This article examines the Roman exile of Chilean Jesuit Julio Jiménez (1958-1964) as a revealing episode of the politico-ecclesiological realignments in Chile during the Cold War. The pressures exerted by sectors of the Chilean clergy, together with the tepid defense of his case by the Jesuit curia in Rome, reflected both his commitment to the orthodoxy of Jacques Maritain's thought and his opposition to the ley maldita. Jiménez's defense of the Communist Party's participation in the electoral system was grounded in a conception of democratic pluralism, in which Maritainian frameworks became crucial for understanding the political evolution of socially engaged Catholics in the late 1950s. Drawing on unpublished sources from the Holy Office, the Secretariat of State, and the ARSI archives in Rome, this study situates Jiménez's exile within broader debates on Catholic political thought and the tensions between anti-communist and anti-Maritainian impulses in mid-twentieth-century Chile.