French Accent

Hispanidad is a curious, almost indefinable doctrine. Its present-day adherents preach that only by a spiritual union of the New World's Spanish-speaking countries with Roman Catholic Mother Spain can mankind be saved from godless Communists and heretical Anglo-Saxons. In Argentina, where the Peron regime until recently made much of its close kinship with Spain, the doctrine has won many a convert. But last week, hard on the heels of the failure of Argentina's trade agreement with Spain (TIME, April 25), a distinguished Argentine cleric was calling Hispanidad a lot of nonsense.

The priest was energetic Father Hernan Benitez, graduate dean of the National University of Buenos Aires, professor of philosophy, and Evita Peron's longtime adviser on social problems. In Father Benitez' opinion, France, not Spain, is Argentina's true spiritual home.

"Not only the style of our houses, the art of our furnishings, the clothes of our women, but our very spiritual life," wrote Father Benitez in the university's learned Review, "smells of France from every pore . . . Every year some 20,000 Argentines go through Paris, while only a hundred or so pass through Madrid. In spite of differences in language, we Argentines feel at home in Paris . . . The man born on the pampas thirsts for wide, liberal and generous horizons, and hates fanaticism as well as mental and spiritual intolerance. Is not France, which has allowed free play for the individual will, more Christian than a country with inquisitorial corsetings and internal slaughterings?"

The Spanish were furious, all the more so because, when Evita Peron visited Madrid two years ago, Father Benitez was a much sought-out member of her party. Madrid's press fairly sizzled. Ya wrote: "It makes one wonder whether the priest's mother had a weakness for a Frenchman." Editorialized Bilbao's El Correo Espanol: "A bilious and ill-adapted clergyman."

Father Benitez was not taking back a word. "Can you imagine in these days such fanatical, Torquemada-like intolerance?" he asked. Last week he announced that he would open forums at which university students would be free to debate philosophy and politics. That, he said, would represent one step farther away from the hidebound teaching methods of the universities of Mother Spain.

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