TOP STORY: THE STARLET WHO MADE HERSELF A SAINT: Who was the real Evita?

c. 1996 Religion News Service UNDATED _ As millions of moviegoers flock to see”Evita,”the new musical starring Madonna, they’ll follow the story of Evita the Whore, a second-rate actress who slept her way into the Argentine presidential palace in the 1940s. But there’s another view of Argentine first lady Eva Peron: Evita the Saint. To […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ As millions of moviegoers flock to see”Evita,”the new musical starring Madonna, they’ll follow the story of Evita the Whore, a second-rate actress who slept her way into the Argentine presidential palace in the 1940s.

But there’s another view of Argentine first lady Eva Peron: Evita the Saint.


To her beloved”descamisados”(shirtless ones), she was a spiritual mother who built schools and hospitals and showered the poor with gifts, from homes to false teeth. In the two years before she died of cancer in 1952, Pope Pius XII received 40,000 letters calling for her canonization.

Who was the real Evita?

Given her talent for self-creation, it’s hard to tell. But it’s clear that”the Spiderwoman with a whip”stereotype”is a profound distortion,”says Dartmouth College history professor Marysa Navarro, co-author with Nicholas Fraser of”Evita: The Real Life of Eva Peron”(Norton). Argentine oligarchs who resented a poor actress’ rise to power only fueled the rumors.

In reality, Eva Peron combined political ambition and spiritual fervor. She saw no contradiction in calling for”total subordination to (and) blind faith in”her husband, Argentine President Juan Peron, a staunch nationalist who supported the fascist and Nazi movements in Italy and Germany, while devoting her own life to serving the poor. “On one hand she was intolerant, authoritarian, almost fascist,”says Tomas Eloy Martinez, director of the Latin American Program at Rutgers University and author of the novel”Santa Evita”(Knopf).”On the other she gave her life for the happiness of the people. She decided to work very hard for the poor people and give them things she had never had.” The Evita the Whore image surfaced early in Evita’s life. According to a story (set to music on the stage and now in the movie), a 15-year-old Evita seduced a famous tango singer so he would take her to Buenos Aires. Navarro and Fraser say there is no proof for such a story, nor to the tales that she bedded and abandoned numerous men to advance her career.

What is uncontested is that at the age of 24 she met a 49-year-old widower, military officer Juan Peron, and began living with him.”Peron, like Eva, had been born out of wedlock,”notes Peron biographer Joseph A. Page,”and he shared with her a contempt for `respectable’ Argentines.” Still, even as a woman who flaunted convention, she embraced the Catholicism imbued in Argentine culture; when she eventually married her live-in lover, the service was in a church. She continued to honor the institutional church after he became president in 1946, supporting Catholic education and making sure that priests were present at convocations.

Because the Catholic hierarchy had supported Juan Peron in the election, Evita Peron never criticized clerics in public. Privately, however, she told friends that she resented their ties to Argentina’s elites and the indifference some displayed to the poor.

Her own religious life focused more on private prayer and public works rather than on rituals and worship. Hardly a doctrinaire Catholic, she admitted in an undated, handwritten letter to having”never kept the benches in churches warm,”according to Page, professor at Georgetown University Law School.

Still, she prayed to the Virgin Mary and sought spiritual counsel from a Jesuit confessor who understood that she”felt closer to the Lord by aiding the sick and struggling on behalf of workers.””She chose to retrieve the social justice message in a church that had been close to the symbols of power,”says Navarro.”She got closer to the people who were closest to her heart. She was a Catholic in the deeper sense of the word.” In 1948, shunned by the aristocrats who ran Argentina’s Charitable Society, she started her own philanthropic organization for the descamisados, The Maria Eva Duarte De Peron Social Aid Foundation. Relying on voluntary contributions and groups that wanted to win her favor _ and later mandatory contributions from salaried workers _ the foundation built low-cost housing for families, vacation colonies for workers and homes for orphans, unwed mothers and the elderly.

