lamarckian view of evolution.Footnote 54 Gallardo gained a certain notoriety with his ‘dynamic’ theory of cell division, according to which the mitotic apparatus was an expression of a force field generated by the centrosomes charged with polar charges, analogous to Faraday's magnetic fields.Footnote 55 His dissertation on this matter was enthusiastically reviewed in Nature by the Irish natural historian Marcus Hartog, who initiated experimental work along the same lines.Footnote 56 The theory was not entirely original, having been proposed by Hermann Fol in 1879 and in 1895 by H.E. Ziegler, but Gallardo worked it out independently.Footnote 57 In his dissertation, the latter allowed himself to depart from his experimental results and freely postulate a ‘cariocynetic force’, a Newtonian force of unknown nature which could also be used to account for the phenomena of heredity and fecundation not in terms of matter but of energy.Footnote 58 Gallardo's neo-vitalism drew upon the natural-philosophical speculations of Johann Reinke, Lord Kelvin's theory of vortex atoms (both of whom he knew at second hand), and the book of the French physiologist Louis Bard, which he had reviewed.Footnote 59

Gallardo introduced genetics in Argentina in a series of works for specialists and also for the general public published between 1908 and 1910.Footnote 60 At the time of the polemics between Mendelians and the followers of the biometric school of Karl Pearson, he insisted upon the lack of contradiction between the approaches.Footnote 61 He also devoted a number of papers to botanical subjects, in particular to teratology, perhaps a result of his having being in charge of the government's Division of Agriculture (1904–1905).Footnote 62 But his most lasting interest, and one which accompanied him from childhood to mature years, was ants, a subject to which he made enduring contributions.Footnote 63

Science, religion and evolution

The traditional notion of God's manifestation in nature is not absent from Gallardo's writings: the value of learning the laws that rule the stars is that ‘we can discern in them the sublime harmony established by God in Creation’; fungus-growing ants ‘show as in lightning God's supreme intelligence, reflected in the narrow aspect of their instinct’.Footnote 64 These were articles for the general public; his academic papers were free of any philosophical or religious allusions. As shown by his 1902 dissertation, he did entertain broad natural-philosophical schemes and advanced hypotheses (which he called Arbeitshypothesen) that could explain the phenomena of living beings in terms he saw as congruent with a theistic world view, but he was conscious that indulging in this kind of speculation was ‘to overstep the strictly positivistic scientific terrain’.Footnote 65 Gallardo was educated in a cultural atmosphere oversaturated with the positivism of fin de siècle Argentina. The ideas of Comte and Spencer became popular in the 1880s as the ideological framework of scientism in public discourse; they were revived when local socialist intellectuals combined positivism with materialism, on the grounds of their common opposition to a metaphysical world view.Footnote 66 ‘Positivism’ was for Gallardo just standard scientific methodology.

In his 1916 conference on science and belief before university students, Gallardo argued that there should be no conflict between religion and science because ‘they correspond to different spheres of the human spirit, between which there could be no interference’.Footnote 67 Religion is ‘supra-rational’ – it concerns ‘mysteries which reason can neither demonstrate, nor even conceive’ – while scientific method is ‘positivistic’ since ‘departing from the data offered to the senses, reason deduces more or less general principles’. ‘Absolute’ truth is like the limit of a variable function, which can never be attained. In the lab, one should be ‘entirely positivist and objective’ and leave aside any qualms about research results conflicting with faith because scientific truth could never be in contradiction with absolute truth. In 1939, Nobel Prize-winner Bernardo Houssay (1947), himself a liberal, saw Gallardo as a ‘fervent believer’ and ‘a savant of deeply religious spirit’. On the very sensitive issue of evolution, he pointed out that ‘since his beginnings in science [Gallardo] adopted evolutionistic ideas which he held during all his life, without ever experiencing conflict with his ingrained religious beliefs’.Footnote 68

