In our country, and in the Catholic environment, repeated talks started on the need for a denominational university during the second half of the nineteenth century, which defines the opposition to secularism that characterized all that period.
The idea of the creation of the University appears first in the Eucharistic Congress in 1884. In that Assembly held in the same year as the enactment of Law 1420 there was a resolution in favor of freedom of teaching in secondary and higher education. Furthermore, the idea of creating a Catholic University emerged, invested with the power to confer academic degrees in various faculties, in which Catholic doctrine would be taught in its entirety.
When at the end of the decade, Catholics resumed their interrupted movement, the same idea enthusiastically returned to be exteriorized. In the Assemblies of 1907 (Buenos Aires) and 1908 (Córdoba) the issue of academic freedom ocupies a preferential place. The first Catholic Youth Congress in 1908 notes the importance of the integral formation of youth and insists on carrying forward the resolutions that since 1902 had been adopted by the Episcopate in the sense of founding a Catholic University “in which youth are prepared for the exercise of professions and where the integrity of the catholic doctrine is taught.” Finally, the initiative is fulfilled in 1910 by decision of the Argentine Episcopate, who founded the Catholic University of Buenos Aires. This first University had been designed exclusively to provide its’ students, within a catholic formation and general culture, the required capacity for the exercise of certain professions. At that time there were no laws which regulated private universities, and in accordance with the constitutional provisions that recognize the right to teach and learn, the bishops believed that the lack of it, that it was no reason to deviate from the foundation of a university.
Fr. Luis Duprat was appointed Rector and the Higher Council for its part was made up of Drs. Joaquin Cullen, Emilio Lamarca and Angel Pizarro among others. Only after two years of its foundations its sole Faculty started to function, the Law Faculty. The curricula of the Faculty were organized under the public University plans and year after year it completed until it reached 6 years, having all subjects completed adding two obligatory courses of Philosophy and History which were destined to integrate the formation of students.
However, the life of this first Catholic University was short-lived: by failing to obtain recognition of their qualifications by the state, it closed its doors in 1922. All efforts were irrelevant to save the crisis in which the University was in. But the experience left a great lesson, it revealed the possibility of establishing a teacher body and an adequate structure capable of serving as base and preparation for an independent institute and of higher culture.
Resource Site : http://www.uca.edu.ar/
Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina Santa María de los Buenos Aires - UCA
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