History of Roman Catholicism in Mexico
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The history of the Catholic Church in Mexico dates from the period of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) and has continued as an institution in Mexico into the twenty-first century. Catholicism is one of many major legacies from the Spanish colonial era, the others include Spanish as the nation's language, the
Civil Code A civil code is a codification of private law relating to property, family, and obligations. A jurisdiction that has a civil code generally also has a code of civil procedure. In some jurisdictions with a civil code, a number of the core ar ...
and Spanish colonial architecture. The Catholic Church was a privileged institution until the mid nineteenth century. It was the sole permissible church in the colonial era and into the early Mexican Republic, following independence in 1821. Following independence, it involved itself directly in politics, including in matters that did not specifically involve the Church. In the mid-nineteenth century the liberal
Reform Reform ( lat, reformo) means the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc. The use of the word in this way emerges in the late 18th century and is believed to originate from Christopher Wyvill's Association movement ...
brought major changes in church-state relations. Mexican liberals in power challenged the Catholic Church's role, particularly in reaction to its involvement in politics.Roderic Ai Camp, ''Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico''. Oxford University Press 1997, p. 25. The Reform curtailed the Church's role in
education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...
, property ownership, and control of birth, marriage, and death records, with specific anticlerical laws. Many of these were incorporated into the
Constitution of 1857 The Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857 ( es, Constitución Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos de 1857), often called simply the Constitution of 1857, was the liberal constitution promulgated in 1857 by Constituent Co ...
, restricting the Church's corporate ownership of property and other limitations. Although there were some liberal clerics who advocated reform, such as
José María Luis Mora José María Luis Mora Lamadrid (12 October 1794, Chamacuero, Guanajuato – 14 July 1850, Paris, France) was a priest, lawyer, historian, politician and liberal ideologist. Considered one of the first supporters of liberalism in Mexico, he fou ...
, the Church came to be seen as conservative and anti-revolutionary. During the bloody
War of the Reform The Reform War, or War of Reform ( es, Guerra de Reforma), also known as the Three Years' War ( es, Guerra de los Tres Años), was a civil war in Mexico lasting from January 11, 1858 to January 11, 1861, fought between liberals and conservativ ...
, the Church was an ally of conservative forces that attempted to oust the liberal government. They also were associated with the conservatives' attempt to regain power during the
French Intervention This is a list of wars involving France and its predecessor states. It is an incomplete list of French and proto-French wars and battles from the foundation of Frankish Kingdom, Francia by Clovis I, the Merovingian dynasty, Merovingian king who uni ...
, when
Maximilian of Habsburg Maximilian I (german: Ferdinand Maximilian Josef Maria von Habsburg-Lothringen, link=no, es, Fernando Maximiliano José María de Habsburgo-Lorena, link=no; 6 July 1832 – 19 June 1867) was an Austrian archduke who reigned as the only Emperor ...
was invited to become emperor of Mexico. The empire fell and conservatives were discredited, along with the Catholic Church. However, during the long presidency of
Porfirio Díaz José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori ( or ; ; 15 September 1830 – 2 July 1915), known as Porfirio Díaz, was a Mexican general and politician who served seven terms as President of Mexico, a total of 31 years, from 28 November 1876 to 6 Decem ...
(1876–1911) the liberal general pursued a policy of conciliation with the Catholic Church; though he kept the anticlerical articles of the liberal constitution in force, he in practice allowed greater freedom of action for the Catholic Church. With Díaz's ouster in 1911 and the decade-long conflict of the
Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution ( es, Revolución Mexicana) was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from approximately 1910 to 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It resulted in the destruction ...
, the victorious Constitutionalist faction led by
Venustiano Carranza José Venustiano Carranza de la Garza (; 29 December 1859 – 21 May 1920) was a Mexican wealthy land owner and politician who was Governor of Coahuila when the constitutionally elected president Francisco I. Madero was overthrown in a February ...
wrote the new
Constitution of 1917 The Constitution of Mexico, formally the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States ( es, Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos), is the current constitution of Mexico. It was drafted in Santiago de Querétaro, in th ...
that strengthened the anticlerical measures in the liberal Constitution of 1857. With the presidency of Northern, anticlerical, revolutionary general
Plutarco Elías Calles Plutarco Elías Calles (25 September 1877 – 19 October 1945) was a general in the Mexican Revolution and a Sonoran politician, serving as President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928. The 1924 Calles presidential campaign was the first populist ...
(1924–28), the State's enforcement of the
anticlerical Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
articles of Constitution of 1917 provoked a major crisis with violence in a number of regions of Mexico. The
Cristero Rebellion The Cristero War ( es, Guerra Cristera), also known as the Cristero Rebellion or es, La Cristiada, label=none, italics=no , was a widespread struggle in central and western Mexico from 1 August 1926 to 21 June 1929 in response to the implementa ...
(1926–29) was resolved, with the aid of diplomacy of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, ending the violence, but the anticlerical articles of the constitution remained. President Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946) came to office declaring "I am a atholicbeliever," (''soy creyente'') and Church-State relations improved though without constitutional changes. A major change came in 1992, with the presidency of
Carlos Salinas de Gortari Carlos Salinas de Gortari CYC DMN (; born 3 April 1948) is a Mexican economist and politician who served as 60th president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. Affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), earlier in his career he wor ...
(1988–1994). In a sweeping program of reform to "modernize Mexico" that he outlined in his 1988 inaugural address, his government pushed through revisions in the Mexican Constitution, explicitly including a new legal framework that restored the Catholic Church's juridical personality.Jorge A. Vargas, "Freedom of Religion and Public Worship in Mexico: A Legal Commentary on the 1992 Federal Act on Religious Matters." ''BYU Law Review'' Vol. 1998, issue 2, article 6, pp. 421-481. The majority of Mexicans in the twenty-first century identify themselves as being Catholic, but the growth of other religious groups such as Protestant
evangelicals Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being " born again", in which an individual expe ...
,
Mormons Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement started by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's death in 1844, the movement split into sever ...
, as well secularism is consistent with trends elsewhere in Latin America. The 1992 federal Act on Religious Associations and Public Worship (''Ley de Asociaciones Religiosas y Culto Público''), known in English as the Religious Associations Act or (RAA), has affected all religious groups in Mexico.


