Church and representations of class in Argentina to middle of the XX century. An approximation from the jocist classist culture

Abstract

The proposal of this article is the analysis about the diverse representations of classes and dynamics from the relation between the Juventud Obrera Católica (JOC) Argentinian and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, with members from other laical organizations and inside the association (ecclesiastical advisers and laics). I depart here from the hypothesis that, to the middle of the XX century, the profound social differences that characterized the argentinian society were reproduced and naturalized in the Church, per both, ecclesiasticals and laics. This acquires particular implications for the operation of the one association self-styled laborer as the JOC, if it goes attached to an identification of the manual worker as a suspected being and with limited compression capacities. Anyway, this visions of intellectual and social inferiority, accepted uncritically by the jocists, coexisted with self representations of moral superiority respect to the elites questioned by their selfishness and hypocrisy, what contributed to deepen the contrasts of classes and the social distances inside the Church.