RELATIONS BETWEEN STATE AND CHURCH. — Speaking of the capital, it is appropriate to mention the religious situation of the country, as a complement to the information provided under ECUADOR. After the great undertaking of Gabriele García Moreno and his tragic death, the country adopted the doctrine of the strictest separation between Church and State. The situation improved during the last decades. On 6 August 1937, the first Friday of the month, Msgr. Fernando Cento, Titular Archbishop of Seleucia Pieria, presented in the capital itself his credentials as the first Apostolic Nuncio, thus re-establishing, after approximately 50 years of interruption, diplomatic relations between Ecuador and the Holy See. This happy result was achieved following laborious negotiations which, begun in 1936 by the Head of State Federigo Paez and conducted between the aforementioned papal representative and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Manuel Larrea, were crowned on 24 July 1937 with the signing of a Modus vivendi.
With this diplomatic agreement, which the distinguished Ecuadorian jurist and historian Giulio Tobar Donoso defined as « the fruit of generous and unexpected concord, the key to peace and the cement of civic harmony », a painful period of conflicts, at times acute, between the two powers finally came to an end. A period rich in fruitful achievements for the supreme spiritual interests of that deeply religious people then began, among them the Catholic Normal Institute and the Catholic University.
With regard to the modus vivendi, particular emphasis should be placed on art. 3, which has no precedent in other documents of this kind, in which Church and State undertake to cooperate « for the moral and material improvement of the Ecuadorian Indian, for his assimilation into the national culture and for the safeguarding of social justice ».
Fifteen years later this highly desirable reconciliation was as if sanctioned
with the apotheosis of the national heroine, Marianna di Gesù, known as the « Azucena de Q. », raised to the supreme dignity of the altars by Pope Pius XII on 9 July 1950 (AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 637-639). — Vedi tav. XIV.