When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was inaugurated as the first Latin American pope, nearly all the region’s states sent delegations to Rome. José Mujica, the left-wing president of Uruguay, was a notable exception. “I had no official business there,” he said. “Uruguay is a lay country.”

Most countries adhere to a formal separation of church and state, but Uruguay is nearly unique in promoting a secularism so intense that its official Christmas holiday is called “Family Day.” In 2023, 47% of Uruguayans identified as non-religious, compared to the Latin American average of 15%.

José Batlle y Ordóñez is the individual most responsible for Uruguay’s ideological commitment to French-style laïcité. The dominant political figure in early twentieth-century Uruguay, Batlle was fervently anticlerical; it was the constitution his party passed in 1917 that disestablished the Catholic Church and renamed Christmas. Uruguay’s church was in no position to put up a fight. Historians estimate the territory’s precolonial indigenous population at less than 10,000, and this scarcity of potential converts led the Spanish Church to neglect Uruguay for centuries.