Colonial era (1521–1821)


Early period: The Spiritual Conquest 1519–1572

During the conquest, the Spaniards pursued a dual policy of military conquest, bringing indigenous peoples and territory under Spanish control, and spiritual conquest, that is, conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity. When Spaniards embarked on the exploration and conquest of Mexico, a Catholic priest,
Gerónimo de Aguilar Jerónimo de Aguilar O.F.M. (1489–1531) was a Franciscan friar born in Écija, Spain. Aguilar was sent to Panama to serve as a missionary. He was later shipwrecked on the Yucatán Peninsula in 1511 and captured by the Maya. In 1519 Hernán ...
, accompanied
Hernán Cortés Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca (; ; 1485 – December 2, 1547) was a Spanish ''conquistador'' who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of w ...
's expedition. Spaniards were appalled at the ritual practice of human sacrifice and initially attempted to suppress it, but until the
Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Conquest of Mexico or the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21), was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. There are multiple 16th-century narratives of the eve ...
was accomplished, it was not stamped out. The rulers of Cortés's allies from the city-state of
Tlaxcala Tlaxcala (; , ; from nah, Tlaxcallān ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tlaxcala ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Tlaxcala), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Political divisions of Mexico, Federal Entities of Mexico. It is ...
converted to Christianity almost immediately and there is a depiction of Cortés,
Malinche Marina or Malintzin ( 1500 – 1529), more popularly known as La Malinche , a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521), by acting as an interpreter, advi ...
, and the lords of Tlaxcala showing this event. But not until the fall of the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlan , ; es, Tenochtitlan also known as Mexico-Tenochtitlan, ; es, México-Tenochtitlan was a large Mexican in what is now the historic center of Mexico City. The exact date of the founding of the city is unclear. The date 13 March 1325 was ...
in 1521 was a full-scale conversion of the indigenous populations undertaken.


