About Agencia Informativa Católica Argentina (AICA)

Agencia Informativa Católica Argentina (AICA)

The Agencia Informativa Católica Argentina, known throughout the Argentine Church and media by its initials AICA, is the Catholic news agency of Argentina, based in Buenos Aires, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA). It was founded by the Argentine Episcopal Conference in December 1955, and its first weekly bulletin appeared on 11 June 1956, the date the agency itself considers its beginning. AICA is the diffusion organ of the Argentine Catholic episcopate and is commonly described, in its own institutional language, as the unofficial, or officious, organ of the Church in Argentina. Owned for most of its modern history by the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, it publishes a daily news service and the weekly Boletín AICA on the life of the Church in Argentina and the world. From 1 February 2026, by its own published history, AICA was reintegrated into the institutional structure of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, the body that founded it, with its seat at Suipacha 1034 in Buenos Aires.

Foundation in December 1955

AICA was founded by the Argentine Episcopal Conference in its plenary assembly held in December 1955 in Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, in Córdoba province. The agency's own history explains the circumstances candidly. The idea of creating AICA was born in very painful moments for Argentine Catholicism, which, in the middle of a religious persecution that culminated in the burning of the Ecclesiastical Curia of Buenos Aires and several historic temples in 1955, found itself in the total impossibility of making its voice heard. The bishops therefore created their own information service. On 11 June 1956 the first number of its weekly bulletin appeared, and that date is considered the beginning of AICA. The agency's history stresses that, in a demonstration of constancy and continuity, that bulletin never stopped appearing thereafter. Fifteen years later, in November 1969, the bishops transferred AICA to the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, with the commitment that its service would be for the whole episcopate and that it would continue being, by origin and purpose, a work of the Argentine Church.

Mission and editorial character

AICA defines its journalistic commitment in terms unusual for a general news agency. Its history states that, conscious that its information work is followed by those who hope to know the truth about the development of Christian life in the world, it has many times sacrificed the scoop, the primicia, in favour of the certainty and truthfulness of the information, always avoiding commentary that could deform the objectivity of the news. It says it will continue doing so because its journalistic commitment and vision have a very particular character, which gives it its quality as an officious organ of the Church in Argentina, and because AICA is a work of the Church and, as such, a work of all Catholics. In practical terms, that mission has meant a specialised wire: news of the Pope and the Vatican, of the Argentine bishops and dioceses, of parishes, religious orders, Catholic education, sanctuaries, beatifications and canonisations, and of the wider world's Church, written for Catholic media and for general media that need reliable Church news. It began, in the description of its records, as a service to newspapers, magazines and parish and diocesan bulletins and AM and FM radios, and with computing advances it built an important number of subscribers seeking that specific information.

The daily service and the Boletín AICA

AICA's two enduring products are its daily service and its weekly bulletin. The news of the Servicio Diario, the daily service, is transmitted in summarised form from Monday to Friday as a free service. Weekly, the agency publishes the Boletín AICA, the bulletin with which it began in 1956 and which remains its registered product and brand. The agency created its internet site in 1996, moving the bulletin tradition onto the web at aica.org, the website recorded for this profile. Its anniversary accounts describe the present-day operation in concrete terms: a daily news service covering national and international events of the Catholic universe, sent by email to tens of thousands of addresses, with the figure given as more than 65,000 email addresses in its 66th anniversary account in 2022 and more than 85,000 in an earlier anniversary account, and with many readers in turn redistributing the information they receive through their own means. Those figures are the agency's own anniversary statements from different years, not audited circulation, and they are presented here as such. The direction of travel they indicate, a free daily email service reaching a large specialist readership, is consistent with how AICA material is encountered across Argentine parish, diocesan and Catholic media sites.

Headquarters: from Bartolomé Mitre to Bolívar 218 and Suipacha 1034

AICA's succession of Buenos Aires headquarters is unusually well documented in its own history, and it traces the institutional geography of the Buenos Aires Church. Its seat was first, for a few months, in a modest office lent by Catholic Action at Bartolomé Mitre 2560. It then moved to the ground floor of the Casa del Clero building at Rodríguez Peña 846, and later to the fourth floor of the same building, remaining in that seat for 27 years. In June 1983 the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Juan Carlos Aramburu, moved it to the new building of the Metropolitan Curia, erected on the ruins of the old Curia burned in 1955 together with six historic churches of the Buenos Aires centre, facing Plaza de Mayo at Avenida Rivadavia 413, where he gave it comfortable and modern installations on the fourth floor; it occupied that seat for 17 years. In June 2000, Archbishop Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, later Pope Francis, moved it to the building at Bolívar 218, belonging to the archdiocese, where its offices were on the third floor and remained for 26 years; Bolívar 218, third floor, is the headquarters given in the agency's reference records and in the seed record for this profile. Finally, the agency's current published history records that from 1 February 2026 AICA returned to the structure of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, with its seat at Suipacha 1034, the conference's Buenos Aires address.

