Argentina’s faith and politics got here together Sunday as Pope Francis canonized the country’s first female saint with Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, sitting within the front row of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The Mass to declare Mama Antula a saint marked the primary meeting between the Argentine pope and Milei, who once called Francis an “imbecile” for defending social justice. The president, who performed the sign of the cross initially of the ceremony, was seated to Francis’ right on the side of the fundamental altar.
Mama Antula was an 18th century laywoman who ministered to the poor and helped keep Jesuit spirituality alive in Argentina after the religious order — to which the pope belongs — was suppressed.
In an audience Friday with Argentine pilgrims on the town for the ceremony, Francis held Mama Antula up as a model of charity at a time by which, he said, “radical individualism” was infecting society today.
Milei is to fulfill privately with Francis on Monday, before also having private talks with Italy’s far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni and the president.
During his campaign, Milei described Francis as an “imbecile” and “the representative of malignance on Earth.”
Francis spoke at length with Milei after he was elected in December and has indicated he has forgiven him for the campaign rhetoric. Francis has said he’s considering visiting Argentina later this 12 months in what could be his first trip home since his 2013 election.
After arriving in Rome on Friday from Israel, where Milei announced the relocation of the Argentine embassy to Jerusalem, the president visited the Colosseum and the church housing certainly one of Michelangelo’s best-known sculptures: a seated Moses.
In an Instagram post accompanying a photograph of himself the sculpture, Milei wrote his frequent motto “Long live freedom rattling it…!!!”
The president, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, has promised to drastically reduce state spending to shore up a government budget deficit that he says is fueling inflation, which finished 2023 at 211%.
Mama Antula, born María Antonia de Paz y Figueroa, is a figure beloved to Argentines, a girl who left behind a lifetime of privilege to spread Ignatian spirituality across Argentina after the Jesuits were ordered expelled from Spain’s colonies.
Silvia Correale, who spearheaded Mama Antula’s sainthood process, said she remembered she first met the longer term Pope Francis when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires and Mama Antula’s candidacy had just cleared a very important hurdle within the Vatican.
“I do know that he esteems her loads, like all of the Jesuits of Argentina and Uruguay, because they consider her their spiritual mother,” Correale told The Associated Press within the runup to the ceremony. “They know that she kept the treasure of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius alive within the years they weren’t there.”
But the present archbishop of Buenos Aires, Archbishop Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva, said it might be improper to think that Mama Antula is simply being made a saint now because a Jesuit Argentine pope happens to be running the Catholic Church.
He noted that the actual process opened in 1905, and that it was Pope Benedict XVI who put her on the trail to possible sainthood when he declared her venerable in 2010.
“It’s a present of God that Pope Francis — an Argentine pope, a Jesuit pope — can canonize her,” he said. “But Mama Antula is a saint independent of Francis.”
