Caesar & God

Argentina's President Juan Peron sent his military aide to the Commerce Ministry on an important errand one afternoon last week. After a ten-minute, closed-door talk with the brass-braided errand boy, young (30), earnest Commerce Minister Antonio Cafiero called his top assistants together and said goodbye. A practicing Roman Catholic and a Catholic Action leader in his student days, Cafiero had just become the first minister to lose his job as a result of the "war that Peron has been waging against the Catholic Church (TiME, April 18 et ante). On another front, the Education Ministry "temporarily" banned all religious instruction in government-supported schools.' The church struck back with an effective blow of its own. In a pastoral letter read this week from every pulpit, Argentina's bishops declared that the church believes in rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but that it also insists on rendering unto God the things that are God's. The letter quoted the "gemlike words" that Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, wrote to the all-powerful Roman Emperor Constantius in 353: "Remember that you are mortal. Fear the Judgment Day. Keep yourself pure for that day, and do not get involved in ecclesiastical matters . . ." Peron's undaunted Information Office, which cares neither for bishops nor emperors, ordered the Argentine press to ignore the letter.

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