From Saturday night until late Sunday, the queue stretched for several blocks to the San Cayetano church in Liniers, north of Buenos Aires.
Nearly a thousand people at midday, a bouquet of ears of wheat in their hands, adorned with an image of the saint.
One by one, the faithful pass in front of the statue of Cayetano, affix their hands.
A few seconds, a minute, a prayer, a thank you, a request to "never miss".
After two years without a pilgrimage due to Covid-19, the Argentines find one of their favorite saints.
And, once again, an anxiety-provoking economic context, with inflation at 64% over the past year and forecasts of 70% to 90% for 2022.
"We're going through a very difficult time, people just can't make it. Look at the incredible prices."
Raquel Viera, a 62-year-old retiree, traveled 72 km to come and pray to San Cayetano, like every August 7 for more than twenty years.
"But I believe you have to come here. If you have faith, you come."
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Cayetano (Gaëtan de Thiène) holds a special place in the pantheon of Catholic Argentina.
A 16th century Venetian saint who dedicated his life to the poor, imported with Italian immigration, and "argentinized" via the story of a "miraculous" rain which in the 19th century saved a wheat crop from drought.
Cayetano became the "Saint of Ears" then, his cult doubling during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the "Saint of Bread and Work".
Raquel, like many faithful interviewed by AFP, came to thank San Cayetano, not to ask.
"I had asked for work for my grandson Elias and he was able to be hired in a factory".
Because there is work in Argentina, where the post-pandemic recovery (+7.4% growth) has seen unemployment (7%) drop sharply, or at least the absence of formal employment.
But inflation eating away at purchasing power, work buys less and less bread.
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"What we now see daily at the sanctuary are families who have work but who cannot manage it at the end of the month because of inflation," Father Daniel Pellizon told AFP. priest of the sanctuary since 2018.
The "working poor" of inflation
At the soup kitchen adjoining the church, which provides meals from Monday to Friday, "we now have lower middle class people, it's heartbreaking.
In this type of context, like that of (the great Argentine crisis of) 2001, we see people who are not used to the place", he continues.
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The figures for poverty in Argentina (37%), based on income, sometimes mask a dense web of aid and social organizations.
Still, according to a recent study by the Caritas organization and the Social Debt Observatory, one in ten Argentines experiences hunger on a daily basis.
And then "a new phenomenon is happening: a large part of formal workers are becoming poor despite their income (...) and this is due to inflation", points out sociologist Ricardo Rouvier, from the University of San Andres.
"Prices go up the elevator but wages go up the stairs", image the analyst, who points out that the average salary since 2015 has experienced a drop in purchasing power of at least 40%.
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Phenomenon which generates "a poverty + cyclical + which can be reversed more or less quickly" but which is added to a structural poverty.
In his homily to Liniers, the Primate of Argentina, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires Mario Poli asked San Cayetano for "our daily bread (...), the bread which nourishes our daily life and which is made inaccessible to cause of suffocating inflation".
And if he called the faithful to solidarity, he also denounced "the ever more insignificant salaries" of too many households.
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In a country where the minimum pension reaches 37,525 pesos (268 dollars), Raquel nevertheless thanks the saint for work, she who sells second-hand clothes on the markets to supplement her pension, because at the end of the month, "I have nothing left, but I don't miss it. But you have to work. It doesn't matter what work, you have to work".
© 2022 AFP