Over the course of the formation of liberationist Christianity, conflicts erupted that profoundly affected its trajectory, identity and public discourse. As the various groups involved in the movement challenged political, military and ecclesial authorities, reactions from these elites became increasingly aggressive. As was analysed in chapter one, acrimonious confrontations between Catholic priests and their episcopal authorities had already occurred as a result of participation in or endorsement of the CGT's Plan de Lucha in 1963–1964. Such incidents were symptomatic of the attempts by sectors of Christianity to re-establish relations with the working classes who had been alienated from the Church. The priests, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), interpreted the Christian faith as demanding a concrete commitment to the poor and the workers. However, these developments were not only symptoms, but also catalysts for a deepening of the process of political mobilisation among Christian sectors and of the commitment to popular movements.

Following the establishment of the Movement of Third World Priests (MSTM), conflicts between political and religious authorities, on the one hand, and priests, religious and laity active in rural and urban popular protests, on the other, escalated. As a consequence, the perception of a division was being reinforced across Argentina, as well as the whole of Latin America, between ‘the Church of the rich and the Church of the poor’. The escalation of social strife, endemic in Argentina under General Onganía's bureaucratic-authoritarian regime, which combined free-market policies and repressive policing, repeatedly brought an age-old question to the fore: to what extent should Church officials involve themselves in temporal issues? This question was in reality intimately connected to that of the commitment to the poor. The criticisms of the liberationists’ political commitments were consequently often connected with a more general condemnation of a perceived reductionism to the material, a rebuke that emanated frequently from the ranks of the episcopate. Christianity in Argentina, and especially the Catholic Church, was thus struck by a stark internal contradiction, a reality that manifested itself in often bitter and hostile polemic, or even physical violence. This chapter firstly evaluates a few examples of the major intra-ecclesial conflicts that were prevalent during the MSTM's existence. Subsequently, it looks at how these internal Church disputes moved from the local level to the national and presaged an escalation of attacks from the media and persecution by state as the political crisis in Argentina deepened.