"May God Help You"

The messenger said he had an important letter to deliver by hand. He was ushered into the little white parish house beside Buenos Aires' church of Corpus Domini. In the pastor's study, tall, ruddy-faced Jose Maria Dunphy, 42, tore open the handsomely embossed envelope. The letter, signed by a secretary of Santiago Luis Cardinal Copello, was curt and final. Father Dunphy was relieved of his parish duties, effective at once. "May God help you," the last line read.

Thus ended, at least for the moment, the bumpy career of one of the few Argentine priests who had dared to criticize the Peron regime. Though the chancery in Buenos Aires gave no explanation, it was plain enough that the priest's criticisms had become embarrassing to the Cardinal Primate.

"It Is Not Christian." When radiorating Father Virgilio Filippo (TIME, Feb. 16) organized nationalists for Peron in the 1946 elections, Father Dunphy worked and preached against what he called the nationalists' "unChristian" intolerance and lawlessness. For two years thereafter he stuck close to his own parish, occasionally writing letters to such Catholic newspapers as El Pueblo, or Cordoba's Los Principios.

It was Peron's speech last September threatening to hang his enemies that brought Father Dunphy back into action. He chided the President from his pulpit. "It is not Christian," he wrote to El Pueblo, "for those in high places to foment or incite to civil war. Nor is it Christian to elevate hatred to the extreme of wanting to annihilate those who hold differing opinions."

In Catholic Argentina this was a sensation; gossip soon whispered that Peron, had asked his good friend Cardinal Copello, as a favor, to get rid of Dunphy. The Cardinal visited Dunphy at his church last fall and suggested--"very suavely," says Father Dunphy--that he ought to resign. Just before Christmas, police held the priest for eight hours while they tried to make him admit authorship of an anonymous pamphlet called "Liberty," "I am in accord with what it says," Dunphy assured them, "but it is not in my style, and I did not write it."

"They Are Equally Wrong." Last week Father Dunphy appealed, with small chance of success, for an ecclesiastical trial. "It is true that I have spoken four or five times against the regime," he said, "but I have always spoken as a priest, as a Christian, and as a Catholic. Priests all over the world today have taken up the fight against Communism on the same grounds--and of course I am among them. But there is totalitarianism of the right and the left, and from the moral and religious point of view they are equally wrong."

A new priest took over Father Dunphy's working-class parish of Corpus Domini. After the installation ceremony, several hundred churchgoers gathered outside the parish house, called Father Dunphy to the door, applauded as he made his last appearance in the parish he had served for 14 years. He was still a priest in good standing, but he had no job, and no pulpit.

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