Julio Meinvielle

Meinvielle's influence was strong throughout the far right in Argentina. Practically, he served as advisor and spiritual inspiration to the highly anti-Semitic Tacuara Nationalist Movement. However, on a wider level he had a deep impact on the nationalist intellectual strand, with the likes of José López Rega (who shared his belief in the fictitious Sinarquia) and Jordán Bruno Genta heavily influenced by his words. Other future government figures such as Mario Amadeo, Alberto Baldrich and Samuel Medrano were also influenced by his works to an extent. Similarly Colonel Mohamed Alí Seineldín, who was arrested in 1987 for plotting a military coup also declared himself a disciple of Meinvielle. The diplomat Máximo Etchecopar had also written for Meinvielle's journal Balcón during his formative years.

In 1952 Meinvielle became a leading figure in the Union Fédérale, a post-Perón party of the right. Continuing to be outspoken in his condemnation of those who did not meet his standards, Meinville was finally suspended from the Catholic Church in 1961 by Antonio Caggiano, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, after he stated that President Arturo Frondizi was a communist agent. He was also a strong critic of the regime of Juan Carlos Onganía, claiming that he was acting on behalf of Sinarquia.

Meinville taught philosophy at Catholic institutions for much of his life and he would also serve as the chaplain at Santa Casa de Ejercicios. He continued to write widely and from the late 1940s to the 1960s he published three journals, Balcon, Dialogo and Presencia, in which he expressed his religious and political views.

Politically he was associated with a coterie of young Catholic intellectuals, including Máximo Etchecopar, Ignacio Anzoategui and Matías Sánchez Sorondo, who produced the 1937 document Programma Nacionalista. He subsequently joined the Nueva Politica group when Sánchez Sorondo established it in 1941.

To this end he applauded the rise of fascism, for which he saw a Christian mission. He was particularly enamoured of the falangism variant as he was a believer in the virtues of Hispanidad and Spain playing a leading role in the fortunes of Latin America. Meinvielle did however feel that the cult of personality surrounding both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler was contrary to Catholicism and the primacy of Christ and so argued that any Argentine version of fascism would have to be avowedly religious and anti-secular. His 1936 book El Judio distilled these fascist views and gave his thinking an Argentine dimension as he argued Buenos Aires was the archetype of 'Babylon', dominated as he felt it was by international Jewish financial interests.

Meinvielle was a staunch critic of what he perceived as slipping standards in Catholic teaching. On this basis he had a well publicized feud with Jacques Maritain during the late 1930s. The conflict had begun in 1936 when Maritain visited Argentina for the first time and was initially well received by a number of leading Catholic figures. Meinvielle attacked Maritain as the 'advocate of the Spanish Reds', sparking off a war of words between the two. His book From Lammenais to Maritain was actually an attack on the ideas of Jacques Maritain, claiming that Maritain was defending the faithlessness of modern society by his endorsement of liberalism. Tracing the origins of Maritain's work to Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais as well as that of Marc Sangnier and Le Sillon, he argued that the humanism of these writers was incompatible with the Catholic faith.

Father Julio Meinvielle (31 August 1905 – 2 August 1973) was an Argentine priest and prolific writer. A leading Roman Catholic Church thinker of his time, he was associated with the far right tendency within Argentine Catholic thinking. As a polemicist he had a strong influence on the development of nacionalismo.