Catholicism, Authoritarianism, and Resistance. The Case of the Archdiocese of Montevideo, Uruguay, 1966–1976

In 1976, the Junta of Commanders-in-Chief of Uruguay published “Las fuerzas armadas al Pueblo Oriental” (Fuerzas armadas 1976), a two-volume text intended to present the official version of the Armed Forces on the political and social events that led to the coup d’état and the subsequent authoritarian regime in the country. This text made harsh judgments regarding the Catholic Church in general and its hierarchy in particular. Along these lines, this paper aims to analyze the specific case of the Archdiocese of Montevideo and its leader, Monsignor Carlos Parteli, from his arrival at the episcopal see in 1966 until the year the aforementioned pronouncement was issued, 1976. The objective is to identify the events and processes that, throughout that decade, contributed to consolidating a vision of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as functional to specific partisan political options and a reading of the Church as an institution potentially instrumentalized in an ideological sense.