Jorge Gottau

Jorge Gottau was born on 23 May 1917 in Estación Presidente Sarmiento, a locality in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. He entered the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini), the international Catholic missionary congregation founded in the nineteenth century by Arnold Janssen, and was ordained to the priesthood on 10 October 1943. As a Divine Word missionary in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, he belonged to an order whose work combined evangelization with pastoral care in regions where the Church was still consolidating its presence.

On 12 April 1961 Pope John XXIII erected the Diocese of Añatuya, taking territory from the Diocese of Santiago del Estero in northern Argentina, and appointed Gottau as its first bishop. He received episcopal consecration on 4 June 1961. The new see covered a large, sparsely populated, and economically poor area of Santiago del Estero Province, marked by rural isolation, limited infrastructure, and scarce ecclesiastical resources. Gottau took part in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), whose liturgical, pastoral, and ecclesiological reforms shaped diocesan life across Latin America in the following decades.

For more than thirty years, from 1961 until 1992, he served as ordinary of Añatuya, organizing parishes, supporting clergy and catechesis, and addressing the social and material needs of a flock living in one of Argentina’s more disadvantaged regions. His episcopate coincided with post-conciliar renewal, the pastoral orientations of the Latin American episcopate, and years of political and social upheaval in Argentina. He resigned the diocese on 21 December 1992, in line with the custom that diocesan bishops offer their resignation at the age of seventy-five, and thereafter was bishop emeritus of Añatuya.

Gottau died on 24 April 1994 in Buenos Aires. He is remembered as the founding bishop of Añatuya and as a Society of the Divine Word missionary who spent the greater part of his episcopal life in a poor and remote portion of northern Argentina. He has not been beatified or canonized, and no feast day or official patronages are attached to his name.