The Church and the history of the Uruguayan Catholic nation at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

This article analyzes the idea of the nation and the State held by the Catholic Church between 1900 and 1930. For that purpose, the ecclesiastical discourses on the origins of the nation and the organization of the state are addressed in light of the particular tensions that the Church and the Uruguayan State went through at the beginning of the century. The sources for this research are the History manuals written by Brother Damascene (BD) and the archiepiscopal guidelines published in the Ecclesiastical Bulletin of the Archdiocese of Montevideo (in Spanish). The article seeks to reconstruct the meanings of a Catholic nation and a tutelary State from the conditioning that the secularization process caused in the Church. The proposal aims at an inter-discursive study that allows a comparative reading of the themes and approaches recovered by the authors in order to achieve recognition of the ecclesiastical institution in the face of the new legal reality that emerged in 1919.