Certainly Gallardo did not doubt the fact of biological evolution, but he was less sure about its mechanism – in this, he concurred with his French teachers. In a brief article in a 1914 issue of the Illinois State Register, he calls Darwin's evolution ‘one of the great progressive movements of the last century’, but at the same time remarks that ‘the mechanism is debated’ and goes into hazy speculation about objections to the theory ‘from a philosophical point of view’.Footnote 69 He opens the note by remarking that he does not believe ‘that there could be any conflict between religion and science’ and proclaims his accord with Father John A. Zahm CSC, the author of a work which essayed a reconciliation between evolution and Catholic doctrine (Evolution and Dogma, 1896; Zahm had visited Argentina in 1916 accompanying Theodore Roosevelt on his Latin American tour).Footnote 70 If Gallardo had any reservations about Darwinian evolution, they were motivated by scientific, not religious, questions. In his 1916 address as president of the Argentine Society of Natural History, he claimed that evolutionary theory, ‘initiated by Lamarck and … established upon more solid bases by Darwin’, showed the importance of ‘a dynamical point of view’ in biological problems (see above). He recalls that it was in the Argentine Pampas that Darwin adumbrated his new theory, ‘while galloping along the immense and lonely plains’, as a result of the impression upon his spirit of the South American natural world; Gallardo then goes on to expand on the palaeontological contributions made by Ameghino.Footnote 71 Florentino Ameghino was a famous Argentine palaeontologist and former director of the Museum that Gallardo was directing, who after his death in 1911 evolved into an emblem of secular scientism and anti-Catholic sentiment.Footnote 72 It is telling that in the homage paid to him in 1915, Gallardo warmly remembered his predecessor and even extolled his debatable theories about the Tertiary origin of the human being in the Pampas (more on this later).Footnote 73 Moreover, in his handbook of zoology intended for preparatory courses for the university and also used in secondary schools, Gallardo included a brief section on the variability of species in which he provided sketches of evolutionary ideas (Lamarck, Darwin and De Vries).Footnote 74

The bishop astronomer

Fortunato Devoto (1872–1941) was born in Buenos Aires soon after the arrival in Argentina of his middle-class Genoese immigrant parents.Footnote 75 At fifteen years old, he entered the Pontifical Latin American College in Rome and studied in the Gregorian University, where he obtained degrees in philosophy, theology and canon law while also studying astronomy under Gaspar S. Ferrrari SJ. He was ordained at the end of 1895 and returned to his country, where he enjoyed the patronage of Msgr Mariano Espinosa, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, eager to promote bright young priests who had been trained in Europe. Devoto became chaplain of nun congregations who ran elite secondary schools for girls; he was named secretary of the cathedral chapter of Buenos Aires and in 1900 took charge of the yearly publication of the Archbishopric of Buenos Aires. Never abandoning his astronomical studies, in November 1907 he joined the Observatory of La Plata, was named its director in March 1910, and resigned after little more than a year as a result of an institutional conflict.Footnote 76 Two months later, he travelled to Paris on a fellowship granted by the national government.Footnote 77 There he obtained the licenciature in sciences, and from 1914 to May 1917 worked at the Paris Observatory with ‘beaucoup de zèle’, if we are to trust his supervisor, Guillaume Bigourdan.Footnote 78 It seems that at the end of his first year of study in Paris he toyed with the idea of devoting himself entirely to his priestly work, but Pius X urged him not to abandon his astronomical career.Footnote 79 His training included equatorial reductions, attending the observatory's time service, use of the meridian circle and astronomical photography.Footnote 80 An asteroid (1328 Devota) was named in his honour by its discoverer, Benjamin Jekhowsky, who had been Devoto's fellow student at the Paris Observatory.Footnote 81

Devoto published his observations of the Delavan comet and was offered the directorship of the observatory of the Castle of Abbadia (Hendaye), a dependency of the Académie des sciences; since the war demanded that the institution should be headed by a native in the event the arrangement did not work out.Footnote 82 Devoto nevertheless worked in that small observatory for a year and kept up a lifelong connection with France: in 1933 he was decorated an Officer of the Legion of Honour for ‘service rendered to France during the war’.Footnote 83 The school magazine of the San José secondary school run by the Betharramites in Buenos Aires (a French Basque congregation) took the opportunity to show the pupils how Devoto's career was ‘a new eloquent testimony of the beautiful accord between science and faith’.Footnote 84

