In secular Uruguay, a populist cardinal rallies the faithful and kicks off a feud

[Judi Lynn]

STEPHANIE NOLEN
MONTEVIDEO
PUBLISHED 16 MINUTES AGO

MATILDE CAMPODONICO/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

When Daniel Sturla, a smiley and charismatic Salesian Catholic priest, was named archbishop of Montevideo in 2014, he took over the post from a man whose profile was as low and reserved as that of the church itself, in this most secular of Latin American countries.

The new archbishop – who a year later was named a cardinal by Pope Francis, with whom he had once worked – was having none of it. Cardinal Sturla launched a multipronged and energetic campaign to get Uruguay’s Roman Catholics to swallow their embarrassment and take pride in their faith. He has held public masses, launched a campaign to paper city balconies with images of the Virgin Mary and found other ways for his faithful to demonstrate publicly their religious devotion.

But recently, it has become clear that Cardinal Sturla has another goal: to turn Uruguayan Catholics into a political force of the kind they are in other neighbouring countries where far more people identify themselves as religious. This effort has brought the cardinal into conflict with the country’s strong women’s movement, which he has criticized for advancing what he calls “gender ideology,” and reignited a conversation about what kind of a say, if any, the church should have on social and political issues.

Uruguay has had a determinedly secular political system for more than 100 years. Gerardo Caetano, a prominent Uruguayan historian, said the church was never a foundational power here as it was elsewhere in Latin America because colonialism came relatively late. The leaders of the independence era admired radical French-style democracy. They stripped crucifixes from hospitals and gave all the holidays secular names. (Christmas is officially Family Day, while what’s known in other countries as Holy Week, at Easter, is called Tourism Week here. Cardinal Sturla finds the practice so abhorrent that he wrote a book about it.)

More:
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-in-secular-uruguay-a-populist-cardinal-rallies-the-faithful-and-kicks/

[dhill926]

1. Uruguay sounds like a cool country....