In 1929, Archpriest Moises Hillar set out to record a comprehensive account of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Buenos Aires. The chronicle narrates the presence of a Syrian-Lebanese community in Argentina and throughout the New World and is dedicated to the Orthodox Administrative Committee and a number of Eastern Orthodox charitable societies. Charitable societies occupy a central place in the book as they had become the representative political bodies available to Syrian-Lebanese Christians in the country. Earlier in the century, Syrian-Lebanese immigrants had successfully rallied for the Ottoman Empire to establish a consulate in the capital city in order to benefit from the empire’s formal political and legal protection. With the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the implosion of its bureaucratic networks abroad, religious and secular leaders from within the Arab Orthodox community had begun to seek new forms of communal organization. The criteria used to create communal institutions like the charitable societies mentioned above would reflect new political realities back home in the Levant and appeal to the commercial and social environment to which they had acculturated in Argentina. This process reflected the gradual normalization of certain models of social welfare and paternalism there between the 1880s and 1920s. The formation of charitable societies within the context of a post-Ottoman world, however, also reflected the religious pluralism of the Levant, which is erroneously attributed to the institutional framework of the so-called millet system there. This paper argues that social welfare and paternalism provided Syrian-Lebanese residents in Buenos Aires the means to politically acculturate via institutions and practices that had been lost with the formal political protection afforded by the now defunct Ottoman consulate. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the charitable societies of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Buenos Aires took on a facade reflective of the nineteenth-century sectarianization of politics in the Levant.