Unlike the rest of the Latin American countries —with the sole exception of Costa Rica— Argentina never legally separated the Church and the State. The «liberal» governments of the period known as the «national organization» (1862-1880) and of the so-called «conservative order» (1880-1916), including those that led the country during the bitter public debates that accompanied the enactment of the «secular laws» of the 1880s, saw in Christianity a fundamental element of «civilization» and in the Catholic Church a necessary ally for the construction of the nation, the state and the «progress.» The article, based on ministerial and parliamentary sources, analyzes the consensus and dissent in the way in which the ruling elite conceived the agency of the Catholic clergy in the process of nation-building.