RELATIONS BETWEEN STATE AND CHURCH. — When speaking of the capital, it is appropriate to mention the religious situation of the country, as a complement to the information provided under the heading ECUADOR. After the great gesture of Gabriel García Moreno and his tragic death, the country applied the doctrine of the clearest separation between Church and State. The situation gradually improved in the following decades. On 6 August 1937, the first Friday of the month, Msgr. Fernando Cento, Titular Archbishop of Seleucia Pieria, presented his credentials as the first Apostolic Nuncio in the capital, thus re-establishing diplomatic relations between Ecuador and the Holy See after an interruption of about fifty years. This happy outcome was the result of laborious negotiations begun in 1936 by the Head of State Federico Páez and conducted between the papal representative and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Manuel Larrea, culminating on 24 July 1937 with the signing of a modus vivendi.
With this diplomatic agreement, which the distinguished Ecuadorian jurist and historian Julio Tobar Donoso defined as “the fruit of generous and unexpected concord, a key to peace and a cement of civic harmony,” a painful period of sometimes acute conflicts between the two powers was finally brought to a close. A new era opened, rich in fruitful achievements for the supreme spiritual interests of that deeply religious people, including the Catholic Normal Institute and the Catholic University.
Regarding the modus vivendi, particular attention should be given to Article 3, which has no precedent in other documents of this kind, in which Church and State undertake to collaborate for the moral and material improvement of the Ecuadorian individual, for his assimilation into national culture, and for the safeguarding of social justice.
Fifteen years later, this most ardently desired reconciliation was, as it were, sanctioned by the apotheosis of the national heroine, Mariana de Jesús, known as the “Azucona de Quito,” elevated to the supreme dignity of the altars by Pope Pius XII on 9 July 1950 (AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 637-639). — See pl. XIV.