Devoto returned to his country in 1918, after seven years in Europe; the press organ of the archbishopric of Buenos Aires dubbed him ‘one of the most renowned Argentine savants’, while extolling his example as a rebuff to ‘those who declare that science and faith cannot walk hand in hand’.Footnote 85 During the 1920s, he was a chief protagonist of the Catholic cultural renaissance in Buenos Aires as counsellor of the CER and an active figure in the CCC, and also through his participation in Criterio.Footnote 86 During the years the government was enmeshed with Rome over the issue of the new archbishop, Devoto ascended several echelons in the hierarchy of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires: Archbishop Espinosa named him canon (1920), and at his death in 1923 Devoto was appointed vicar general and afterwards delegate of the apostolic administrator Msgr Juan A. Boneo.Footnote 87 When the consecration of Fr José M. Bottaro (1926) solved the impasse between Rome and the government, Devoto again became vicar general. In 1927 he was made Bishop of Attea and auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese by Pius XI.Footnote 88

An incidental remark by Devoto in the first issue of the review of the archbishopric of Buenos Aires that he himself edited throws some light on his view of the relationship between science and religion. Commenting upon the Fifth International Catholic Scientific Congress (Munich, 1900), Devoto claimed that ‘it was necessary to instruct the Catholics in the procedures of the rigorous scientific method while vindicating them from the charge of dilettantism in the sciences’. He thought that this was the only way to show that the alleged ‘incompatibility between the scientific spirit and the Catholic spirit’ was unfounded.Footnote 89 His career would show that he took to heart his programme of neutralizing the conflict view by showing that Catholics could do serious and prestigious science.

Observatories

The National Observatory in Córdoba had been created in the 1870s by President Domingo F. Sarmiento and put in the charge of American astronomers.Footnote 90 From 1909, it was headed by Charles D. Perrine, who despite many efforts had not been able to configure the mirror for the sixty-inch reflector he was supposed to install. By the beginning of the 1930s, the institution was in disarray and the mounting climate of chauvinistic nationalism blamed the situation on its American staff.Footnote 91 The government appointed two experts to investigate the issue, who reported that the observatory was ‘a foreign mission in our territory’ instead of ‘the really national institution’ it was meant to be.Footnote 92 One of the members of the commission was Félix Aguilar, a geodesic engineer graduated from La Plata at the time Devoto was director there, who, after studying in Europe, returned to take charge of that observatory (1916–1920). He held teaching positions in the major institutions of the army and was head of the geodesic division in the Military Geographical Institute, where Devoto was asked to head the astronomy division, which he declined (1925). In June 1933, Perrine's Córdoba observatory was put under the authority of a National Council for Observatories (hereinafter CNO, after its name in Spanish), created by law, with Devoto as its director and Aguilar as one of its members.Footnote 93 In turn, Aguilar presided over a newly created commission for the measurement of a segment of a meridian arc, in which Devoto participated.Footnote 94

The creation of the CNO was seen as an important institutional advance and the Catholic press took the opportunity to promote the figure of the bishop astronomer.Footnote 95 The CNO was significant for two reasons. First, it supervised the handing over of the Córdoba observatory to an Argentine director, Enrique Gaviola, at that time the country's foremost physicist, who was able to finally supervise the shaping of the mirror for a new sixty-inch reflector in Pittsburgh (he had been responsible for theoretical and technical advances on mirror shaping, working with John D. Strong at Mount Wilson).Footnote 96 Later, Gaviola duly recognized Devoto's role in restructuring the observatory.Footnote 97 Second, the CNO, presided over by Devoto, founded the Jesuit Observatory of San Miguel, in the vicinity of Buenos Aires. This new institution was modelled upon the Jesuit Ebro Observatory (Catalonia); its first director was the Jesuit astronomer Ignacio Puig.Footnote 98 The new observatory would study the effects of solar and cosmic activity on the Earth. Originally, it would consist of three sections: geophysics, electro-meteorology and solar physics. Funding came from several corporations and individual donors, a novel scheme in the country.Footnote 99 This was underlined by Devoto in his lecture at the inauguration of the first building of the observatory in December 1935. In his brief intervention, he refers three times to the advantages of encouraging private individuals to establish scientific institutes, which ‘could become official [institutions] as far as they are willing to be subordinate to the national authorities’.Footnote 100 The creation of San Miguel Observatory did not aim to establish a Catholic system of scientific research parallel to that of the government; it was instead an example of the principle of subsidiarity, of ‘collaboration between the state and its subjects [sic]’. Devoto's speech evokes that of a civil servant vigilant regarding the prerogatives of the government. The final invocation to raise the hearts of the audience to the Redeemer of this world in memory of the 1934 International Eucharistic Congress which had taken place in Buenos Aires caps a discourse whose register sounds more civic than religious. Devoto and Aguilar were the embodiment of a scientific policy marked by state intervention, nationalism and collaborative relationships between the military and the church within a conservative but politically liberal order.

