For seven days, Uruguay pauses and puts worldly affairs on hold. This week, which is coming to an end, public offices were closed, there were no classes in the schools and Parliament was not in session. They’re national holidays: musical performances, gastronomic feasts, beer festivals, and horseback riding excursions have taken over Tourism Week, as Holy Week has been officially called here since 1919. Abstinence, according to the secular tradition that’s at the heart of this society, which according to a Pew Research report Center is the least religious on the continent. In this survey, Uruguay appears as the most secular country in Latin America, with 37% of the population having no religious affiliation, while the continental average is 8%.
Secularism is a core issue for Uruguayans, dating back to the second half of the 19th century, when a diverse anti-clerical current gained strength in the new republic. “It was a confessional state, but with a weak church and a political occupation favorable to secularism,” says historian Gerardo Caetano. The first signs were clear: cemeteries were secularized in 1861, public education was secularized in 1877 and the registry office was left in state hands in 1879. In addition, the anti-clerical spirit was evident in parts of society. Caetano recalls that in the last years of the 19th century, “banquets of promiscuity” were held in front of Montevideo Cathedral, where grilled meat was served against abstinence on Good Friday. These banquets, which were frequent until the early 20th century, were never more than irreverent festivals that brought together freethinkers, anarchists, liberals and Freemasons, says the historian.
The anti-clerical tendency was consolidated and radicalized under the presidency of José Batlle y Ordoñez (1903-1907 and 1911-1915), a Colorado Party politician and journalist considered one of the mentors of Uruguayan modernization. “Batlle was never an atheist; he left the church and took up strongly anti-clerical positions, but not anti-religious ones,” Caetano emphasizes. In El Día, the newspaper she founded, Batlle ordered the word God to be lowercase, and under the pseudonym Laura signed articles promoting policies in favor of women’s liberation, in a context that went in the opposite direction. “Among the letters to the editor were texts defending Catholic principles against Batllismo, written by Batlle himself to make the argument,” he adds.
With the impetus of this key figure in Uruguay’s history, the separation of state and Catholic Church in the 1919 constitution came about, but not without approving a series of measures that still amaze progressives and conservatives today. In 1906 crucifixes were removed from all public hospitals and the following year the Divorce Act was approved, amended five years later in 1913 to allow by the woman’s sole will. As the sociologist Néstor da Costa, one of the authors of the book 100 Years of Secularism in Uruguay, noted, all references to God and the Gospels were suppressed in the oath of parliamentarians in 1907 as well.
“There was a French-inspired Enlightenment attempt to wipe religion off the map, with strong support from rationalist associations and Freemasonry,” says da Costa. In 1919, the obsession with removing religious references from public view hit the official holiday calendar. According to the law, Holy Week has been renamed Tourism Week, Christmas is Family Day and King’s Day is Children’s Day. The legislature also stipulated that December 8, the day of the Immaculate Conception, would be officially designated Beaches Day and that the nomenclature of 30 cities would be changed, removing the names of saints and including other lay people. Da Costa clarifies, however, that the reformist process did not include some of the most radical visions that defended the secularization of ecclesiastical goods or proposed the state monopoly of education.
“There was a clash of ideas here, but there was nothing like the Cristero War,” says Caetano, referring to the war that pitted the Mexican government against the Catholics in the 1920s Church of the Mexican State in 1857 and the Uruguayan in 1919. “The secularism in countries like Mexico or Cuba took place in very religious societies. On the other hand, in Uruguay, secularism prevailed because there was already a secularized society there, in which the place of religion was much weaker,” he says.
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On this aspect, the sociologist da Costa claims that Uruguayans filled the religious gaps with a kind of alternative secular religion that was taught in public classrooms. “Batllismo knew that symbols had to be created that would unite the population,” he explains. One of the clearest expressions of this is the text of the anthem dedicated to national hero José Artigas (1764-1850). “Our Father Artigas / Lord of our country / for history a genius / for the fatherland a god”, prays this Our Father, written in 1910 and sung in schools.
Secularization, understood as the privatization of religion, is a fact that distinguishes Uruguay from other Latin American countries over the past two centuries and also into this new millennium. The Pew Research report cited at the beginning of this article notes that this is the only country surveyed where the percentage of adults reporting no religious affiliation (37%) “rivals” the segment that says they have no religious affiliation identified as Catholic (42%). . Also, Uruguay is the only country in the region where a majority, 57%, say religious leaders should have “no influence” on political affairs.
lay education
“Secular education is expressed in respect for all opinions and beliefs as long as the name of God is not mentioned,” current Bishop Emeritus of Minas (in the east of the country), Jaime Fuentes, argues wryly in an article. According to him, public education in Uruguay—secular, free, and compulsory since 1876—had led to “enforced religious ignorance.” On the other hand, Fuentes accused secularism of impregnating Uruguayan culture with a “closed skepticism”. “How do you explain that Uruguay has the highest number of suicides on the entire continent?” he asked.
Caetano disagrees with this position, widespread in Catholic circles, that the spirit of secularism has robbed the Uruguayans of their sense of transcendence. “In the face of Catholic morality, Batllismo, and not just Batllismo, he built a secular morality oddly charged with Christian values,” he says. In this sense, he asserts, he proposed creating a model country where the poor are less poor and the rich less rich, with a strong state as a “shield for the weak”. “To say that this is a morality without demands is a deeply wrong view,” he concludes.
More than 100 years after the official divorce between the state and the Catholic Church in Uruguay, secularism continues to provoke heated debates while its observance is the cause of relentless surveillance. Except during that popular and festive tourism week known around the world as Santa Claus, when those keepers of those laws also rest.
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