Statue of Virgin Mary reopens secular debate in Uruguay.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
The request to install a sculpture of the Virgin Mary in the historic area of Uruguay's capital reopened a debate rooted in the mid-19th century that now divides a society where all religions have coexisted for many years under strict secularism.
Since February, when Cardinal Daniel Sturla went to the Montevideo government with his plan to install a four-meter statue of the Virgin Mary next to the country's historic first customs office, legislators, political parties, prelates, members of non-Catholic churches, the media, and neighborhood organizations joined a debate in which the country's unique secular history occupies a central place. After Sturla said that he made the request with the confidence that Uruguayan society had "evolved" in its secularism, former President Julio Maria Sanguinetti (1985-1990 and 1995-2000), a declared agnostic, felt attacked and said, "The cardinal persists in reopening a healed wound and smears those of us who state our opposition to the image, when in reality what we are trying to do is to keep this space from being changed into a sort of open-air church, something that does not fit with the neutrality that the state must maintain before all religious faiths."
In Latin America, where 40% of the world's Catholics live and where religious symbols in public spaces abound, barely 5% of Uruguay's citizens attend Mass and participate in Catholic activities. That 5% figure is a non-scientific projection; there are no statistics on Uruguayan religious beliefs because it is against the law for the census to ask about people's faith. However, the Uruguayan Episcopal Conference indicated in 1980 that only 3.8% of the population regularly attended Mass.
In the midst of the debate, the Uruguayan daily El Observador cited a 2015 study by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center that said that 37% of Uruguayans say they have no religious affiliation and 13% say they are atheist or agnostic. The study does not indicate how many are Protestants, how many belong to the new Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches or to the increasingly visible sects rooted in African religions, but it offers a revealing figure: 22% of respondents said they had left Catholicism for another religion. Proponents of the monument didn't take the anti-clerical sentiment of the Uruguayans into account, Leonardo Haberkorn noted in an AP story on April 8.
Some historians trace the exclusion of the Catholic Church from the institutional life of...
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