The Church Defies Per

Under a grey late-afternoon sky, some 15,000 hymn-chanting men and women paraded in downtown Buenos Aires last week, following a sound truck manned by priests.

Traditionally, the Holy Thursday procession of Buenos Aires' Roman Catholics marches 13 blocks, from Congress Square to the spacious Plaza de Mayo, but this year the police gave grudging permission to proceed only as far as the Church of Our Lady of Monserrat, five blocks from the Plaza. Abreast of the church, the marchers shuffled to a halt. But some of the younger men, alert as scouts advancing into enemy territory, pushed on to see what the cops would do. They did nothing.

The columns slowly started up again. The throng swelled to an estimated 35,000, as bystanders and homeward-bound workers joined the parade. In the forbidden Plaza de Mayo, the marchers halted before the buff-colored cathedral and waved their white handkerchiefs. The sea of white signified not surrender, but support and defiance--support for the church, defiance for President Juan Peron, who last October began waging an off-and-on war of harassment against the church (TIME, April 4 et ante).

The march beyond the Church of Monserrat was a crossing of the Rubicon in the struggle between the uneasy strongman and the church. As recently as a few weeks ago, a closed-door meeting between Peron and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires could touch off widespread rumors of a truce. Last week any lingering wisps of hope for a peace evaporated. Peron called his envoy to the Vatican home for "consultations," and the Vatican reciprocated by summoning its apostolic nuncio to Rome for "consultations." The official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, labeled Peron's government "totalitarian." In an unconsciously comic gesture, intended as an affront to the pious, the Peronista Party announced the formation of a "lay order" of Sisters of Eva Peron, the President's late wife.

Peron deliberately chose Holy Week to launch, through his puppet press, a campaign for repeal of the constitutional provision stating that "the federal government supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church."

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