The Church in Argentina

Abstract

Quilmes is a large, predominantly working class suburb on the eastern side of Buenos Aires. With a population of some 800,000 it was constituted as a separate diocese five years ago and Bishop Jorge Novak was named its first bishop. To mark their five years as a diocese Quilmes held a synod last September whose aim was, as Sr Justa Tello told me at the synod office, “to help the people commit themselves”. The two-week synod last year was however just the beginning of a process of getting to know the socio-political and religious realities of the diocese; further sessions planned for 1982/83 hope to evolve pastoral responses to these realities. It is, as Sr Justa Tello explained, based on the ‘See-Judge-Act’ methodology and the September session of the synod had limited itself to the first of these.

Fr Orlando Yorio, who himself ‘disappeared’ for five months in 1976 just after the military coup in March of that year, is secretary of the synod. He pointed out to me that in the early years of the Spanish conquest of Latin America “evangelisation took place through synods”. Among the ample documentation prepared by various commissions for the synod is one which gives an historical background in the early councils of the church, various diocesan synods held in Europe at different times and especially the 51 diocesan synods held in many different regions of Latin America from 1539-1638. To my great surprise Fr Yorio pointed out to me that canon law insists that each diocese hold a synod every ten years. This major event in the life of the Quilmes diocese then was, in the words of Fr Yorio, “to put us in touch with a renovating tradition of the Latin American Church”.