Bishop Enrique Angelelli arrived in the Diocese of La Rioja, Argentina, in 1968, inspired by the Second Vatican Council and Young Christian Workers Movement.
There, he began expanding roles for the laity, women and religious in La Rioja, a poor diocese in the northwest of Argentina. He championed worker cooperatives among the vineyards in the Andes foothills—an act viewed as subversive by the local elites, who branded the bishop a “communist.” He also advanced a vision of the church that focused on social ministries and the poor, along with synodality among the faithful.
Bishop Angelelli also confronted the country’s military dictatorship, which came to power in 1976 and murdered, disappeared and terrorized people for nearly a decade. That defiance ultimately cost him his life. He died in a mysterious car crash.
His death followed the slayings of two priests, Gabriel Longueville, O.F.M. Conv., and Carlos de Dios Murias, O.F.M. Conv., along with the killing of a pastoral worker, Wenceslao Pedernera.
The four churchmen became the first martyrs of the military dictatorship.
Argentina recently marked the 50th anniversary of the country’s military dictatorship, which ruled from 1976 to 1983 in a reign commonly referred to as “the dirty war.” During those years an estimated 30,000 people were either killed or disappeared, according to human rights groups. The crimes of the dictatorship included dissidents being held and tortured in clandestine detention centers.
Many were executed and tossed in unmarked graves or sedated and tossed from military aircraft into the Río de la Plata. An estimated 500 babies were born to pregnant women being held in detention. Then, after their mothers were murdered, they were placed with military families.
Some bishops supported military rule, according to church observers. None openly condemned the murders of Bishop Angelelli and the other churchmen.
“The episcopal conference of that time somewhat turned its back on Angelelli during the height of the dictatorship,” said Mariano De Vedia, religion writer at the Argentine newspaper La Nación and author of a book on Bishop Angelelli.
“There was a small group of bishops who stood up to the military government, but they did not have the support of the majority of bishops,” José María Poirier, publisher of the Catholic publication Critero, said in an interview before the beatifications of the four martyrs in 2019. “They preferred not to discuss the matter” of Bishop Angelelli’s murder, he said. “They implicitly accepted that it had been an ‘accident.’”
Pope Francis had championed their cause, having first visited La Rioja Bishop Angelelli’s administration and, as the Jesuit superior in Argentina and Uruguay at that time, receiving three seminarians from the diocese at a Jesuit school in Buenos Aires. Francis returned to La Rioja in the 2000s as archbishop of Buenos Aires, delivering a homily that local Bishop Dante Braida described as “very perceptively recognizing their martyrdom.” Francis later advanced the martyrs’ cause from the papacy.
Pope Francis called Bishop Angelelli “a true martyr,” explaining that a martyr “bears witness that, when the heart and mind are fixed on God, certain attitudes inevitably arise: sincere love for all and the rejection of any form of exploitation or self-serving shortcut or the pursuit of an easy life, whenever the rights and lives of the weakest, the marginalized, or those on the ‘periphery,’ as we say today, are at stake.”
In 2014, two military commanders were found criminally responsible for Bishop Angelelli’s death. They are among the more than 1,100 people—including police, military officials and civilians—convicted of crimes against humanity by Argentine courts since 2006.
Church observers described Bishop Angelelli’s pastoral approach in La Rioja as an early precursor for the papacy of Francis. Indeed, his vision caught the attention of Jorge Mario Bergoglio S.J., the then-Jesuit provincial in Argentina who befriended Bishop Angelelli and visited La Rioja.
“When he became pope and promoted synodality, it reflected a lot of what Monsignor Angelelli promoted here,” Bishop Braida of La Rioja, told America. “He had a good reference point in Angelelli to promote that. [Bishop Angelelli] was a man of many gestures of closeness. And I think that’s what Francis also sought to express in his pontificate. There was certainly some kind of influence on him.”
Others see Bishop Angelelli’s legacy extending beyond the pastoral and spiritual realms.
“He was a prophet. His words, his pastoral, ethical and political pronouncements, and his transformative actions on collective consciousness and social relations resonated deeply in his time and remain relevant today,” said Delfor Brizuela, a former priest in La Rioja and former head of the provincial human rights commission.
