A book recently published in Buenos Aires sheds new light on the difficult transition period between the Spanish Empire on the River Plate and the foundation of the Argentine Republic. The launch party for Bernado Lozier Almazán’s Proyectos monárquicos en el Río de la Plata 1808-1825. Los reyes que no fueron (“Monarchic projects in the River Plate 1808–1825: The kings who weren’t”) was held recently in the Quinta ‘Los Ombúes’, home of the municipal library, museum, and archives of San Isidro, the city in the Provincia de Buenos Aires known as Argentina’s ‘Rugby Capital’.

Proyectos monárquicos highlights the forgotten truth that most of the Argentine ‘patriots’ — San Martín, Belgrano, and Alvear among them — were monarchist, not republican. Proposals involving the courts of Spain, Portugal, France, and even England were proffered, and there was even an interesting proposal to marry a European prince to an Incan princess and offer him the throne of the Río de la Plata.

The author was introduced by Ignacio Bracht, the historian and fellow of the Argentine Institute of Genealogical Sciences, who pointed out the book illuminated Argentines’ roots in a way outside the ‘official’ historiography. “In the early nineteenth century,” Bracht said, “monarchs enjoyed the veneration of their subjects, who saw the king as one who granted them freedom, order, and the unity of peoples — ideals which were seriously violated in the United Provinces.” For this reason, Bracht suggests, monarchists considered the traditional system of government as more appropriate for guiding the “fledgling and hesitant nation” than republicanism. In the author’s own remarks, Lozier Almazán ruminated on what Argentina would be like had any of the projects researched in the book actually succeeded.

Among those present at the book launch were Abp. Edgardo Lisen, president of the Argentine-Urguayan Cultural Institute, Fr. Edgardo Albamonte SSPX, chaplain to the Charles VII Traditionalist Brotherhood (Argentina’s Carlist institute)

Source: Portal Uno

“Despite my inclinations to the contrary, I have racial sensitivities. I am Latin. I regard the civilised barbarian in the North with an inherited sense of mistrust. Today [the United States] has become a colossal society, and has adopted the goal of imposing its industry, its commerce, and its imperialism. Each citizen of the Union is a kind of stockholder… [upholding] an ideal of material perfection above moral perfection, and equating civilisation with the triumph of industry and commerce. We, by contrast, descendants of the Latins and educated by the Greeks, regard that person as most civilised who is most morally perfect. … I am proud to say I am bored with railroads and factory chimneys.” – Belisario J. Montero

ONE OF THE best aspects of Catholicism is the affirmation (for lack of a better word) of absolutely everything that is good throughout the world. All the peoples of the earth, each with their particular genius, eventually descend from the same parents. This gives one, I hope, a certain sympathy towards every nation and every people, and an anticipation that each one will eventually grow into the full flower of a Christian order appropriate to their particular characteristics and personality. Christianity is not oppressive and conformist in its universalism but instead all-embracing.

There is much to be admired in the sentiments expressed by Belisario Montero, an Argentine diplomat, in the comments cited above. To put them in context, they were made after the final collapse of the Spanish Empire following the Spanish-American War of 1898. Argentina, as you already know, is a place that excites me. In her is found so much of the idea of Europe, varyingly perfected and perverted, accidentally demolished in an attempt to save it and then put back together again not precisely as it was before. Marx “travelled” to Buenos Aires, but so did Maurras (and ultimately the Frenchman was more influential). For a time, photographs of Mussolini cut from the illustrated magazines were plastered onto the walls of aspirational working-class porteños trying to keep up with the latest European fad, and the military elite and social aristocracy combined to oppose the vulgar and destructive forces of liberal democracy and unbridled capitalism. Almost every coup in the nation’s history was received with a sigh of relief, especially (and ironically) the coups getting rid of whomever the previous welcome coup put in charge. Argentina has a long history of terrible success and beautiful failure. Perón himself is the very embodiment of this.

Of course, unlike Don Belisario, I am not a Latin. Celts are in some ways the distant cousins of the Anglo-Saxons (and not as distant as we like to pretend), who are cousins of the Germans and the Scandinavians and so on. Perhaps that makes us people of the North, though if so only tangentially. The United States, however, is undoubtedly a construct that is Northern and Protestant in its nature. This does not make it inherently bad, but it does mean it has inherent difficulties which must be overcome. Leo XIII put it very well, I think, when he wrote “We highly esteem and love exceedingly the young and vigorous American nation, in which We plainly discern latent forces for the advancement alike of civilisation and of Christianity”. The inherent difficulty is that the characteristics which can prove so conducive to spreading Christianity & civilisation are likewise capable of spreading godless materialism and consumerism.