Power of the Spanish Crown in ecclesiastical matters

The justification of Spanish (and Portuguese) overseas conquests was to convert the existing populations to Christianity. The pope granted the Spanish monarch (and the crown of Portugal) broad concessions termed the ''
Patronato Real The ''patronato'' () system in Spain (and a similar '' padroado'' system in Portugal) was the expression of royal patronage controlling major appointments of Church officials and the management of Church revenues, under terms of concordats with ...
'' or Royal Patronage, giving the monarch the power to appoint candidates for high ecclesiastical posts, collection of tithes and support of the clergy, but did not cede power in matters of doctrine or dogma. This essentially made the Spanish monarch the highest power of Church and State in its overseas territories.


The first evangelists to the indigenous

In the early conquest era of Mexico, the formal institutions of Church and State had not been established. But to initiate the spiritual conquest even though the episcopal hierarchy (the diocesan clergy) had not yet been established, Cortés requested that the
mendicant A mendicant (from la, mendicans, "begging") is one who practices mendicancy, relying chiefly or exclusively on alms to survive. In principle, mendicant religious orders own little property, either individually or collectively, and in many inst ...
orders of
Franciscan , image = FrancescoCoA PioM.svg , image_size = 200px , caption = A cross, Christ's arm and Saint Francis's arm, a universal symbol of the Franciscans , abbreviation = OFM , predecessor = , ...
s, Dominicans, and
Augustinians Augustinians are members of Christian religious orders that follow the Rule of Saint Augustine, written in about 400 AD by Augustine of Hippo. There are two distinct types of Augustinians in Catholic religious orders dating back to the 12th–1 ...
be sent to New Spain, to convert the indigenous. The Twelve Apostles of Mexico as they are known were the first Franciscans who arrived in 1524, followed by the Dominican order in 1526, and the Augustinian order in 1533. Mendicants did not usually function as parish priests, administering the sacraments, but mendicants in early Mexico were given special dispensation to fulfill this function. The Franciscans, the first-arriving mendicants, staked out the densest and most central communities as their bases for conversion. These bases (called ''doctrina'') saw the establishment of resident friars and the building of churches, often on the same sacred ground as pagan temples. Given the small number of mendicants and the vast number of indigenous to convert, outlying populations of indigenous communities did not have resident priests but priests visited at intervals to perform the sacraments (mainly baptism, confession, and matrimony). In prehispanic Central Mexico, there had been a long tradition of conquered city-states adding the gods of their conquerors to their existing pantheon so that conversion to Christianity seemed to be similar. In general, Indians did not resist conversion to Christianity. Priests of the indigenous were displaced and the temples transformed into Christian churches. Mendicants targeted Indian elites as key converts, who would set the precedent for the commoners in their communities to convert. Also targeted were youngsters who had not yet grown up with pagan beliefs. In Tlaxcala, some young converts were murdered and later touted as martyrs to the faith. In Texcoco, however, one its lords,
Don Carlos ''Don Carlos'' is a five-act grand opera composed by Giuseppe Verdi to a French-language libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle, based on the dramatic play '' Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien'' (''Don Carlos, Infante of Spain'') by Fried ...
, was accused and convicted of sedition by the apostolic inquisition (which gives inquisitorial powers to a bishop) headed by
Juan de Zumárraga Juan de Zumárraga, OFM (1468 – June 3, 1548) was a Spanish Basque Franciscan prelate and the first Bishop of Mexico. He was also the region's first inquisitor. He wrote ''Doctrina breve'', the first book published in the Western Hemisph ...
in 1536 and was executed. His execution prompted the crown to reprimand Zumárraga and when the Holy Office of the
Inquisition The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy, conducting trials of suspected heretics. Studies of the records have found that the overwhelming majority of sentences consisted of penances, ...
