Uruguay’s secular culture shuns Catholicism, yet heroes like Saint Anna Maria Rubatto and convert Alberto Methol Ferré defy the “libertine atheist” tide.
A survey of the presence of the Catholic Church in South America will invariably focus on the largest nations, Brazil and Argentina, with reference also to countries such as Peru, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, and Venezuela. It is unlikely, however, that Uruguay will feature very prominently, or at all, in surveys of the Catholic presence in the southern half of the Americas. There are good reasons for this.
Uruguay is small in size, and the influence of the Church in its history has been relatively minor. Its history is marked by secularism to a degree that is less true of its larger neighbors due to the influence of Freemasonry and the ideas of the Enlightenment in general and the French Revolution in particular. This is reflected in the politics of the country, both past and present. It is generally considered to be the most secular culture in Latin America.
Although Catholicism is the largest religion, many of those who identify as Catholic are only nominally so. Only 30 percent claim to believe in a god of any description, whereas 14 percent are atheists. One can presume that the remaining 56 percent can be considered to be agnostics, to whom God is not particularly important one way or the other. A survey of Uruguayan history and culture would suggest that it is not fertile ground for the Faith. Yet, this apparently barren corner of the world, this spiritual desert, has its own heroes of Christendom.
Uruguay has only one canonized saint and three blesseds. The country’s solitary saint is Anna Maria Rubatto, founder of the Capuchin Sisters of Mother Rubatto, who took the religious name Maria Francesca of Jesus. Although she was born in Italy, she moved to Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital city, in 1892, dying there of cancer twelve years later. The first miracle attributed to her intercession was approved by St. John Paul II who beatified her in 1993. A second miracle was subsequently approved, and she was canonized by Pope Francis in 2022.
Uruguay’s three blesseds are Jacinto Vera y Durán, a 19th-century bishop of Montevideo, and two laywomen, Maria Dolores Aguiar-Mella Díaz and Consuelo Aguiar-Mella Díaz, biological sisters born in Uruguay who were murdered by the communists in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.
Whereas the heroic virtue of these four holy Uruguayans has been recognized by the Church, the heroism of three important Uruguayan converts to the Faith will be unknown to almost anyone beyond the land of their birth.
Esther de Cáceres (1903-1971) was born in Montevideo to a single mother in a middle-class family, the illegitimate daughter of a prominent physician and surgeon. Graduating from medical school in 1929, the only Uruguayan woman of her generation to do so, she specialized in psychiatry. Politically, she was active in anarchist movements and was affiliated with the Socialist Party. Literarily, she was a widely published poet, forging a considerable reputation in literary circles. She and her husband began an artistic salon which was attended by the elite of the Uruguayan intelligentsia, including some of the country’s best-known writers and artists.
At the end of World War II, she and her husband traveled to Paris where they met the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who drew them to his Christian humanist school of thought. Through Maritain’s influence, the couple experienced a fervent Catholic conversion. Following her reception into the Church, Esther de Cáceres published an extensive collection of poems, many of which had mystical overtones. She was awarded the National Prize on three occasions and was the first woman to serve as secretary of the National Academy of Literature.
Ramón Díaz (1926-2017), widely recognized as one of Uruguay’s most influential intellectuals, was a lawyer, economist, professor, founder of the weekly newspaper Búsqueda, and a columnist for various media outlets. A lover of literature in general and English literature in particular, he began teaching English at the Anglo Institute in Montevideo when he was only 19 years old. An avid thespian as a young man, he performed in plays by Ben Jonson, Bernard Shaw, Terence Rattigan, and others. He converted to the Faith at the age of 26, a few months after he graduated as a lawyer.
Studying economic theory, he was inspired by Edmund Burke, and by Hayek, Friedman, and Samuel Johnson. A lecturer in political economics, he also held various senior positions in the Uruguayan government and is widely credited for reducing inflation to single digits—a level the country hadn’t reached for fifty years—and was responsible for restructuring Uruguay’s foreign debt.
In 1972, he founded the magazine Búsqueda to combat the socialist ideas that prevailed in Uruguay at the time. In later years, between 1994 and 2009, he wrote a weekly column for the newspaper El Observador. A man of deep Catholic faith, he published many books in his chosen fields of economics and politics, which were characterized—as was his journalism—by a comprehensive view of the issues informed by his vast knowledge of history, philosophy, theology, culture, and the arts.
Alberto Methol Ferré (1929-2009) joined the Catholic Church in 1949, at the age of 20, citing his reading of G.K. Chesterton as a major influence on his conversion. He was particularly struck by a phrase in the first book of Chesterton he had read in which Chesterton insisted that objective truth transcends and supersedes man’s subjective perception of it. “Man is made to doubt himself, not to doubt the truth,” Chesterton had written, “and today the terms have been reversed.”
Later in his life, Methol Ferré would describe himself as a “wild Thomist” in emulation of Chesterton’s approach to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas in the light of the paradoxes that it presents. One of the great theological scholars of his generation, Methol Ferré studied the works of Henri de Lubac, Romano Guardini, Yves Congar, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He also admired great 20th-century Catholic thinkers, such as Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, and Christopher Dawson.
Most controversially, Methol Ferré was an influence on the Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio (later Pope Francis), whom he came to know while working at the Latin American Episcopal Council between 1972 and 1982. He was, according to Bergoglio, a “brilliant thinker.” Yet, Methol Ferré’s brilliance should not be judged by Bergoglio’s muddying of the clarity of his thought. In particular, his analysis of intellectual history from the time of the Protestant Reformation enables us to understand our present-day “woke” culture in the context of what he called “libertine atheism.”
Methol Ferré maintained that the new atheism “has radically changed its face”: “It is not messianic, but libertine. It is not revolutionary in a social sense, but complicit with the status quo. It has no interest in justice, but in all that permits the cultivation of radical hedonism.”
This libertine atheism was the progressive perversion of previous perversions of the truth, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, which decayed into Enlightenment secularism, and then into messianic Marxism. According to Methol Ferré, libertine atheism, seeks “beauty” in the enjoyment of “satisfaction” in this life. It “perverts” beauty because “it separates it from truth and from goodness, and therefore from justice.”
Since libertine atheism is not merely an idea but a way of life, it can only be countered effectively by an alternative way of life, the way of virtue, the way of holiness:
Libertine atheism is not an ideology, it is a practice. A practice must be opposed with another practice; a self-aware practice, of course, which means one that is equipped intellectually. Historically the Church is the only subject present on the stage of the contemporary world that can confront libertine atheism. To my mind only the Church is truly post-modern.
These words of Methol Ferré are profoundly true. They are as profoundly true as are the words and works of those great minds who influenced his thought, such as Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton, Maritain, and Dawson. They are awake to the “woke” ways of libertine atheism.
Alberto Methol Ferré is one of those “happy few” little known heroes of Christendom from the largely unsung country of Uruguay. He should be celebrated, and they should be celebrated. And, in the words of Hilaire Belloc, we should give thanks and praise “for all the good things that our Christendom brings,” even to the farthest-flung, neglected, and “libertine atheist” parts of the world.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (July 2024).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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