About Criterio

Criterio

Criterio is a Catholic magazine of current affairs and culture published in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was first published on 8 March 1928, initially directed by Atilio Dell'Oro Maini and sponsored by Catholic intellectuals of the Cursos de Cultura Católica. It is still published today, which makes it unique among the titles in this batch of Argentine magazines: where the others are closed historical publications written about in the past tense, Criterio is a living institution whose history, told here, runs from 1928 to the present.

Criterio is regarded as Argentina's leading Catholic magazine of current affairs and culture. Across nearly a century it has been directed by, among others, Monsignor Gustavo Franceschi, Jorge Mejía and Rafael Braun, and it has served as the forum in which Argentine Catholic intellectuals argued, in public and in print, about fascism and democracy, Peronism, the Second Vatican Council, dictatorship, human rights and the place of the Church in a changing society. Few Argentine magazines of any kind can match its continuity.

Founding in 1928 and the Cursos de Cultura Católica

Criterio was first published in Buenos Aires on 8 March 1928. Its initial director was Atilio Dell'Oro Maini, and it was sponsored by the Catholic intellectuals of the Cursos de Cultura Católica, the Catholic Culture Courses, the formation circle that gathered the lay and clerical intellectuals who were rebuilding Argentine Catholic thought in the 1920s. The magazine was founded, in other words, not as a commercial venture and not as an official organ of the hierarchy, but as the publication of an intellectual movement: independent Catholic publishing in the service of a Catholic reading of contemporary affairs and culture.

That origin shaped its enduring character. Criterio was from the start a magazine of ideas for educated Catholic readers, addressing politics, society, literature, philosophy and theology together, on the premise that a Catholic judgement on the modern world required engaging the modern world in detail. Its title, Criterio, criterion or judgement, announced exactly that ambition: to supply a standard by which events could be weighed.

Directors and editorial succession

The succession of Criterio's directors maps the history of Argentine Catholicism itself. After Dell'Oro Maini's initial direction, the magazine was directed by Monsignor Gustavo Franceschi, its defining mid-century editor, a priest-intellectual who made Criterio a national forum and who conducted, from its pages and its office, many of the era's defining Catholic controversies. Later directors included Jorge Mejía, who went on to senior responsibilities in the Church and who directed the magazine in the conciliar period, and Rafael Braun. In more recent decades the magazine's direction and publishing passed to figures such as José María Poirier, identified in international Catholic reporting in 2015 as the publisher of Criterio in Buenos Aires.

A magazine that survives its founders must institutionalise its editorship, and Criterio did so where the director-magazines of Argentine letters, dependent on a single patron or critic, could not. Its continuity across directors is one of the clearest structural explanations of its longevity, the other being its anchorage in a durable community of readers, writers and institutions rather than in one generation's polemic.

The Maritain controversy and the 1930s

Criterio's pages in the 1930s hosted one of the great Latin American Catholic controversies of the century. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose thought proposed a Christian humanism at a distance from both communism and fascism, visited Argentina in 1936, and his defence of the Jews and his refusal to sanctify political camps divided Argentine Catholics. When Maritain condemned the bombing of Guernica and rejected the idea that Franco's war in Spain was a holy war, the controversy erupted in Criterio in earnest. Conservative Catholics such as Gregorio Maldonado and César Pico opened fire against him in the magazine and defended a possible union between Catholics and fascism, and the priest Julio Meinvielle attacked Maritain's position in its pages in still harsher terms.

Franceschi himself, though he had a personal and respectful relationship with Maritain, harshly criticised his call for peace, seeing Franco's fight against the socialist government of Spain as an example for Argentine Catholics. Maritain's disciples and defenders, including Rafael Pividal, Manuel Ordóñez, the future founder of Argentine Christian Democracy, and Augusto Durelli, answered from the same Catholic world. The episode is essential to an honest history of Criterio: the magazine in the 1930s was the arena of a Catholic right largely sympathetic to European fascism, arguing against the Christian democratic current that would, in time, transform Latin American Catholicism. Later generations of the magazine's own tradition judged that period severely, and the controversy remains a standard case in scholarship on Catholicism and politics in Argentina.

Criterio at mid-century

By the 1950s Criterio was established as the Catholic weekly of reference in Argentina. Studies of Argentine religious sociology record that in that decade the Catholic weekly Criterio, together with journals of pastoral and theological specialisation, regularly published translations and articles by local authors that built a critical mass of Catholic social thought, attractive enough that the young Belgian priest François Houtart, later one of the international references of the field, spent a year of study in Argentina in 1954 producing articles in that milieu. The detail captures Criterio's mid-century function: a general Catholic magazine operating at an intellectual level that connected Buenos Aires to the international renewal of Catholic social science and theology.