was established in Mexico in 1571, Indians were exempted from its jurisdiction. There was a concern that Indians were insufficiently indoctrinated in Catholic orthodox beliefs to be held to the same standards as Spaniards and other members of the ''República de Españoles''. In the eyes of the Church and in Spanish law, Indians were legal minors. The arrival of the Franciscan Twelve Apostles of Mexico initiated what came to be called The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. Many of the names and accomplishments of earliest Franciscans have come down to the modern era, including
Toribio de Benavente Motolinia Toribio of Benavente, O.F.M. (1482, Benavente, Spain – 1565, Mexico City, New Spain), also known as Motolinía, was a Franciscan missionary who was one of the famous Twelve Apostles of Mexico who arrived in New Spain in May 1524. His publis ...
,
Bernardino de Sahagún Bernardino de Sahagún, OFM (; – 5 February 1590) was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain (now Mexico). Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, ...
,
Andrés de Olmos Andrés de Olmos (c.1485 – 8 October 1571) was a Spanish Franciscan priest and grammarian and ethno-historian of Mexico's indigenous languages and peoples. He was born in Oña, Burgos, Spain and died in Tampico in New Spain (modern-day Ta ...
,
Alonso de Molina Alonso de Molina (1513. or 1514.. – 1579 or 1585) was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a well-known dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571 and still used by scholars working on Nahuatl texts in the tradition of the ...
, and Gerónimo de Mendieta. The first bishop of Mexico was Franciscan
Juan de Zumárraga Juan de Zumárraga, OFM (1468 – June 3, 1548) was a Spanish Basque Franciscan prelate and the first Bishop of Mexico. He was also the region's first inquisitor. He wrote ''Doctrina breve'', the first book published in the Western Hemisph ...
. Early Dominicans in Mexico include
Bartolomé de Las Casas Bartolomé de las Casas, OP ( ; ; 11 November 1484 – 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish landowner, friar, priest, and bishop, famed as a historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman then became a Dominican friar ...
, who famously was an
encomendero The ''encomienda'' () was a Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples. The labourers, in theory, were provided with benefits by the conquerors for whom they laboured, including military ...
and black slave dealer in the early Caribbean before he became a Dominican friar; Diego Durán and
Alonso de Montúfar Alonso de Montúfar y Bravo de Lagunas, O.P., was a Spanish Dominican friar and prelate of the Catholic Church, who ruled as the second Archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to his death in 1572. He approved and promoted the devotion to Our Lady of ...
who became the second bishop of Mexico. It was not until
Pedro Moya de Contreras Pedro Moya de Contreras (sometimes ''Pedro de Moya y Contreras'') (c. 1528, Pedroche, Córdoba Province, Spain – December 21, 1591, Madrid) was a prelate and colonial administrator who held the three highest offices in the Spanish colon ...
became archbishop of Mexico in 1573 that a diocesan cleric rather than a mendicant served as Mexico's highest prelate. The friars sought ways to make their task of converting millions of Indians less daunting. By using existing indigenous settlements in Central Mexico where indigenous rulers were kept in place in the post-conquest period, the mendicant orders created ''doctrinas'', major Indian towns designated as important for the initial evangelization, while smaller settlements, ''visitas'', were visited at intervals to teach, preach, and administer the sacraments. Friars built churches on the sites of temples, transforming the ancient sacred space into a place for Catholic worship. Some of these have been recognized by
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international coope ...
as
World Heritage Site A World Heritage Site is a landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for ...
s under the general listing of
Monasteries on the slopes of Popocatépetl The Earliest Monasteries on the Slopes of Popocatepetl ( es, Primeros Monasterios en las faldas del Popocatépetl) are fifteen 16th-century monasteries which were built by the Augustinians, the Franciscans and the Dominicans in order to evangeli ...
. Churches were built in the major Indian towns and, by the late sixteenth century, local neighborhoods; ''barrios'' (Spanish) or ''tlaxilacalli'' (Nahuatl) built chapels.