“Despite my inclinations to the contrary” – that is the telling phrase. It is that typically Christian idea, to accept the limitations of race but restrain oneself from the errors of racism. (We must beware each and every -ism). And for every Americano sneering at the North, there is an Estadounidense who sneers at the laziness and corruption of the South. “Why don’t these people WORK?!?” (The answer: because there are more important things to do: namely, to live). Of course, both are right – and wrong.

And that is the frustration of reality: you will never find your Utopia to live in, except in the realm of the imagination, or – God willing – in the next life. You merely have to find the place where you are comfortable with the accommodations you’re forced to make.

Part of the fun of ‘New World’ places like the United States, Argentina, or South Africa is that you have that mix of different European cultural spirits. Who could doubt, for example, that, at the Cape of Good Hope, the commercial spirit of the Dutch was elevated by the civilisation of the Huguenots? But then the Dutch were already elevated themselves, as even the most cursory survey of that people must conclude. And again, for better or worse, a great deal of Prussia survives in South America. And Portugal, that tiny mother who gave birth to Brazil! A few weeks ago, the Lex column in the Financial Times suggested somewhat whimsically that a possible solution to Portugal’s financial woes would be for it to apply to become a Brazilian state – an idea charming in its idiosyncrasy.

What fun it would have been to be a fly on the wall in Victoria Ocampo’s villa in San Isidro, where Malraux, Stravinsky, Saint-Exupéry, Ortega y Gasset, and even Indira Gandhi were guests. And her journal, Sur, published all sorts of characters: Camus, Borges, even Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.

It’s telling that Doña Victoria studied at the Collège de France and attended lectures at the Sorbonne: Argentina (and America? South Africa? etc.?) is still dependent on a periodic influx from Europe, whether of blood or of intellect or of spirit – and those influxes have ceased because Europe has almost stopped producing any people or ideas or spirit.

But I expect this will change, and, God willing, things will improve for a time until the next great crisis is upon us.

The South African Ship Drakensberg sailed into Buenos Aires last month as part of the sea phase of ATLASUR VIII, a naval exercise involving ships from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and South Africa. Mr Tony Leon, former Leader of the Opposition and currently South African Ambassador to Argentina, was picked up by the ship-borne Oryx helicopter and landed on Drakensberg to observe the sail into Buenos Aires’s harbour. Mr Leon served in the SAN aboard President Pretorius in 1976.

Above, Capt Andre de Wet (OC, Drakensberg), H.E. Mr Tony Leon (S.A. Amb. to Argentina), V Adm Carlos Madero (Arg. Navy), and Capt Charl Coetzee (Chief of Staff).

In the morning, senior South African Embassy and Naval personnel paid homage to Admiral Guillermo (William) Brown, the Irish-born founder of the Argentine Navy at the monument to him by the Libertad building.

SMALL SEEDS, IF well-planted and tended to, flower into much larger growths. On a Friday morning last month, just four pilgrims set out from the town of Rawson in the Buenos Aires province of Argentina, but by the time they reached their destination — a Latin Mass in the Marian basilica of Luján — their numbers swelled to nearly a hundred. The pilgrimage of November 5th, 6th, and 7th, under the patronage of ‘Our Lady of Christendom’ (Nuestra Señora de Cristiandad) was inspired by the traditional Paris-Chartres pilgrimage every Pentecost weekend. The organisers hope that, like the Chartres pilgrimage, this trek to Luján will become an annual recurring event.

“Renewing Christendom in Argentina” was the theme of this year’s pilgrimage, which “seeks to promote the rich tradition of the Roman Catholic Church for our times” the organisers announced in a press release after its completion.

“This new 100-kilometre pilgrimage was an act of reparation and praise to God, imploring the salvation of souls through the renewal of Christian culture and the rediscovering of the bi-millennial tradition of the Church.”

Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite was offered every day of the pilgrimage, and ample opportunities to engage in the sacrament of confession were provided. Because the Friday on which the pilgrimage started was not a day off in Argentina, only four marchers began from Rawson, but they were joined with others at the end of the day when they reached the town of Rivas.

On the third day, as the enlarged group caught its first glimpse of the soaring spires of the Basilica of Our Lady of Luján, the pilgrims bowed toward the shrine and sang the Salve Regina before proceeding towards the city. On that day, the feast of Mary Mediatrix of All Graces, the final Mass of the pilgrimage was offered in the crypt of the Basilica by His Excellency Antonio Baseotto, the Bishop Emeritus of the Armed Forces.

The pilgrimage organisers offered their thanks to all the priests who offered the sacraments along the route, with a special thanks to Fr. Vivian Ferran, parish priest of Suipacha, for giving permission for the Tridentine Mass to be offered in his church in Rivas, and to Fr. Daniel Blanchoud, rector of the Basilica, who was enthusiastic about having the Mass celebrated in the crypt and instructed that permission would be given for future years as well.