During the day and late into the evening, she met with men, women and children who lined up to see her with requests for aid. She handed out medicines, tickets for vacations, sewing machines, bridal gowns, bicycles and thousands of pairs of false teeth, a symbol of wealth. “Evita arrived and with her great wings filled the space of desires,”writes Martinez. She”was the emissary of happiness.” Her opponents charged that she was training”the people to beg.”But her close friend and confessor, the Rev. Hernan Benitez, a Jesuit priest, said that she treated even her sickest visitors with dignity, according to Navarro and Fraser.”I saw her kiss the leprous,”the authors quote Benitez as saying.”I saw her kiss those who were suffering from tuberculosis or cancer. I saw her distribute love, a love that rescues charity, removing that burden of injury to the poor which the exercise that charity implies. I saw her embrace people who were in rags and cover herself with lice.” Critics who wonder why Peron focused on palliative measures rather than on changing the systems that perpetuated poverty, says Navarro, fail to understand the limits of her power in a society that prohibited women from voting until 1947. And Page notes Peron was acting within the parameters that her husband had established.”The space that was open to her was in social welfare activities,”says Page.”Peron didn’t want to upset or restructure the social order.” Evita Peron kept few accounts at the foundation, which led to charges of fiscal abuse.”She couldn’t give a hoot about paperwork,”says Navarro. Nor did she care about detractors who made fun of her penchant for wearing expensive dresses and jewelry even when handing out medicine to her descamisados. She didn’t dress for the aristocracy, she said, but for the poor who were starved for beauty.


It was the onset of uterine cancer that elevated Peron from spiritual mother of the descamisados to popular saint.”When the public discovered she was sick, the descamisados had no doubt that she would soon be seeing God,”says Martinez.”And they wanted her to think of them personally.”If she thought of them, they believed that they, too, would achieve immortality.

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Her followers went to great lengths to capture her attention.”People walked in reverse for many miles in the name of Evita,”says Martinez.”They played the piano for many days and prayed for her health.”A famous performer danced tango for 127 hours with the same number of partners, he wrote, so Peron would hear of his tribute and remember him to God.

She continued working despite her worsening condition, and supporters said that she became a martyr for the people she loved, sacrificing her health and later her life. In newspapers and union calendars, write Fraser and Navarro, she was”shown in the traditional robes of the Virgin,”her head”surrounded by a halo.” Peron died at the age of 33, and her husband commissioned a master embalmer to preserve her body. Tens of thousands of mourners contemplated the ruby-lipped corpse with the blond chignon”as if she were a wax Madonna,”writes Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, author of the biography”Eva Peron”(St. Martin’s Press). An anti-Peronist writer called the two weeks of funeral ceremonies a”bacchanal of necrophilia”in a country preoccupied with the dead.

In”Santa Evita,”Martinez follows the corpse’s actual 19-year odyssey in which it was hidden, stolen, replicated (twice), buried and dug up and smuggled to Europe by anti-Peronist military leaders who feared the body would be used to foment an uprising. The body was finally laid to rest in 1976 in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, a site that the actress Madonna visited to prepare for her starring role in the film.”I have never seen such a beautiful, decadent, haunted place,”Madonna wrote in the magazine”Vanity Fair.””There were hundreds of wild cats everywhere and each mausoleum was more grand and exquisite than the last, little tiny mansions with windows to view the caskets, which are surrounded by gargoyles and statues and religious painting and plaques. … The dead live in style.” (OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS)

Fraser and Navarro play down the cult of Santa Evita that emerged after her death.”All people did was remember her,”they wrote,”and if they called her a saint it was in a familiar and colloquial way.” Martinez disagrees.”I visited many poor houses in the provinces of my country, and I saw small altars with Eva Peron in the middle, and flowers and candles, and people praying to her. And I was very moved because they think Evita is a saint, very sincerely. Many people think Evita is an instrument for their salvation.” Savior or not, she remained ambivalent about the Catholic Church. And it would be three more decades before her feelings about the church hierarchy would be made public in a memoir attributed to her:”In my Own Words”(The New Press), published for the first time in Argentina in 1987 and in the United States this year.

The text lambastes Catholic clerics for”having betrayed Christ who was compassionate with the masses”by siding with the rich while showing”coldness and indifference”to the poor. “Religion should be for the liberation of the people,”the purported memoir says,”because when man meets God he reaches the heights of his extraordinary dignity.” Navarro and Evita’s sisters do not believe that Eva Peron was the author of”In my Own Words.”And historians such as Page, who wrote the introduction to the English translation, say the literary allusions suggest that at the very least the work was embellished by another.


Still, Page and Martinez think that Peron may have dictated the work in her final days. The words, they say, accurately reflect the sentiments of a first lady who was neither saint nor whore, but a woman who said she saw Christ in the descamisados.

MJP END LIEBLICH

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