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.
Meinvielle studied for his Doctorate in Philosophy and Theology in Rome and soon afterwards became a prolific writer of religious, historical and economic books within the school of Thomism. He came to see history as a process of decline in Catholic values, as determined by three events that he saw as catastrophic i.e. the work of Martin Luther, the French Revolution and the October Revolution.
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.
He took as the basis for his Catholicism the works of Thomas Aquinas and the Papal encyclicals Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno, contrasting them with his twin political hates of liberalism and communism.
He was also critic of capitalism and Marxism and he sought to draw parallels between the two by arguing that materialism was the basis for both. Instead he sought an economic system based on Roman Catholicism in which consumption regulated production and in which wealth creation was fine as long as the wealth was re-invested.
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