Last May 25, on the occasion of the tedeum for Homeland Day, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva, delivered, in front of President Javier Milei and almost his entire cabinet, an uncomfortable homily. He spoke of brothers “paralyzed in their hopes, in their opportunities, in their dignity”, demanded “a ruling class that is encouraged by dialogue, encounter and reconciliation” and left a phrase that ordered the day: “They live on privileges, far from the common people, they have lost sensitivity to those who suffer, they criticize those who try to do good.”
García Cuerva also pointed to the libertarian digital ecosystem. He described “haters sitting in front of a computer to carry out terrorism on the networks, disqualifying, defaming”, and, quoting Pope Leo XIV, asked to “disarm language by renouncing hurtful words” and invited to “cultivate kindness.” During this section of the speech, the camera director struck out Santiago Caputo, whose right eye was itching.
García Cuerva’s words would have had an immediate effect on President Milei, who did not counterattack. The next day, on Radio Miter, in a calm tone, he described García Cuerva’s gaze as “an absolutely valid opinion”, said that it “opens a dialogue and a debate” that seemed “super valuable” and celebrated that “a religious authority tries to mediate.” His only objection was nuanced: the word “terrorism” seemed to him “a bit of an exaggeration” for people who write on Twitter. The news is interesting if you take into account that it is the same Milei who in 2018 had called Francisco “representative of the evil one in the house of God.”
Haters. The President’s biographer, Nicolás Márquez, downloaded a more brutal version in X: he called García Cuerva “a brutalized, immoral and anti-Christian bishop.” Deputy Alberto “Bertie” Benegas Lynch, one of the legislators closest to Milei, went on the political side: “García Cuerva’s message was regrettable and unfair to the Government’s achievements. Some campaign in a cassock for the return of Peronism that left us 57% poor,” he wrote, and accompanied the post with photos of the archbishop along with Sergio Massa, Malena Galmarini and Alicia Kirchner.
García Cuerva was born in Río Gallegos in 1968, the son of an Air Force commodore, he was a village priest in La Cava, in Beccar, before Francisco elected him archbishop in 2023. He is a creature of Bergoglism, of the hotbed of village priests from which Pepe Di Paola and Gustavo Carrara, today archbishop of La Plata, emerged. His first controversy, as soon as he assumed it, was precisely the photos with massism that Benegas Lynch resurfaced three years later: then he had to clarify that he was not a Kirchnerist — “in this obsession with the crack they have wanted to push me to that side” — and display his links with the PRO, from María Eugenia Vidal to Carolina Stanley.
In one of his first public appearances as archbishop he spoke of “damned inflation” during Massa’s tenure as Minister of Economy. At the 2024 tedeum he spoke about the leadership lacking a “social thermometer.” This year he even had clashes with the City Government regarding police operations in the towns. He said there was a “smell of eradication.”
That was, perhaps, the key to the nuisance that García Cuerva represents for the ruling party: he is the opponent whom they cannot treat as they do with others. It is not caste nor is it Kirchnerism, it cannot be said without paying a cost among the faithful, and on top of that he speaks from the place that Milei himself, a confessed believer, does not dare to desecrate. That’s why they attacked him from the side.
The question that the tedeum left open was whether the Church that García Cuerva embodies—orphaned by Francis and under the pontificate of Leo