“His bold and forceful pronouncements, along with his unwavering consistency, make him a figure who challenges a present marked by a lack of leaders of his caliber, where calculation, [conspiracy-mongering] and apathy have become commonplace.”
The Argentine church hierarchy showed somewhat tepid enthusiasm for the 2019 beatifications in La Rioja, according to Mr. De Vedia, but it has shown “full support” for the 50th anniversary commemoration of the dictatorship.
The commemorations included a Mass celebrated on Aug. 1 at Punta de Los Llanos, the hamlet where Bishop Angelelli’s vehicle was run off the road as he returned from celebrating a novena for the slain priests and Mr. Padernera.
“What does Enrique Angelelli, a pastor from the interior of the country, have to say to us today?” asked the celebrant, Archbishop Marcelo Daniel Colombo of Mendoza, president of the Argentine bishops’ conference.
“Far from any rhetoric that merely observes reality from a distance, he would ask us to commit to transforming society into a more just and fraternal place,” the archbishop said. “He would confront the attempt to reduce people to a mere algorithm of consumption and submission to the dictates of powerful economic interests. He would question the grand, empty pronouncements of any political persuasion that exclude the individual and their rights.”
Argentine media interpreted the archbishop’s comments as a challenge to the administration of President Javier Milei and its fiscal austerity, which has slashed social spending.
But the media also noted the attendance of many prominent figures in the opposition Peronist movement, along with their internal squabbles. Archbishop Colombo said, in comments alluding to the Peronists in attendance, “It is the individual people who matter, each and every one of them and their families. Social movements, grand political pronouncements in favor of the people, and communitarian ideologies are useless if they are not geared toward promoting people—men and women—with their inalienable rights.”
Tens of thousands of Argentines demonstrated in March on the 50th anniversary of the dictatorship. The Argentine bishops’ conference joined their voices, saying, “Never again,” on the eve of the March 24 anniversary, while also acknowledging its own shortcomings during the dictatorship.
“We recognize the gravity of what happened during those violent years and understand that memory demands self-criticism from society and the church within it—a self-criticism that will help rediscover and rebuild the sense of fraternity among Argentinians,” the bishops said.
The anniversary of the dictatorship arrived amid controversy in Argentina. The Milei administration has disputed the dictatorship’s death toll and slashed much of the funding for human rights groups and memorials.
The Casa Rosada, Argentina’s president’s office, released a video on the 50th anniversary decrying “a biased and vengeful version of history” pushed by the Peronists, who preceded Mr. Milei in office—especially the faction that supported kirchnerismo, the Peronist movement inaugurated by former Presidents Nestor Kirchner, who died in 2010, and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Mr. Milei’s politically conservative vice president, Victoria Villarruel, the niece of a colonel from the dictatorship, has called the official toll of dead and disappeared during the Dirty War period a “myth” and accused schools of teaching a “partial and distorted” version of history.
Fernando Farías is a political commentator and host of an English-language news program for Argentina’s public radio network. He said revisionists like the vice president argue that Argentina was fighting an “unconventional war” against leftists, including guerrillas, “and the thousands of disappeared are direct or indirect victims of that war.”
According to that revisionist narrative, he added, victims of left-wing violence were “made invisible” after the restoration of democracy and especially during the Kirchner governments.
The Kirchners governed between 2003 and 2015, while Ms. Fernández de Kircherner also served as vice president between 2019 and 2023. Though he made his name on hyperbolic attacks on figures like Pope Francis and promises to slay rampant inflation, Mr. Milei also made repudiation of the Kirchners a pillar of his 2023 campaign.
Scandal erupted in 2024 when six lawmakers from Mr. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party visited imprisoned military officials convicted of crimes against humanity. It was later revealed that Javier Olivera Ravasi, a priest known for expressing conservative political views and defending the military dictatorship as the son of an army officer convicted of human rights violations, organized the visit. The Diocese of Zarate-Campana subsequently expelled Father Olivera, who now serves in the United States at the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
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