The Argentine Church's request ahead of the Pope's arrival and the Government's view

Next Friday, Leo XIV will depart from Rome for Uruguay, the first stop of a South American tour that will bring him to Argentina the following Sunday, November 8, after almost four decades without a papal visit to the country. For the Argentine Church, the event goes far beyond the organization of a schedule of masses, institutional meetings and pastoral activities. It also represents an opportunity to try to repair a relationship with political power that, despite contacts in recent months, is still far from reaching the continuity that Church authorities demand. Within the Episcopate there is a concrete expectation: that the Pope's arrival should not function as a circumstantial truce or an institutional photo-op that expires once the papal plane takes off for Peru. The proposal they conveyed to their counterparts in the Government is a long-term one. They want a permanent channel of dialogue to be established, with defined interlocutors and an agenda that does not depend exclusively on the needs of each particular moment. In some sectors of the Church there is even unease over the perception that the Government is now approaching them out of convenience. "They are angry because they believe they are being used," summarized Church sources. The suspicion is that, once Leo XIV leaves Argentina, contacts will become spaced out again and the institutional relationship will lose the intensity it acquired during the preparations for the trip. "They feel that after the Pope's departure there will be no more of a relationship. It is something transitory," they describe. At the Casa Rosada, as this outlet was able to establish, they committed to listening to the proposal, and took note. A senior official considered it "logical." And in informal conversations they indicated that the relationship will not be limited to coordinating the visit, although there is still no talk of the concrete form that commitment will take. The Government has a need to prevent the Pope's visit from being a negative turning point for its administration, especially at a time of economic weakness, amid the rise in country risk and the sharp drop in activity that the President himself acknowledges, all of which impact on the usual social issues that concern the Church. The March 2024 meeting between Milei and the Episcopal Conference The distance has precedents. Milei has received the authorities of the Argentine Episcopal Conference only once since taking office: it was on March 12, 2024, when the head of the body was Monsignor Oscar Vicente Ojea, then bishop of San Isidro. At that meeting, the bishops conveyed to him their concern about the economic and social situation, the lack of food and medicine, and the difficulties faced by the most vulnerable sectors, based on the concerns they received from the country's various dioceses. Since then, meetings with the President have not been sustained. The relationship was maintained through other officials and regained intensity with the preparations for the papal visit, but without a new audience between Milei and the leadership of the Episcopate. The most recent contacts featured Karina Milei and Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno, as well as officials from other areas of the Government. And lately, authorities from the Security Ministry and even SIDE (the intelligence agency). Along that path, demands that go beyond the organization of the trip were incorporated. Disability and gambling addiction, two issues the Church has been insisting on for some time, were added to the agenda. In both cases, Congress ultimately provided responses that were received favorably by Church authorities, though only after months of demands and an official resistance that generated unease. The Church values that progress was finally made, but some critics consider the reaction came too late. The demand on disability had been especially exposed in October, when representatives of the Episcopal Conference asked the Government to extend the sector's State of Emergency and review the planned cuts in the 2027 Budget. On the issue of gambling addiction, the Episcopate pressed the Senate to advance the regulation of online betting, with special concern about the impact on children and adolescents. Behind these demands lies a broader discussion about the social role of the Church and its capacity for dialogue with the State. Within the Episcopate, they point out that religious demand is growing and that the turnout of popular expressions of faith contradicts some readings of a society increasingly distant from religious institutions. The most recent pilgrimage to Luján, with an attendance estimated by Church sources at between 2.8 and 3 million people, is one of the examples they use to illustrate that phenomenon. The arrival of Leo XIV also comes at a time when the Government needs to manage several political and diplomatic fronts. After the friction with Brazil over the Argentine position regarding Bolsonarism, and amid economic difficulties, the papal visit will inevitably put issues such as poverty, inequality and the situation of the most vulnerable sectors front and center. These are matters on which the Church has its own position and on which it does not always find agreement with the libertarian administration. The Government, for its part, will seek for the visit to have an institutional and pastoral dimension, without it becoming a political dispute. The official agenda includes a meeting between the Pope and Milei at the Casa Rosada and a meeting with authorities, diplomatic representatives and civil society at the Palacio Libertad. In the Church, however, they remind that Leo XIV will have the freedom to express his positions and that it is not planned for his message to be conditioned by the needs of any government. As the papal visit approaches, within the ruling party the dispute between Patricia Bullrich and Karina Milei's sector remains open, and in recent days it was again exposed on social media and in the movements in the Senate. The Casa Rosada tries to tone down the clashes, but the senator's circle grows increasingly emboldened and is not willing to let pass the responses to their criticisms or distinctions, when they occur. This week's episodes had two triggers. On one hand, Bullrich's distancing from the Government's strategy toward Brazil and Bolsonarism. On the other, the differences over the sovereignty ruling on the Malvinas, because Santiago Caputo's sector attributed to Bullrich the maneuver to involve the Security Ministry, now headed by Alejandra Monteoliva, in the future National Security Council. In Bullrich's inner