The rise of Catholic scientists

On the ground that Ángel Gallardo had decided to go on financing the building of the ‘Argentine church’ in Rome (Santa Maria Addolorata, originally supported by his brother Msgr José León Gallardo, who died in 1924), a radical student referred to him in the magazine of the Buenos Aires Centre of Medical Students as ‘the illustrious biologist who believes in God, the manufacturer of Adam and Eve’.Footnote 101 The irony, predicated on the assumption that any reader would endorse the conflict thesis, suggests that a large segment of educated public opinion saw science as an essentially anti-religious pursuit. In an article published in 1910, the Catholic social leader Emilio Lamarca merged in a single contentious argument spontaneous generation, Haeckel's evolutionism and Rousseau's social contract.Footnote 102 For him, as for Argentine Catholic social thinkers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, evolution and science in general were part of the liberal and socialist onslaught on Christianity.Footnote 103 The letter to Father Devoto of a conservative Catholic activist blaming the CER for teaching young ladies too much Plato instead of instructing them against ‘transformist geology’ and ‘transformist anthropology’ is also an expression of this mentality of a church besieged by the spread of evolutionary ideas.Footnote 104 Science had been one of the main instruments in secularizing public discourse and positivists sought to resignify religious symbols and rituals into a secular cult of science, whose founding cultural hero was Ameghino.Footnote 105 Also, the popularization of science was at the core of the socialist programmes for workers’ education. Biological evolution, the materialist conception of life and the origin of the universe were staple subjects.Footnote 106 Astronomy was a favourite subject in this agenda. The inaugural lecture of Sociedad Luz, a nascent socialist cultural centre, was on ‘The planetary system and the Earth’ – delivered in June 1899 by the engineer student Maurice Klimann, it was hampered neither by the heavy Russian accent of the lecturer nor by the asphyxiating smoke generated by the kerosene lamp of the magic lantern he used.Footnote 107 Between 1912 and 1913 the socialist French physicist and mathematician Camille Meyer, who introduced Planck's quantum theory to the country, gave a series of lectures on the universe published in a fine volume of three hundred pages.Footnote 108

During the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the Argentine Jesuit journal Estudios launched an anti-evolutionistic campaign analogous to the crusade La Civiltà Cattolica had developed earlier in Italy.Footnote 109 The journal systematically published articles by Spanish Jesuits: Jaime Pujiula of the Ebro Biological Laboratory, the astronomer José Ubach (originally from the Ebro Observatory and later established in Buenos Aires) and José María Blanco, also living in Buenos Aires (incidentally, he had published an article against De Andrea, which prompted Gallardo to request his expulsion from Argentina).Footnote 110 Fathers Blanco and Ubach taught in the Jesuit secondary school Colegio del Salvador and in the metropolitan seminary. Blanco, a serious amateur of physical anthropology, had exposed the forgery of prehistoric tools and human bones to support Ameghino's theories of the Tertiary origin of the human being in Río de la Plata – a local and contemporary version of the British 1912 ‘Piltdown Man’ (it should be recalled that Gallardo had had no qualms about accepting it).Footnote 111 Ubach had contributed papers on the observation of eclipses and transits of Mercury and also wrote an informed critique of the theory of relativity, which he declared unsound.Footnote 112 Although the scientific activity of the Iberian Jesuits was far from negligible, it was considered by contemporary standards to be backward and defensive. It is against this somewhat dull backdrop that the full extent of the novelty of Gallardo and Devoto should be measured. Both had faultless scientific credentials and a solid French training; they had conducted locally prestigious scientific institutions and by the end of their careers had joined the highest circles of political power and shaped the development of science in their country. By the early 1930s, those who took Catholic scientists as a joke did so at their own risk. Among the science textbooks recommended by an official commission named by the government in 1927 were Gallardo's Zoology, Eduardo Holmberg's Botany and a manual of cosmography by Eduardo Brugier, a Chilean Jesuit.Footnote 113 When, in the course of parliamentary debate on the issue, someone objected to Gallardo's textbook, the socialist deputy and physician Enrique Dickmann replied that, although he disagreed with Gallardo in political matters, he felt compelled to testify that his book was ‘an excellent text long in use in state schools … [written by] an expert on the matter’.Footnote 114