The abandoned experiment to train Indian priests

The crown and the Franciscans had hopes for the training of indigenous men to become ordained Catholic priests, and with the sponsorship of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and Don
Antonio de Mendoza Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco (, ; 1495 – 21 July 1552) was a Spanish colonial administrator who was the first Viceroy of New Spain, serving from 14 November 1535 to 25 November 1550, and the third Viceroy of Peru, from 23 September 1551 ...
, the
Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco The Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, is the first and oldest European school of higher learning in the Americas and the first major school of interpreters and translators in the New World. It was established by the Franciscans ...
was established in 1536, in an indigenous section of Mexico City. Several prominent Franciscans, including
Bernardino de Sahagún Bernardino de Sahagún, OFM (; – 5 February 1590) was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain (now Mexico). Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, ...
taught at the school, but the Franciscans concluded that although their elite Indian students were capable of high learning, their failure to maintain life habits expected of a friar resulted in the ending of their religious education toward ordination.Ricard, ''The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico'', pp. 294-95 In 1555 the Third Mexican Provincial Council banned Indians from ordination to the priesthood. The failure to create a Christian priesthood of indigenous men has been deemed a major failure of the Catholic Church in Mexico. With the banning of ordination for indigenous men, the priest was always a Spaniard (and in later years one who passed as one). The highest religious official in Indian towns was the ''fiscal'', who was a nobleman who aided the priest in the affairs of the church. The Colegio continued for a number of decades more, with some of its most able students becoming participants in Sahagún's project to compile information about the prehispanic Aztecs in order that Christian evangelization would be more effective. The twelve-volume magnum opus ''The General History of the Things of New Spain'', completed in the 1570s, is one of the high achievements of the early colonial period, published in English as the
Florentine Codex The ''Florentine Codex'' is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it: ''La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España'' (in English: ''Th ...
.


Mendicant-produced texts for evangelization

The Franciscans were especially prolific in creating materials so that they could evangelize in the indigenous language, which in Central Mexico was
Nahuatl Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have small ...
, the language of the Aztecs and other groups. Fray Andrés de Olmos completed a manual designed to teach the friars Nahuatl. Fray Alonso de Molina compiled a bilingual dictionary in Nahuatl (''Mexicana'') and Spanish (''Castellano'') to aid the friars in teaching and preaching. He also created a bilingual confessional manual, so that friars could hear confessions in Nahuatl. Bernardino de Sahagún wrote a book of psalms in Nahuatl for friars to use in their preaching; it was the only one of his many works that was published in his lifetime. When friars began to evangelize elsewhere in New Spain where there were other indigenous groups, they created similar materials in languages as diverse as Zapotec, Maya, and Chinantec. Increasingly the crown became hostile to the production of materials in indigenous languages, so that Sahagún's multivolume ''General History'' was not a model for such works elsewhere in Mexico. One of the major challenges for friars in creating such materials was to find words and phrasing that evoked the sacred without confusing the indigenous about Christianity and their old beliefs. For that reason, a whole series of words from Spanish and a few from Latin were incorporated as loanwords into Nahuatl to denote God (''Dios'') rather than god (''teotl'') and others to denote new concepts, such as a last will and testament (''testamento'') and soul (''ánima''). Some Christian dichotomous concepts, such as good and evil, were not easy to convey to Nahuas, since their belief system sought a middle ground without extremes. Fray Alonso de Molina's 1569 confessional manual had a model testament in Spanish and Nahuatl. Whether or not it was the direct model for Nahua scribes or notaries in indigenous towns, the making of testaments that were simultaneously a religious document as well as one designed to pass property to selected heirs became standard in Nahua towns during the second half of the sixteenth century and carried on as a documentary type until Mexican independence in 1821. Early testaments in Nahuatl have been invaluable for the information they provide about Nahua men and women's property holding, but the religious formulas at the beginning of wills were largely that and did not represent individual statements of belief. However, testators did order property to be sold for Masses for their souls or gave money directly to the local friar, which may well have been encouraged by the recipients but can also be the testators’ gesture of piety.


Hospitals

The friars founded 120 hospitals in the first hundred years of the colonial era, some serving only Spaniards but others exclusively for the indigenous. These hospitals for Indians were especially important since epidemics sickened and killed countless Indians after the conquest.David Howard, ''The Royal Indian Hospital of Mexico City'', Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, Special Studies 20, 1979, p. 1.
Hernán Cortés Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca (; ; 1485 – December 2, 1547) was a Spanish ''conquistador'' who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of w ...
endowed the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception, more commonly known as the Hospital de Jesús, in Mexico City, which was run by religious. Bishop
Vasco de Quiroga Vasco de Quiroga (1470/78 – 14 March 1565) was the first bishop of Michoacán, Mexico, and one of the judges (''oidores'') in the second Real Audiencia of Mexico – the high court that governed New Spain – from January 10, 1531, to April 16, ...
founded hospitals in Michoacan. The crown established the Royal Indian Hospital (''Hospital Real de Indios'' or ''Hospital Real de Naturales'') in Mexico city in 1553, which functioned until 1822 when Mexico gained its independence. Although the Royal Indian Hospital was a crown institution and not an ecclesiastical one, the nursing staff during the eighteenth century was the brothers of the religious order of San Hipólito. The order was founded in Mexico by Bernardino de Alvarez (1514–1584), and it established a number of hospitals. The religious order was to be removed from its role at the Royal Indian Hospital by a royal decree (''cédula'') after an investigation into allegations of irregularities, and the brothers were to return to their convent. Hospitals were not just places to treat the sick and dying, but were spiritual institutions as well. At the Royal Indian Hospital, the ordinances for governing called for four chaplains, appointed by the crown and not the church, to minister to the sick and dying. All four had to be proficient in either Nahuatl or Otomi, with two to serve in each language.Howard, ''Royal Indian Hospital'', p. 34. Although many secular clerics without a benefice held multiple posts in order to make a living, the chaplains at the Royal Indian Hospital were forbidden to serve elsewhere.


