Antonio María Cardinal Barbieri
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Styles of Antonio María Barbieri |
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| Reference style | His Eminence |
| Spoken style | Your Eminence |
| Informal style | Cardinal |
| See | Montevideo |
Cardinal Antonio María Barbieri, O.F.M. Cap (born Alfredo Barbieri October 12, 1892, Montevideo, Uruguay; died July 6, 1979, Montevideo) was a prominent Roman Catholic prelate and the first and only Uruguayan cardinal.
He had a hesitant start to his ecclesiastical career because his parents were strongly opposed to him joining the priesthood, and before he was training for the religious life of a Capuchin friar the future cardinal worked as an insurance clerk. He became a novice in 1913 and moved to Genoa to continue his novitate two years later. He studied theology for many years both before and after his ordination in 1921. After finally obtaining his doctorate at the age of thirty-two in 1923 he declined a professorship at a prestigious university in Rome and returned to Uruguay, where he served as a pastor in the local Capuchin monastery. He was elected superior of this mission in 1931 and re-elected five years later. Besides his skill in theology, Barbieri was also a noted historian and a skilled violinist.
He became Archbishop of Montevideo in 1940 and held the position until his retirement on November 17, 1976. He was a close associate of Carlos Carmelo Vasconcellos Motta when the first episcopal conferences of Latin American bishops began in the middle 1950s, and three years later Pope John XXIII elevated him to the cardinalate.
Cardinal Barbieri participated in the 1963 conclave and the Second Vatican Council and during the 1960s was recognised for his long periods of service as a theologian and historian with his promotion to the Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay (Historical and Geogrpahical Institute of Uruguay). When he turned eighty on October 12 of 1972, however, Cardinal Barbieri was barred from participating in any future conclaves, and he died quietly less than a year into John Paul II's long reign.