Science, religion and patterns of secularization

Historians of science working on science and religion have long argued that science was not the engine of secularization. Their work amounts to a consistent body of historical research and analysis, which I can only hint at here. John H. Brooke has particularly called attention to the ‘ironic pattern’ of deism as a result of Christian culture and natural theology.Footnote 115 Ronald Numbers has focused the question on the American contemporary scene.Footnote 116 Peter Harrison has qualified these views, affirming that while secularization was not a consequence of the confrontation between science and religion, it was nevertheless ‘an indirect result of the conditions of belief that attended the success of modern science’.Footnote 117 These approaches tend to concentrate on the rise of modern science, the contrasting fortunes of Newtonian Enlightenment in England and France, and the persistence of natural theology in Protestant societies; when it comes to secularization in the nineteenth century, they are mostly concerned with the Anglo-Saxon pattern. As shown by the work of Harry Paul, the question of science and religion gains some added complexity when viewed from the viewpoint of what happened during the Third Republic in France, the model of the Latin pattern of secularization.Footnote 118

But in Latin America this pattern seems to involve the following aspects: (a) contrary to the many-valued logic of Protestant pluralism, the two-valued logic of the Latin pattern (Catholic or non-Catholic) leads to a neater division of the scientific community into a secular majority and a small confessional minority; (b) secularism is at first a top-to-bottom affair, promoted by the same elites who also foster science as an ingredient of the ideology of progress; (c) not infrequently, the particular kind of relationship between state and church (which varies in different countries and evolves with time) modulates the interactions between science and religion. These factors are manifest in the case under study, which focuses on an inflection point in the course of the relationships between science and religion in Argentina. Science and scientific imagery were certainly a main component in the self-fulfilling prophecies of the secularizing discourse of the liberal elite of the 1880s and later of socialism. We have taken a close look at the moment at which the secularistic monopoly of science was broken by the arrival upon the stage of scientists with strong confessional commitments. This coincided with the first inklings of the local Catholic renaissance and the shift from a model of a moderately ‘Gallican’ church to another closer to integral Catholicism (Gallardo and Devoto could be seen as transitional characters in this respect). This process was not unrelated to the resurgence of different stripes of nationalism. In the 1930s and 1940s, a growing number of Catholic scientists branched into two groups: some favoured political authoritarian regimes and neo-Thomist philosophy, while the others defended democratic liberal democracies and were less preoccupied about questions of doctrinal orthodoxy (the latter were among the best Argentine science was able to offer in the years after the Second World War).Footnote 119

The irruption of scientists identified with the majority church of the country, as examined in this article, again refutes any simplistic interpretation of science as an agent of secularization. What was crucial for the transactions between science and religion was the rise and fall of science-saturated ideologies legitimizing secularist agendas tied to local politics. Ascribing science any kind of ‘causal’ role in this process would be taking the effect for the cause. Conversely, it is the particular type of dynamic of secularization which seems to have modulated and even shaped the kind of relationships between science and religion that obtained in this society.

Footnotes

This paper is part of a research project on science and religion in Argentina which I am conducting as member of Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. I appreciate the perceptive comments of one of the anonymous referees and the overall assessment of the editor of the BJHS, Amanda Rees, which certainly helped to improve the original manuscript. I would also like to thank Trish Hatton for her untiring help throughout the process of evaluation. I remain obliged to the staff of the following institutions for their helpful assistance: Archive and Library of Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (Ms Marta del Priore); Biblioteca Nacional (Argentina) (Department of Ancient Periodicals); Library of Asociación Amigos de la Astronomía (Ms Paula Martín); Library of Instituto de Cultura Religiosa Superior; Library of Colegio San José (Mr Oscar Palmyero); Library of Congress (Ms Malea Walker, Serial and Government Publications Division); Library of the School of Theology and Central Library of Universidad Católica Argentina; Library of Facultades de Filosofía y Teología, Colegio Máximo (San Miguel, Buenos Aires); Museo de Astronomía y Geofísica, Universidad Nacional de La Plata.

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