Confraternities

Organizations that were more in the hands of the indigenous were
confraternities A confraternity ( es, cofradía; pt, confraria) is generally a Christian voluntary association of laypeople created for the purpose of promoting special works of Christian charity or piety, and approved by the Church hierarchy. They are most ...
(''cofradías'') founded in the Nahua area starting in the late sixteenth century and were established elsewhere in indigenous communities. Confraternities functioned as burial societies for their members, celebrated their patron saint, and conducted other religious activities, nominally under the supervision of a priest, but like their European counterparts there was considerable power in the hands of the lay leadership. Confraternities usually had religious banners, many of their officials wore special ritual attire, and they participated in larger religious festivities as an identifiable group. For Indians and Blacks, these religious organizations promoted both their spiritual life and their sense of community, since their membership was exclusively of those groups and excluded Spaniards. On the contrary, ''limpieza'' (pure Spanish blood) status was gradually necessary for certain religious orders, confraternities, convents, and guilds. In one Nahua sodality in Tula, women not only participated but held publicly religious office. When the confraternity was given official recognition in 1631, they are noted in the confraternity's records in Nahuatl: "Four mothers of people in holy matters
ho are Ho (or the transliterations He or Heo) may refer to: People Language and ethnicity * Ho people, an ethnic group of India ** Ho language, a tribal language in India * Hani people, or Ho people, an ethnic group in China, Laos and Vietnam * Hiri ...
to take good care of the holy ''cofradía'' so it will be much respected, and they are to urge those who have not yet joined the ''cofradía'' to enter, and they are to take care of the brothers nd sisterswho are sick, and the orphans; they are to see to what is needed for their souls and what pertains to their earthly bodies." In the Maya area, confraternities had considerable economic power since they held land in the name of their patron saint and the crops went to the support of the saint's cult. The ''cah's'' (indigenous community) retention of considerable land via the confraternities was a way the Maya communities avoided colonial officials, the clergy, or even indigenous rulers (''gobernadores'') from diverting of community revenues in their ''cajas de comunidad'' (literally community-owned chests that had locks and keys). " Yucatan the ''cofradía'' in its modified form ''was'' the community."


Spanish Habsburg Era (1550–1700)


Establishment of the episcopal hierarchy and the assertion of crown control

The Catholic Church is organized by territorial districts or dioceses, each with a
bishop A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or office of bishop is ...
. The main church of a diocese is the
cathedral A cathedral is a church that contains the ''cathedra'' () of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually specific to those Christian denominations ...
. The diocese of Mexico was established in Mexico City in 1530. Initially, Mexico was not an episcopal jurisdiction in its own right; until 1547 it was under the authority of the Archbishop of
Seville Seville (; es, Sevilla, ) is the capital and largest city of the Spanish autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville. It is situated on the lower reaches of the River Guadalquivir, in the southwest of the Iberian Penins ...
(Spain). The first bishop of Mexico was Franciscan friar Don
Juan de Zumárraga Juan de Zumárraga, OFM (1468 – June 3, 1548) was a Spanish Basque Franciscan prelate and the first Bishop of Mexico. He was also the region's first inquisitor. He wrote ''Doctrina breve'', the first book published in the Western Hemisph ...
. The church that became the first cathedral was begun in 1524 on the main square
Zócalo The Zócalo () is the common name of the main square in central Mexico City. Prior to the colonial period, it was the main ceremonial center in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. The plaza used to be known simply as the "Main Square" or "Arms Sq ...
and consecrated in 1532. In general, a member of a mendicant order was not appointed to a high position in the episcopal hierarchy, so Zumárraga and his successor Dominican
Alonso de Montúfar Alonso de Montúfar y Bravo de Lagunas, O.P., was a Spanish Dominican friar and prelate of the Catholic Church, who ruled as the second Archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to his death in 1572. He approved and promoted the devotion to Our Lady of ...
(r. 1551–1572) as bishops of Mexico should be seen as atypical figures. In 1572
Pedro Moya de Contreras Pedro Moya de Contreras (sometimes ''Pedro de Moya y Contreras'') (c. 1528, Pedroche, Córdoba Province, Spain – December 21, 1591, Madrid) was a prelate and colonial administrator who held the three highest offices in the Spanish colon ...
became the first bishop of Mexico who was a secular cleric.


