Priest for Per

The day after Argentine ex-Dictator Juan Peron faced his first major uprising in 1955 he was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for expelling a pair of prelates from 90% Catholic Argentina. During the uprising Peronistas burned nine Catholic churches. Most churchmen still denounce Peron, but last week Monsignor Antonio Jose Plaza, 49-year-old archbishop of the industrial city of La Plata, was trying to lure the 2,000,000 Peronistas still left into a proclerical political party.

In September, Plaza gathered 1,000 Catholics, most of them Peronistas, to open a "Christian Social Week." They rattled the walls with hymns, cries of "Viva Peron!" and "Viva Eva!" Early in October, Plaza blamed the 1955 church burnings on Masons, not Peronistas. Next day he led Peronistas before a visiting Vatican cardinal to petition the Pope to lift Peron's excommunication.

A congressional Deputy accused Plaza of "exploiting a corpse" and "trying to capture votes, not souls." The bitter anti-Peronists who run the army called Plaza in for a talk. Undeterred, Plaza pleaded on TV for an end to Peron's exile in the Dominican Republic. "The church cannot want any of its sons to suffer," he said, "and it is to be supposed that an Argentine exiled from his country lives in suffering." At week's end part of the front of Plaza's house was blasted off by unknown bomb setters--a hint of the passions the politically ambitious archbishop is unleashing.

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