circle, they acknowledge that the senator's personal and political relationship with Santiago Caputo is of better tune than the one she maintains with Karina Milei. But that "does not mean" they are willing to tolerate his criticisms without reacting. "We have resources to respond and we are not larretistas," they warn, in a phrase that evokes the old internal rift of Juntos por el Cambio. Patricia Bullrich and Javier Milei The senator also has reproaches for the General Secretary of the Presidency. She questions the level of commitment of the Mileis to the election and, above all, the push to intervene in Senate decisions as if it were a dependency of the Executive Branch. "She doesn't understand that it is not a notary's office, that it is not a ministry," say those close to Bullrich, referring to attempts to promote changes in the structure of the bloc and in the committees that lack the necessary votes. Within this context fall the reports about a possible removal of Bullrich from the leadership of the libertarian bench to place in her position the Neuquén senator Nadia Márquez. The visit that Milei and his sister made this Saturday to Neuquén to participate in the inauguration of a temple linked to Márquez's family was also read in terms of the internal rift. The legislator is one of the leaders closest to the Karinista faction and had already received signals of support in the dispute over spaces of power within the upper chamber. Those close to Bullrich dismiss that the move could materialize. "They won't dare," they maintain about the possibility of Karina pushing ahead with the replacement. They consider that such a decision would provoke "a crisis with no return." Among libertarian leaders and satellites, another hypothesis circulates: if a rupture ends up formalized, it will more likely happen in February than before the end of the year. "The rupture already occurred, it just hasn't been formalized," summarizes a former member of La Libertad Avanza. Milei in Neuquén with Martín Menem, Karina Milei and Nadia Márquez In the Karinista camp, on the other hand, they seek to avoid an open confrontation. The criticisms of Santiago Caputo for his intervention in the Brazilian front, which some leaders reproached for having gotten involved with the logic of an international operator —"playing 007," according to the description that circulated internally— also did not generate a public reaction from the General Secretary's circle. After Donald Trump distanced himself from the strategy of backing Bolsonaro, while maintaining gestures of protection toward the former Brazilian president, some in the ruling party considered that gamble had ended badly. In Karina's sector they preferred not to deepen the discussion. "Not at all did we think it was a negative issue," they responded. The most visible response from that sector to Patricia Bullrich came through the X account Oficina de Respuesta Oficial, which is under the control of leaders of Las Fuerzas del Cielo and came out to harshly question economist Carlos Melconian. In Bullrich's circle, they assured that the criticisms of Mauricio Macri's former Economy Minister do not concern them at all. They also sought to distance themselves from him: they recalled that he had collaborated on the drafting of the economic platform for the 2023 presidential campaign of the former PRO president, but now describe him as "a jilted ex" for his criticisms of Milei's program. The President, meanwhile, again used his social media to intervene in the political discussion. This week he retweeted a message from an account close to the ruling party aimed at the internal rifts of his adversaries, in a line that was interpreted as an allusion to the differences between the PRO and La Libertad Avanza. He also reposted a video released by Karina Milei's blue account -"They call me the Boss"-, in which Martín Menem held that there was no room for an internal rift within the ruling party and that the only possible candidate of La Libertad Avanza was Javier Milei. The gesture was read within the space as a signal of support for Karina's leadership and a warning to those who begin to project their own candidacies. It is no coincidence that it coincided with the public reappearance of Mauricio Macri, who on Friday asserted that the electoral agreement between the PRO and La Libertad Avanza is "stalled." The Government responded that "the stalled ones are them," referring to the difficulties of the yellow party in resolving its own strategy and its internal differences. But at Balcarce 50, still eager to tone down the dispute with Bullrich, they deny that the presidential retweets were directed at her. They say the issue "already bores them," that it is "more of the same" and that there is no decision to remove the senator. They also assure that the Mileis have patience with her regarding the personal issues she is going through, although they reject that the exceptional messages by the head of State on political scheming on social media were a warning. Maximiliano Pullaro, Karina Milei, Diego Santilli and Luis Caputo participate in the front row of a press conference before a crowd of attendees. The tension, however, persists. In the Government there are officials who point out with unease that both Macri and Bullrich dare to raise public differences at a time when the administration faces economic difficulties, a rise in country risk, a drop in activity and inflation that has still not managed to break through the level the President himself had anticipated for this point in the year. The discussion about the agreement with the PRO was also reactivated after Cristian Ritondo presented a series of requests and after contacts were resumed at Balcarce 50, following several weeks without official meetings. The libertarian response consists, for now, of shifting the focus onto others' problems. In the ruling party they maintain that the PRO must "first sort out its own internal rifts before discussing an alliance for 2027." The problem is that, behind closed doors, La Libertad Avanza is also failing to resolve its own. On the contrary, they multiply, and with ever greater force. The visit of Leo XIV will find a Government seeking to show a fluid institutional relationship with the Church, while it tries to manage tensions it fails to resolve within its own structure. For the Episcopate, the Pope's arrival can be an opportunity to open a dialogue that has not existed with continuity since the beginning of the administration. For Milei, that will be a week of high public exposure, in which he will have to coexist with a religious and social agenda that he does not fully control and with an increasingly flourishing political internal rift.