Bishops as interim viceroys

The crown established the
viceroyalty of New Spain New Spain, officially the Viceroyalty of New Spain ( es, Virreinato de Nueva España, ), or Kingdom of New Spain, was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain during the Spanish colonization of the Amer ...
, appointing high-born Spaniards loyal to the crown as the top civil official. On occasion in all three centuries of Spanish rule, the crown appointed archbishops or bishops as
viceroy of New Spain The following is a list of Viceroys of New Spain. In addition to viceroys, the following lists the highest Spanish governors of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, before the appointment of the first viceroy or when the office of viceroy was vacant. ...
, usually on an interim basis, until a new viceroy was sent from Spain.
Pedro Moya de Contreras Pedro Moya de Contreras (sometimes ''Pedro de Moya y Contreras'') (c. 1528, Pedroche, Córdoba Province, Spain – December 21, 1591, Madrid) was a prelate and colonial administrator who held the three highest offices in the Spanish colon ...
was the first secular cleric to be appointed archbishop of Mexico and he was also the first cleric to serve as viceroy, September 25, 1584 – October 17, 1585. The seventeenth century saw the largest number of clerics as viceroys. The Dominican
García Guerra Fray García Guerra (''also Francisco García Guerra''), OP (c. 1547 in Frómista, Palencia, Spain – February 22, 1612 in Mexico City), archbishop of Mexico and viceroy of New Spain. He held the former office from December 3, 1607, and the l ...
served from June 19, 1611 – February 22, 1612. Blessed Don
Juan de Palafox y Mendoza Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (26 June 1600 – 1 October 1659) was a Spanish politician, administrator, and Catholic clergyman in 17th century Spain and a viceroy of Mexico. Palafox was the Bishop of Puebla (1640−1655), and the interim Archbis ...
also served briefly as viceroy, June 10, 1642 – November 23, 1642.
Marcos de Torres y Rueda Marcos de Torres y Rueda (April 25, 1591, Almazán, Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyo ...
, bishop of Yucatán, served from May 15, 1648 – April 22, 1649. Diego Osorio de Escobar y Llamas, bishop of Puebla, served from June 29, 1664 – October 15, 1664. Archbishop of the
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico The Archdiocese of Mexico ( la, Archidioecesis Mexicanensis) is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or archdiocese of the Catholic Church that is situated in Mexico City, Mexico. It was erected as a diocese on 2 September 1530 and elevated to ...
Payo Enríquez de Rivera Manrique, O.S.A., served an unusually long term as viceroy, from December 13, 1673, to November 7, 1680. Another unusual cleric-viceroy was
Juan Ortega y Montañés Don Juan Ortega y Montañés (''also Juan de Ortega Cano Montañez y Patiño'') (July 3, 1627 in Siles, Spain – December 16, 1708 in Mexico City) was a Roman Catholic bishop and colonial administrator in Guatemala and New Spain. He was s ...
, archbishop of Mexico City archdiocese, who served twice as interim viceroy, February 27, 1696, to December 18, 1696, and again from November 4, 1701, to November 27, 1702. Once the Spanish Bourbon monarchy was established, just three clerics served as viceroy. Archbishop of Mexico City
Juan Antonio de Vizarrón y Eguiarreta Juan Antonio de Vizarrón y Eguiarreta (September 2, 1682, in El Puerto de Santa María, Spain – January 25, 1747, in Mexico City, Spain) was archbishop of Mexico from March 21, 1731, to January 25, 1747, and viceroy of New Spain from March ...
, served six years as viceroy, March 17, 1734, to August 17, 1740. The last two cleric-viceroys followed the more usual pattern of being interim.
Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta Dr. Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta (October 31, 1729 – May 26, 1800) was archbishop of Mexico from September 12, 1772, to May 26, 1800, and viceroy of New Spain from May 8, 1787, to August 16, 1787. Origins and education Núñez de Ha ...
, archbishop of Mexico City, served from May 8, 1787, to August 16, 1787, and Francisco Javier de Lizana y Beaumont, archbishop of Mexico City, served from July 19, 1809, to May 8, 1810.