Fr. Domingo Alberto Soria, the Episcopal Delegate for the Litugy of the Archdiocese of Mercedes-Luján sent the pilgrims a letter of encouragement, which ended: “With the hope that this event is a step in the spirit of ecclesial communion and richness of the liturgical life of the Shrine of Luján, I send a cordial greeting in the Lord and in Santa María de Luján.”

In the Sunday after-church tea-drinking circles of Manhattan, much thought and disputation was provoked by Damian Thompson’s recent revelation that the senator-elect from Florida, Mr. Marco Rubio, is in fact an evangelical Protestant despite his office claiming he is a Catholic. Word comes from Argentina about a member of parliament named Cynthia Hotton, a brazen defender of the right to life and solidarity with the unborn.

The head (and only MP) of the small ‘Values for my Country’ party, Ms. Hotton is attractive, media-savvy, and bold. My mind — laden with Argentine cynicism — adds those factors up and determines there is no way she can possibly be Catholic. A bit of research confirms the suspicion: her Facebook fan page lists her religious views as Cristiana Evangélica. Her political party’s emblem is a form of cross, a politicisation that — though certainly not without precedent — makes yours truly a little uncomfortable.

While Ms. Hotton’s Protestantism is not surprising, her constituency is: she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from the City of Buenos Aires. What’s the deal with B.A. these days? It’s probably one of the most left-wing cities in the Hispanic world, and yet on its city council, the centre-right PRO has more than three times as many seats as the next largest party, the left-wing Proyecto Sur. I’m not complaining (far from it!), but just find it rather curious. Much of PRO’s success is likely thanks to the personal appeal of its leader, Mauricio Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires.

Argentina is, in a very broad sense, against abortion, but like many widely held propositions in the country, this is effectively meaningless. After all, Argentines are very broadly for stability, transparency, and economic prosperity, and when was the last time they experienced all of those? Still, despite differences in religion, one wishes Ms. Hotton well in her campaign to uphold human dignity in the corridors of power.

THE PROSPECT WAS horrifying. The year was 1919, and Europe had only just brought to an end an orgy of self-destruction lasting several years. The negotiations to conclude a peace treaty at Versailles were ongoing, but from abroad it looked as if the continent had descended into a trend of violence, decline, and destruction. That year, Luis Barolo, an Italian textiles manufacturer who had immigrated to Argentina, commissioned his fellow-countryman Mario Palanti to design a fascinating and mysterious structure as a monument to “the Latin Genius” Dante Alighieri — a repository in the New World for the poet’s legacy as the continent that gave him birth slid into oblivion.

The Palacio Barolo is a tower on the Avenida de Mayo, the Buenos Aires boulevard connecting the Plaza de Mayo to the National Congress. Constructed between 1919 and 1923, the lobby of the tower is actually an arcade connecting the avenue to the Calle Hipólito Yrigoyen. It is strangely appropriate that this great edifice intended to honour and perpertuate the Old World’s legacy in the New is part cenotaph, part monument, part office tower — a uniquely American twist on a European inheritance.

The architect Palanti incorporated a Dantean numerology and mysticism into his design. For example, the building’s twenty-two storeys are spread over a total height of 100 metres (328 feet), one metre for each canto of the Divine Comedy. (It was the tallest building in South America until the Kavanagh was completed). On a whole, it is divided into a tripartite schematic inspired by the Divine Comedy: the basement and ground floor represent Hell, floors 1–14 represent Purgatory, and floors 15–22 represent Heaven. The axis of the building aligns perfectly with the Southern Cross constellation at around 7:30 pm in the early days of June, when Dante is believed to have been born.

The dome at the top, inspired by the Rajarani temple at Bhubaneswar, was designed to hold an ossuary containing the bones of Dante Alighieri himself, but Barolo was unable to convince the Italians to give them up. Indeed, his bones had remained hidden for centuries in order to prevent feuding over where to house them, and only came out of hiding a few decades before the Palacio Barolo was conceived.

Amusingly, an online travel guide from the BBC claims that the Palacio Barolo “inspired Dante’s Inferno”, not the other way around — an interesting problem for the time-space continuum to be sure.

Across the River Plate in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, the Barolo has a cousin in the Palacio Salvo, also designed by Palanti before he returned to his native Italy, where he died in 1930. Mysteriously, all the plans to the tower on the Avenida de Mayo disappeared after the building’s completion, so the Palacio Barolo may still contain secrets undiscovered to this day.

Ramírez sympathised with the Axis powers in the Second World War, and his inability to successfully maintain Argentina’s neutrality in the face of U.S. pressure led to his resignation and succession by Gen. Edelmiro Farrell, who was viewed by most as the instrument of his charismatic junior, the infamous Col. Juan Perón (with whom we are all too familiar).

