Argentina’s poverty rate rose to 32.3 percent in the first half of 2026, while an adviser to the economy minister publicly rebuked the archbishop of Buenos Aires for speaking about hardship. The exchange has sharpened tensions between the government and the Catholic Church, five weeks before Pope Leo XIV’s planned visit.
Poverty and the Church’s Warning
INDEC, Argentina’s national statistics institute, reported that about 15.5 million people lived in poverty in the first half of 2026. The rate stood at 28.2 percent in the second half of 2025, leaving roughly 2 million more people poor. Indigence, or extreme poverty, climbed from 6.3 percent to 7.5 percent over those same reporting periods.
The government points to a poverty rate of 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024, after President Milei’s devaluation and spending cuts. Bishops say the improvement hasn’t reached ordinary households. In August, Ángel Rossi, the archbishop of Córdoba, said, “the macroeconomy does not reach the plate.”
On Friday 2 October, Archbishop Jorge García Cuerva said the pope would find a “wounded” and “divided” country. Speaking to reporters after Mass at the Metropolitan Cathedral, he described Argentina as a country “where disqualification and intolerance are the order of the day.” He said it hurt to see “a very large percentage” of Argentines “having a hard time.”
García Cuerva didn’t name Milei, Infobae noted, and praised working families “who don’t give up,” El Día reported. Since 2023, he has led the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, described as the country’s most senior Catholic see.
Government Response and Church Relations
The sharpest public response came from Felipe Núñez, an adviser to Economy Minister Luis Caputo and a director of BICE, a state-owned bank that finances investment and foreign trade. “As a Catholic I am tired of this guy,” Núñez wrote on X on Friday. “Less politics and more preaching the word of God, Cuerva.”
Ricardo Alfonsín, a former congressman and son of the late president Raúl Alfonsín, called Núñez’s post disrespectful, El Destape reported. He argued that Christian faith requires attention to social suffering. Ministers stayed publicly silent, Infobae reported.
El Día reported that senior ministers left the public counterattack to figures such as Núñez while the government sought to distinguish García Cuerva from the wider Church hierarchy. Officials value their ties with Marcelo Colombo, head of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, the national body of bishops. “They are not the same political ties,” an official at the presidential palace told Infobae.
Milei and his sister Karina, the presidency’s secretary-general, ordered officials to keep relations with the Church free of politics, Infobae reported. Some officials privately link García Cuerva to Kirchnerism, the left-wing Peronist movement of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
The Papal Visit and Disability Law
Leo XIV is due to land in Buenos Aires on Sunday 8 November and meet Milei at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. On 9 November, the pope is scheduled to visit Pequeño Cottolengo Don Orione, a home for disabled people in Claypole. That stop comes as Congress debates a new disability law, with disputes over its cost and wording unresolved.
“The Cottolengo part is going to go badly,” one government source told Perfil. Another official said, “We do not think there will be problems.” Perfil reported that the government wanted the law settled before November.
García Cuerva was expected to speak at the youth pilgrimage to Luján on 3 and 4 October, a 60-kilometre walk to Argentina’s main Marian shrine. The 52nd edition also serves as a logistics rehearsal for the pope’s mass there. The dispute hasn’t changed the visit programme, El Día reported, and the government, Church and local authorities continued coordinating.