Directors: Lombroni, Canale and the Woites era

The agency's published history names its directors, and they explain its continuity. The first nine months, in the first seat, had as director Miguel Lombroni, a young Catholic Action leader. He was succeeded by the priest Arnaldo Clemente Canale, who held the post for a decade, from 1956 to 1966, a period in which, by the agency's account, AICA was consolidated on the road to its later achievements; Canale later became an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. The third director was Miguel Woites, who, after ten years as administrator and head of newsroom, was designated director on 17 May 1966 by the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires and president of the Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Antonio Caggiano, and was ratified by all his successors. Woites, born in Lincoln, Buenos Aires province, on 7 June 1928, directed AICA for well over five decades, was responsible for the press offices for the visits of John Paul II to Argentina in 1982 and 1987, was distinguished by John Paul II with the title of Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, and was declared an Outstanding Personality of the City of Buenos Aires in the field of communication in 2019. He died on 17 November 2023. The fourth director is Eduardo Enrique Woites, his son, who had worked at AICA from the age of 18 and served for many years as its administrator, and who was named interim director by Archbishop Jorge García Cuerva in December 2023.

Coverage: an Argentine agency at the Church's great events

AICA's history places the agency, professionally and objectively in its own words, at the service of information about the great events of the universal and Argentine Church across its lifetime. It lists among the events that found the agency at work the Second Vatican Council; the coming into operation of CELAM, the Latin American Episcopal Council, born less than a year before AICA itself; the episcopal assemblies of Medellín, Puebla and Santo Domingo; the pontifical visits to different nations of America, particularly the two made to Argentina in 1982 and 1987; the resignation of Benedict XVI; and the elections of Francis and of Leo XIV. The Argentine dimension of that coverage is distinctive: the 1982 visit of John Paul II took place during the Malvinas war, and the 2013 election of Francis was the election of AICA's own former archbishop, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who as Archbishop of Buenos Aires had moved the agency to Bolívar 218 in 2000. For Argentine Catholic media, AICA was the natural source through which such events were received in Spanish, with Argentine context, on the day.

Place in the Argentine agency landscape

Within Argentina's news agency system, AICA occupies a category of its own. Reference accounts of the country's media list, alongside the large general wires, two smaller agencies by name: the Buenos Aires provincial agency and the Agencia Informativa Católica Argentina, described as a Catholic Church agency focusing on news related to religious and Church matters. It never competed with Télam, Noticias Argentinas or DyN for general news subscriptions on their scale, and its survival did not depend on that market; when DyN closed in 2017 and Télam was dissolved in 2024, AICA continued its daily service uninterrupted, as it had since 1956. Its readers are, in large part, intermediaries like those of any wire: diocesan bulletins, parish publications, Catholic newspapers and portals, and radio stations, as well as general media that reproduce its Church reporting. Its longevity, approaching seventy years at the time of its 2026 reintegration into the Episcopal Conference, makes it one of the longest continuously operating news agencies in Argentina, and a rare case of a specialist confessional wire outlasting the general commercial wires founded in the same era.

Return to the Episcopal Conference in 2026

The most recent chapter in AICA's documented history is institutional. The agency's published history states that from 1 February 2026 AICA returned to be integrated into the institutional structure of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, the ecclesial body that founded it in 1955, and that its seat is now at Suipacha 1034. The agency presents the decision as expressing the will to offer AICA a clear framework of institutional belonging and to strengthen the accompaniment needed to sustain and project its information task, understood as an ecclesial service oriented to communion, truth and mission. It says the process was the result of joint and sustained work between AICA, the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, the General Secretariat and the Communication and Press Office of the conference. In the year in which the agency completed 70 years at the service of the Church's communication, counting from the 1956 bulletin, AICA described itself as inaugurating a new chapter in its history. Readers of this profile should note the dating carefully: the seed record for AICA described it as owned by the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires and headquartered at Bolívar 218, which was accurate for the long period from 1969 and 2000 respectively; the agency's own updated history records the 2026 change, and both facts are given here with their dates so that neither is mistaken for the other.

Significance

AICA's significance is easiest to see in the niche it has filled without interruption since 11 June 1956. Argentina is a country where Catholic institutions, dioceses, schools, movements and sanctuaries generate news every day, and where events in Rome can become national news overnight, most dramatically with the election of an Argentine pope in 2013. A specialised, bishops-founded agency, committed by its own charter to preferring verified certainty over speed, has supplied that coverage to Catholic and general media alike for seven decades, through dictatorship, democratic restoration, economic crisis and the digital transformation of news. Its weekly bulletin never stopped appearing; its daily service is free; its directors served for decades each; and its institutional home has come full circle, from the Episcopal Conference that created it in a moment of persecution in 1955, through the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, and back to the conference in 2026. On the verified record, that combination of specialisation and continuity, rather than scale, is what distinguishes Agencia Informativa Católica Argentina among Argentine news agencies.