State-Church Fight : Divorce Bill: Clash Splits Argentines

The debate is incendiary. It consumes priests, politicians, the press and the people with extraordinary passion and rhetoric.

In Argentina, when it comes to divorce, there is no middle ground. There has been none for a century.

Jose Alberto Furque, a freshman congressman from the remote mountain province of Catamarca, is at the center of the furor. Furque, 37, says he has in mind only an overdue updating of the civil code, but he keeps meeting people who think he wants to destroy their beloved Argentina.

“Back home, the pressure from the church is tremendous,” Furque complained the other day. “The bishop says things like, ‘How can a legislator from a province where the Virgin of the Valley is adored have sponsored legislation allowing divorce?’ ”

Bishop’s Prayer

The bishop of Catamarca, Pedro Alfonso Torres Farias, says stronger things as well. In an open letter to Furque, he prayed: “May God free our nation from the divorcist scourge and forgive those who want to destroy the basic cell of our Argentine society.”

The issue is state versus Roman Catholic Church; the elected, secular representatives in a democratic government are challenging the doctrine of the nation’s predominant religion. The weight of public opinion appears to lie with the Congress. The weight of history rests with the church.

Argentina’s controversy is typical of the clash between traditionalism and modernization that colors life at all levels in Latin America today. Divorce as a flashpoint is startling because the whole idea is so anachronistic. All other countries in Catholic Latin America, with the exception of isolated Paraguay, already acknowledge at least a limited form of divorce.

Outside of Latin America, only Andorra, Ireland, Malta, the Philippines and San Marino still do not allow divorce.

2 Million in Limbo

Supporters of divorce here say it is a question of pragmatism, a practical advance for as many as 2 million people who are in a kind of limbo, who are separated but cannot legally remarry in Argentina. Historically, this has invited social opprobrium and dispute over inheritances and the legitimacy of children born to de facto second marriages.

“We are not trying to change the basis of society, simply to overcome this country’s cultural underdevelopment,” said Furque, who has proposed legislation that would permit divorce in strictly limited circumstances. His is one of a number of divorce bills awaiting consideration in the Chamber of Deputies.

“Spanish and French colleagues tell me about their concern for legislation governing genetic engineering and test-tube babies,” he went on. “When I tell them about divorce, they ask what we’ve been doing this past century.”

Furque’s bill, which is certain to be modified during debate, would allow divorce after one year of separation by mutual consent or for causes ranging from adultery to alcoholism, drug addiction or prison sentences of more than three years.

Opponents of congressional action portray divorce as a decisive moral issue fraught with religious, social and ideological overtones.

Argentina, they warn, must not succumb to the virus of moral laxity that has already afflicted 98% of the world’s people. Not many ramparts remain unstormed, they note. The Philippines and Malta are safe, but Ireland is weakening and San Marino seems lost.

Blames Marxists

According to Cosme Beccar Varela, president of an ultra-conservative Catholic lay group called Tradition, Family, Property, it is a left-right issue. “The Marxists want free love,” he said. “Indissoluble marriage is as far as you can get from that.”

A bright red banner in the street outside the group’s headquarters features a heraldic lion rampant, along with the warning: “Divorce=Successive Polygamy.”

Beccar Varela said: “Divorce is a cancer of society that attacks first one family, then another, then another, until it ends with the death of society. Mercifully, our country has been faithful to the law of God.”

In all, more than a dozen militant lay groups are girding for battle alongside the church. It is an old fight. Argentina’s first divorce bill went to Congress in 1888 and died in committee. Deputy Carlos Olivera, who sponsored a divorce bill in 1901, complained that he was “the target of insults by the priests of the whole country.”

‘Will Go . . . Like Butterflies’

Deputy Ernesto Padilla, in opposing Olivera’s bill, thundered, “With divorce, husbands will go from wedding to wedding like butterflies from flower to flower.”

