The Ravished Churches

Women wept, and children stared around them wide-eyed. Last week at the first services police allowed in Buenos Aires' burned-out churches. Argentine Roman Catholics saw the full extent of the damage. Inside blackened shells they found looted poor boxes, shattered statues and altars, toppled altar rails. They knelt to pray in mounds of ashes.

The churches--nine in all--were set afire the night of the June 16 revolt against Juan Peron. The damage was not the work of rioting mobs (or of Communists, as Peron said) but rather of methodical arsonists. At the 233-year-old Church of San Ignacio, a terrified caretaker saw them: 30 or 40 swarthy, roughly dressed men carrying crowbars and bottles of gasoline. While dust still hung over the nearby Plaza de Mayo, bombed a few hours earlier, the men marched into the church. Within minutes, flames were consuming San Ignacio's great cedar altar and its historic, Indian-carved pulpit. At the same time, similar bands of men touched off other important churches. The lofty dome of the Basilica of San Francisco glowed red. Flames danced in the windows of the archbishop's palace next to the Metropolitan Cathedral (which was spared).

Once reopened, the damaged churches became a focus for piety and anger. Inside Santo Domingo, a priest said Mass at an altar improvised of boxes and boards placed in front of a cross made of two charred timbers wired together and planted in a heap of rubble. At San Ignacio, a brown-robed friar carefully set back on its feet an image of San Benito de Palermo, whose day it was. "Not even in Russia did they do this," he said. "They hanged priests, but they did not destroy the churches." In San Miguel lay partly burned church records.

As though ashamed of the whirlwind it had reaped, the government made no attempt to discourage pilgrimages to the churches; polite cops guarding the damaged properties interfered with nobody and even saluted priests.

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