This poster produced by the junta incorporates a number of the symbols of Argentine patriotism and nationalism. ‘Liberty’ and ‘Justice’ are proclaimed the principles of the junta, and underneath the date of the coup is announced the ‘Dawn of a Greater Argentina’. The Phrygian cap of liberty, a frequent Argentine emblem, rests atop the scales of justice while the stars of the Southern Cross imply a divine favour over the new regime.

The map of Argentina coloured in yellow includes the British colony of the Falkland Islands and Antártida Argentina, the Argentine Republic’s claimed possession on the Antarctic continent (which overlaps with competing claims by Chile and the United Kingdom). Behind the whole composition, the Argentine Cockade looms ascendant like a rising sun, affirming the text’s proclamation of a new dawn under the nationalist-revolutionary regime.

AT THE HEART OF IT ALL IS Buenos Aires, one of the world’s most exciting cities. I was there for months during the Falklands War, reporting for the BBC. They were praying for me in our local church. If only they had known how close I had come to eating myself to death – those steaks are huge – they would have prayed even harder.

It is an intensely Anglophile country, and was even then. The upper crust didn’t want to argue about the sovereignty of the Falklands (any more than they would want to argue now about oil drilling); they wanted to know where in Jermyn Street to order their cavalry twills. The hundreds of thousands of descamisados (literally, “shirtless ones”) who packed the Plaza de Mayo screaming for Mrs Thatcher’s blood would break off when they saw the BBC logo on the camera to make sure they had got the lyrics to “Hard Day’s Night” exactly right. The city’s biggest department store was called Harrods, the poshest club was (and is) the Hurlingham and the most popular film during the war was “Chariots of Fire”.

The veterans of the Malvinas, portly and grey-haired now, camp out in the Plaza de Mayo, still begging for better pensions. Porteños (the locals’ name for themselves) call them “the whiners”. The memorial to the 700 or so Argentine dead is prominent enough, but it is just a list of names and the eternal flame has long since gone out. It faces the great clock, built by the British a century ago (with a movement copied from Big Ben). The locals still call it the English Tower, even though it was officially renamed after the conflict. The cause still rankles, but the war is an embarrassment.

There’s poverty in the suburbs but, at its heart, Buenos Aires is a grand city, laid out in the days when its wealth and its future seemed unlimited. The world’s widest avenues, finest opera house, most opulent fin de siècle town houses, and – my idea of heaven – Italian restaurants cooking the world’s most wonderful meat. (Try La Brigada, where they cut the tenderloin with spoons. And don’t order “Baby Beef” looking for a light meal; it weighs in at just short of a kilo.)

It’s an old-fashioned European city, with a café society oddly short of dark faces. The original natives, and the African slaves, were wiped out or pushed out. The most prominent of the country’s remaining blacks (70 or so, it is said) was arrested at the airport recently because officials thought her Argentine passport must be a forgery.

The city is full of grand monuments, mostly to the chancers who snatched independence when Spain had its back turned, bowing the knee to Napoleon. They are as extravagantly memorialised in death as they were spurned in life; nearly all of them died in exile.

Argentina’s real heroes can be seen, stuffed, in the colourful old dock area, La Boca. Life-size models stare at you from the shops and down from the balconies. There are just three of them, and a tawdry trio they are. Eva Duarte Peron, of course, the actress who slept her way to the bottom of the movie business and into the life of a crypto-fascist colonel on the make; a long-dead tango warbler called Carlos Gardel; and Maradona, the squat footballer with the hand of God and the soul corroded by cocaine. Two of them died young; the third is still trying.

Death is a big thing in Argentina. La Recoleta cemetery is worth the trip in itself. It’s an entire suburb of gloriously overblown mausolea; a gentleman’s club for the dead, even harder to get into than the Garrick. Evita is there, in the Duarte family tomb. Her father’s relatives famously said they wouldn’t be seen dead with her; now she’s banged up with them for all eternity. There’s a new museum to Evita that’s worth seeing, with a pinch of salt.

I would dispute Bs.As. being “an old-fashioned European city”. It is instead a rather vigorous American city that retains many of the best attributes of an old-fashioned European city.

An Argentine correspondent informs us that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered on October 28th at the Church of St. Boniface, the German-speaking parish of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the beatification of Blessed Charles, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary. The mass was organized by Viscountess Huges Stier de Saint Jean (née Princess Isabelle Auersperg-Breunner), whose mother was a descendant of the Emperor Franz Joseph through his daughter Valerie. The Mass was offered in Spanish and German, with the prayers of intention read in those languages as well as Hungarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Croatian, and Italian.

Category: Charles of Austria

Looking down the Avenida de Mayo towards the Argentine Congress in the 1910s.