Alongside Esquiú, the Catholic family weekly founded in 1960, Criterio formed the senior tier of Argentine Catholic periodicals, with Esquiú addressing the Catholic family broadly and Criterio addressing its intellectual and professional leadership. SciELO-indexed scholarship on the two magazines treats them together as the principal sources for the public positions of Argentine Catholicism in their period, a status that reflects Criterio's authority within its own world.

The conciliar and post-conciliar decades

The Second Vatican Council transformed every Catholic magazine, and Criterio, directed in the 1960s by Jorge Mejía, was the Argentine forum in which conciliar renewal was explained, debated and contested. Mejía appears in the contemporary record lecturing on the Council's documents to Catholic study circles in Buenos Aires in 1965, alongside the future cardinal Eduardo Pironio, evidence of the magazine's role as a teaching institution for the Argentine Church in transition. In the decades that followed, through the polarisation of the late 1960s and 1970s, the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 and the democratic restoration, Criterio continued as a magazine of current affairs and culture in which Catholic intellectuals argued about the Church, the state and society from changing positions, including, in its later decades, the currents associated with the theology of the people and the Argentine Church of Pope Francis.

The election in 2013 of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as Pope Francis gave Criterio's world a global resonance it had never had, and its publisher was quoted internationally in 2015 analysing Argentine politics and church-state relations for Catholic media abroad. A Buenos Aires Catholic magazine founded in 1928 finding its city's cardinal on the throne of Peter, and commenting on the fact for the world, is a measure of the institutional road Criterio had travelled.

Contents and character

Criterio is a magazine of current affairs and culture: politics, economics, society, religion, literature, philosophy and the arts, treated from a Catholic intellectual standpoint for a general educated readership. That breadth distinguishes it from devotional and parish publishing on one side and from academic theology journals on the other. Its contributors across its history have included priests, lay intellectuals, academics and public figures, and its pages have mixed editorial comment, essays, interviews, reviews and documentation of Church and society.

Precise circulation figures for Criterio are not stated in the sources used for this profile and are not estimated here. Its standing does not rest on mass circulation. It rests on authority within Argentine Catholic and intellectual life, on the calibre of its directors and contributors, and on continuity, the quality that makes a magazine citable as a witness across an entire century of national history.

Buenos Aires and the Argentine Catholic context

Criterio's Buenos Aires base placed it at the centre of Argentine Catholic institutional life: the archdiocese, the Catholic universities and cultural institutes, the Cursos de Cultura Católica from which it sprang and the national press with which it argued. Argentina's Catholic culture in the twentieth century was at once deeply established and repeatedly contested, by liberalism, by Peronism, by Marxism and by secularisation, and Criterio was the periodical in which the Catholic intellectual response to each contest was most continuously elaborated. To read its run is to read Argentine Catholicism thinking aloud about modernity for nearly a hundred years.

That continuity gives the magazine an archival value beyond its denomination. Historians of Argentina of every persuasion cite Criterio because it took positions, on the record and on schedule, on the Spanish Civil War, on Peronism, on the Council, on dictatorship and democracy and on the social questions of each decade. A current-affairs magazine that never stopped appearing becomes, willy-nilly, a chronicle.

Criterio today

Criterio is still published today from Buenos Aires, a fact verified in recent international reporting that identifies its publisher in the city and in the continuing scholarly and journalistic citation of the magazine as a living title. Directory users should therefore treat this entry differently from the closed titles around it: Criterio is an active Argentine Catholic magazine with a history beginning on 8 March 1928, not a defunct publication, and its present-tense status should be preserved in cataloguing even though most of this profile necessarily concerns its past.

Its survival is, in comparative perspective, extraordinary. Of the Argentine magazines founded in the 1920s, across every camp, Florida, Boedo, Catholic and commercial, Criterio is the one that endured. The avant-garde burned out, the popular titles were overtaken by new media, and the great director-reviews ended with their directors. Criterio, anchored in a Church, a readership and an institutional editorship, continued.

Legacy and significance

Criterio's significance is threefold. It is Argentina's leading Catholic magazine of current affairs and culture, the senior forum of its Catholic intellectual life. It is a primary source of the first order for the history of Catholicism, politics and culture in twentieth and twenty-first-century Argentina, from the Maritain controversy to the age of Francis. And it is a standing demonstration that an Argentine magazine could achieve what almost none achieved: institutional permanence across the most turbulent century in the country's history.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these: Criterio, Buenos Aires, first published 8 March 1928 under Atilio Dell'Oro Maini, sponsored by the intellectuals of the Cursos de Cultura Católica, later directed by Gustavo Franceschi, Jorge Mejía and Rafael Braun, Argentina's leading Catholic magazine of current affairs and culture, still published today.