ARGENTINA: Spellbinder

Peronistas were all set. For next month's congressional elections, they had picked their candidates, including Father Virgilio Filippo, 52, a spellbinding parish priest from the Buenos Aires suburb of Belgrano. They planned to keep the padre under wraps; the final rally would be his only speaking date. Last week that plan died quickly in a party squabble.

After the nominating convention, Hector Campora, Peronist chief of Buenos Aires, took party workers to a midnight dinner at barn-sized La Estancia. When Campora got up to praise newsmen guests for their "objective cooperation," Eduardo-Colon, peppery publisher of the rabidly Peronist La Epoca, broke in with denunciation of press venality. Campora shouted that no one could abuse his guests, and for a moment it looked as though the Peronistas were going to forget they were at a party. Father Filippo saw that the time had come for him to speak. He launched into a eulogy of "the social justice of our God-sent President." By the time he sat down, the Peronistas were cheering instead of feuding.

Talking down rows among the Perón faithful is a routine job for the ex-speech professor, who is already being tabbed as the party's spokesman in the next Congress. Before the war, Father Filippo radiorated regularly, Coughlin-style, on the evils of Communism. From the moment of the 1943 revolution, he preached for Perón, trumpeting that all Peronist ideas could be found in papal encyclicals.

Nowadays he has little time to whistle to his green canary in the rectory garden. Most evenings, he is off to a nationalist meeting in one of Belgrano's German restaurants. After 10 p.m., he can usually be found in his library, holding long caucuses with his followers.

Recently, President Peron made Father Filippo his ecclesiastical aide. In Congress, the President counts on him to set an example in dialectics and party discipline for the undisciplined Peronistas.