Metropolitan Cathedral of Montevideo: in a country where Christmas is officially “Family Day” and Holy Week is “Tourism Week”

On Plaza Constitución, in the Ciudad Vieja of Montevideo, the metropolitan cathedral stands where a first brick church had been built between 1730 and 1746. Its full name is basilica cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and of Saints Philip and James, patrons of the city. The first stone of the present building was laid in 1790 and the work closed with the consecration in 1804. The attribution of the original design is still contested among the sources, which variously name Tomás Toribio, José Custodio de Sáa y Faría and José del Pozo y Marquy, while the present façade was remade between 1941 and 1949 by the architect Rafael Ruano. The building is often called the oldest in Uruguay, although that statement appears only in popular sources and not in a primary government one. Declared a national historic monument in 1975, it holds the tomb of Monsignor Jacinto Vera, first bishop of Montevideo, today venerable and in a cause of beatification, and the image of the Virgin of the Thirty-Three, patroness of Uruguay. The archdiocese of Montevideo, erected as apostolic vicariate on 14 August 1832, raised to diocese in 1878 and to metropolitan archdiocese on 14 April 1897, is led today by Cardinal Daniel Fernando Sturla Berhouet, archbishop since 2014 and cardinal since 2015. Uruguay is described by encyclopedic sources as the most secularised country of the Americas. The constitutional reform that came into force on 1 March 1919, pushed by President José Batlle y Ordóñez, laid down the separation of State and Church, and a specific law of 23 October 1919 officially renamed the religious feasts in lay terms: Christmas became «Family Day», Epiphany «Day of the Children» and Holy Week «Tourism Week», names still in official use. Self-declared Catholics range, depending on the source, between forty-two and forty-seven per cent of the population, with a share of the religiously unaffiliated reaching comparable figures. The higher figure sometimes quoted, sixty-seven per cent, refers instead to the internal count of the baptised kept by the Church, not to a demographic survey, and the two are not to be confused. Pope John Paul II visited this cathedral on the evening of 31 March 1987, during his journey to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, praying briefly before the tomb of Monsignor Vera and then giving an address; the great open-air Mass of that same journey, with one hundred and fifty thousand faithful, was held elsewhere, at Tres Cruces, and not in the cathedral. Pope Francis never visited Uruguay, contrary to what is sometimes remembered; he had discussed the possibility with the Uruguayan ambassador to the Holy See, but the journey never took place in his lifetime.