After three months of congressional debate punctuated by rival street demonstrations, Olivera’s bill lost, 50-48.

“Divorce is too important an issue to be decided by a mere majority,” Roberto Bosca, an official of a pressure group called Union of Families, said recently. “Congress has no right to approve divorce. If it is to be considered at all it should be by individuals with specialized knowledge, not deputies who never addressed the issue with the voters who elected them.”

In preparation for congressional debate, the church, nominally the shepherd of 85% of Argentina’s 30 million people, is unlimbering its own battle-proved artillery. A new booklet called “Divorce . . . What Argentine Bishops Say” is a 62-page barrage of fire and brimstone. New salvos are fired almost daily.

“Discussion of divorce creates division in the country at a time when unity is needed,” said Msgr. Emilio Ognenovich, the bishop who heads the church’s Secretariat for the Family. “It is a very bad prologue for the upcoming (1987) papal visit.”

Enormous Influence

Argentina is not as visibly Catholic as some of its Andean brethren, but the church wields enormous high-level influence on political parties and the armed forces, according to Penny Lernoux, a Bogota-based specialist on Catholicism in Latin America.

“With the Colombians, the Argentine hierarchy is the most conservative in the region,” Lernoux said. “When Argentine human rights groups wanted to get a message to the Pope in Puebla (Mexico) in 1979, they had to do it through the Brazilians. The Argentine bishops wouldn’t help them.”

In Colombia, where democracy is older and more stable than in Argentina, divorce is possible for the minority of couples who do not marry in the church, Lernoux noted, “but in the eyes of the Argentine bishops, divorce is a fight to the death.”

In the Argentine Congress, a majority in the lower house is already on record as favoring some sort of divorce. No one underestimates the dangers that lie ahead, though, or is confident of victory for divorce this year.

Politicians on Fence

The government of President Raul Alfonsin will take no position on the issue, lest it incur the open enmity of a church already annoyed by its secular liberalism in tolerating such chinks in the national moral armor as pornography. Neither will Alfonsin’s ruling party, the Radical Civic Union, or the Peronists, his principal opposition, formally declare themselves for or against divorce.

The Peronists have been hurt before in conflicts with the church. President Juan D. Peron approved a divorce law in 1954 as part of a complicated feud with the church. That feud contributed to his eventual downfall, and the armed forces leaders who toppled Peron in 1955 suspended his divorce law. In one of the curiosities of Latin American jurisprudence, it remains on the books, but in suspension, to this day.

Efforts by the Peronists to revive divorce while they were back in power in the mid-1970s failed three times in Congress.

The Rev. Emilio Monti, Methodist dean of the Evangelical Faculty of Theology, a seminary shared by eight Protestant churches here, said: “Pastorally, we oppose divorce and try to head it off. It is a failure, a sin if you will. But not allowing people to remake their lives by remarrying is worse. Legally, life can be very difficult for those who are de facto divorced.”

Foreign Marriages

Many legally separated persons form new households without any effort to legalize them. Under the law, this is concubinage. Among separated Argentines of the middle and upper classes, Monti says, remarriage outside the country is a common tactic. Neighboring Paraguay and Bolivia are favorites, although it is also possible for an Argentine to acquire a Mexican divorce by proxy and a Mexican marriage certificate without ever leaving Buenos Aires.

Conversely, according to Aldo Zuccolillo, editor of the Asuncion newspaper ABC Color, which has been closed by the Paraguayan government, Brazil and Argentina are frequent remarriage havens for couples from divorceless Paraguay.

New marriages of Argentines in Paraguay are legal everywhere except in Argentina. New marriages of Paraguayans in Argentina are legal everywhere except in Paraguay.

In both countries, the foreign unions are socially accepted alternatives to impossible divorce for people still deciding whether to exchange old ways for new.

Among the other countries that do not allow divorce, San Marino will soon have a divorce law, and the Irish Parliament may be asked to consider a bill later this year that would allow a limited form of divorce.