A Marriage That Got Both Partners Killed
Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Guiterrez fled Buenos Aires to a small provincial town. There, they lived as husband and wife, and launched the town’s first school. Back in the Argentine capital, their love and “marriage” became a scandal that soon took on political tones. Opponents of the country’s dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas used the marriage of a priest as an example of moral decay. That hit close to home, because Rosas was a notorious womanizer. So Camila and Ladislao were tracked down, kidnapped, and returned to the Argentine capital.
The dictator’s daughter pleaded for clemency for her friend. Rosas replied that the case warranted: “a show of my undisputed power, as the moral values and sacred religious norms of a whole society are at stake“. The dictator personally signed the lovers’ death warrant. On August 18th, 1848, Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Gutierrez were executed by a firing squad in a prison town near Buenos Aires. She was twenty-years-old at the time, and eight months pregnant. As a last gesture of Christian charity, she was given holy water to drink, so her baby would go to heaven.
