Argentina is mainly Catholic. In the most recent national survey of religious belief, carried out by the research council CONICET in 2019, about 63 per cent of Argentines identified as Catholic, about 15 per cent as evangelical Protestants and about 19 per cent as having no religion, a share that has grown quickly. Argentina also has the largest Jewish community in Latin America and a significant Muslim minority. The constitution requires the federal government to support the Catholic Church, but guarantees freedom of worship. Argentina is also the home country of Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas.
| Religion | Share (CONICET, 2019) | Change since 2008 |
|---|---|---|
| Catholic | ~62.9% | Down from ~76% |
| No religion | ~18.9% | Up from ~11% |
| Evangelical | ~15.3% | Up from ~9% |
| Other (Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-day Saints, Jewish, Muslim and others) | ~3% | Roughly stable |
A Constitution That Still Supports the Church
Article 2 of Argentina's constitution, largely unchanged since 1853, says that the federal government "supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic faith". In practice, this means the state pays salaries and allowances to bishops and some clergy. Until the constitutional reform of 1994, the president also had to be Catholic. That requirement was removed, and in 2018 the Church and government agreed to phase out the direct salaries to bishops over time, with parishes relying more on donations. Argentina never had a formal separation of church and state in the French or Mexican sense, but in daily life the state is secular. Religious education is not part of the public school curriculum in most provinces, although some provinces in the north have long included it.
Luján: The Nation's Shrine
The heart of Argentine popular Catholicism lies 70 km west of Buenos Aires, in the town of Luján. According to tradition, in 1630 a cart carrying a small clay statue of the Virgin Mary refused to move at that spot, and the statue stayed there. The neo-Gothic Basilica of Our Lady of Luján, completed in the early twentieth century, now houses it, and the Virgin of Luján is the patron saint of Argentina. Every October, young people walk the 60 km from Buenos Aires to Luján in an overnight pilgrimage that draws hundreds of thousands of people, one of the largest religious gatherings in Latin America. Football clubs, labour unions and the armed forces hold their own pilgrimages there through the year.
The Jesuit Missions of the North-East
The most famous chapter of Argentina's colonial Catholicism took place far from Buenos Aires, in the subtropical north-east. From the early seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries gathered Guaraní communities into planned mission towns called reducciones. At their height, around thirty of them were home to more than 100,000 people across what are now Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. The missions had churches, workshops and a Guaraní-language printing press, and their armed militias defended them against slave raiders from Brazil. When Spain expelled the Jesuits from its empire in 1767, the missions declined and were abandoned. Their red sandstone ruins, above all San Ignacio Miní in Misiones province, are now part of the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis World Heritage Site.
Perón, the Church and the Burning of 1955
Relations between the Church and the state have sometimes been hostile. Juan Perón came to power in the 1940s with Catholic support, but by 1954 he was clashing with the bishops over divorce, religious education and the Church's influence. In June 1955, after a failed military uprising in which navy planes bombed the Plaza de Mayo, Peronist crowds set fire to several historic churches in central Buenos Aires. The Vatican excommunicated the officials responsible, and Perón was overthrown by a military coup in September of that year.
During the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, parts of the Church hierarchy were criticised for their silence about the disappearances of thousands of people. Others in the Church opposed the regime, among them priests and nuns who were themselves killed. Bishop Enrique Angelelli, who died in 1976 in a staged car crash, was beatified in 2019.
Buenos Aires to Rome: Pope Francis
In March 2013 the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected pope and took the name Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit. In Buenos Aires he had been known for travelling by bus and subway, and for his work in the city's shanty towns, the villas miseria. His papacy, which ended with his death in April 2025, gave Argentine Catholicism global attention, though he never made a papal visit to his own country.
Folk Saints of the Roadside
Alongside official Catholicism, Argentines honour popular saints the Church has never recognised. Along the country's highways, drivers pass hundreds of red roadside shrines hung with red flags. They are dedicated to Gauchito Gil, a nineteenth-century gaucho from Corrientes who, according to legend, was killed by soldiers after refusing to fight in a civil war and promised miracles to those who prayed to him. Other roadside shrines are piled with bottles of water. They honour the Difunta Correa, a woman said to have died of thirst in the desert of San Juan in the 1840s while following her husband's regiment. Her baby was found alive, still feeding at her breast. Her main shrine at Vallecito draws large crowds each Easter.
The Andean North: Pachamama and the Miracle of Salta
In the north-western provinces of Jujuy and Salta, where Indigenous Andean traditions are strongest, Catholicism mixes with older beliefs. Every 1 August, families hold a ceremony for Pachamama, Mother Earth. They dig a hole in the ground and feed it with food, coca leaves, chicha and cigarettes to give thanks and ask for a good year, and many people drink a little caña con ruda, cane spirit steeped with rue, on the same day to ward off illness through the winter. The Quebrada de Humahuaca, a World Heritage cultural landscape, is known for its carnival and for adobe chapels where these traditions meet Catholic feasts.
Salta's great religious festival is that of the Señor y la Virgen del Milagro, the Lord and Virgin of the Miracle. It commemorates the belief that two statues, carried in procession in 1692, ended a series of devastating earthquakes. Every September, pilgrims walk for days from all over the province, some from towns hundreds of kilometres away, to join a procession on 15 September that draws hundreds of thousands of people to the city's streets.
Buenos Aires's Jewish Community
Argentina's Jewish community, estimated at around 170,000 to 180,000 people, is the largest in Latin America. Most descend from immigrants who arrived between the 1880s and the 1930s, many from the Russian Empire, supported by the Jewish Colonization Association, which founded farming colonies in Entre Ríos and Santa Fe. The Jewish gauchos of those colonies became a well-known part of Argentine history. Today the community is concentrated in Buenos Aires, especially the neighbourhood of Once.
It has also suffered the two deadliest terrorist attacks in the country's history. In March 1992 a bomb destroyed the Israeli embassy, killing 29 people, and in July 1994 a car bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community centre, killing 85. Argentine prosecutors have blamed Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, and the investigations, including the unexplained death in 2015 of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, remain a major political controversy.
Churches the Immigrants Brought
Mass immigration brought churches as well as languages. In Patagonia, the Welsh settlers of the Chubut valley built simple nonconformist chapels, several of which still stand around Gaiman and Trelew. In Buenos Aires, the blue onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in San Telmo, consecrated in 1904, are a reminder of the Russian-speaking and Orthodox migrants of the early twentieth century, and Syrian and Lebanese immigrants founded Antiochian Orthodox parishes. Volga Germans, who arrived from Russia from the 1870s and settled in Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires provinces, brought both Catholic and Lutheran congregations. Mennonite farming communities, who came later, still live in separate villages in La Pampa.
Evangelicals, Muslims and a Growing Secular Majority in the Cities
The fastest change in Argentine religion has been the growth of evangelical churches, especially Pentecostal congregations in the poorer outskirts of big cities and in the north. Their share has more than doubled since the 1980s. Muslims number several hundred thousand by some estimates, many descended from Syrian and Lebanese immigrants. The King Fahd Islamic Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, opened in 2000, is one of the largest mosques in Latin America.
At the same time, a growing share of Argentines, especially young people in Buenos Aires, have no religious affiliation. Argentina legalised same-sex marriage in 2010, the first Latin American country to do so, and legalised abortion in December 2020, both against strong Church opposition. Those votes showed how far public life has moved from Church teaching, even in a country that still funds the Church and whose most famous citizen of recent times became pope. The way language and immigration shaped the same society is described in our guide to the language spoken in Argentina, and a comparison with the region's most secular country is in our overview of religion in Uruguay.