Structure of the episcopal hierarchy

The ecclesiastical structure was ruled by a bishop, who had considerable power encompassing legislative, executive, and judicial matters. A bishop ruled over a geographical district, a diocese, subdivided into parishes, each with a parish priest. The seat of the diocese was its cathedral, which had its own administration, the ''cabildo eclesiástico'' whose senior official was the dean of the cathedral. New Spain became the seat of an archbishopric in 1530, with the archbishop overseeing multiple dioceses. The diocese of Michoacan (now Morelía) became an archdiocese in the sixteenth century as well. The creation of further dioceses in Mexico is marked by the construction of cathedrals in the main cities: the cathedral in Antequera (now Oaxaca City) (1535), the Guadalajara Cathedral (1541), the
Puebla Cathedral The Basilica Cathedral of Puebla, as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is known according to its Marian invocation, is the episcopal see of the Archdiocese of Puebla de los Ángeles (Mexico). It is one of the most importan ...
1557, the
Zacatecas Cathedral The Cathedral of Zacatecas, dedicated to the Assumption of Mary, Virgin of the Assumption, is the main temple of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Zacatecas, Diocese of Zacatecas. Located in the historic center of the Zacatecas City, city, declared W ...
(1568), the
Mérida Cathedral Mérida or Merida may refer to: Places *Mérida (state), one of the 23 states which make up Venezuela * Mérida, Mérida, the capital city of the state of Mérida, Venezuela *Merida, Leyte, Philippines, a municipality in the province of Leyte *M ...
(1598), and the Saltillo Cathedral (1762).


Ecclesiastical privileges

The ordained clergy (but not religious sisters) had ecclesiastical privileges (''fueros''), which meant that they were exempt from civil courts, no matter what the offense, but were tried in canonical courts. This separation of jurisdictions for different groups meant that the Church had considerable independent power. In the late eighteenth century, one of the
Bourbon Reforms The Bourbon Reforms ( es, Reformas Borbónicas) consisted of political and economic changes promulgated by the Spanish Crown under various kings of the House of Bourbon, since 1700, mainly in the 18th century. The beginning of the new Crown's ...
was the removal of this ''fuero'', making the clergy subject to civil courts.N.M. Farriss, ''Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico''. London: Athlone Press 1968.


Secular or diocesan clergy's income

Members of the upper levels of the hierarchy, parish priests, and priests who functioned in religious institutions such as hospitals, received a salaried income, a benefice. However, not all ordained priests had a secure income from such benefices and had to find a way to make a living. Since secular priests did not take a vow of poverty, they often pursued economic functions like any other member of Hispanic society. An example of a secular cleric piecing together an income from multiple posts is Don
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (August 14, 1645 – August 22, 1700) was one of the first great intellectuals born in the New World - Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain ( Mexico City). He was a criollo patriot, exalting New Spain over O ...
, one of New Spain's most distinguished intellectuals, who had no benefice.


Reduction of mendicants' role

In the sixteenth century, the establishment of the episcopal hierarchy was part of a larger Crown policy that in the early period increasingly aimed at diminishing the role of the mendicant orders as parish priests in central areas of the colony and strengthening the role of the diocesan (secular) clergy. The ''Ordenanza del Patronazgo'' was the key act of the crown asserting control over the clergy, both mendicant and secular. It was promulgated by the crown in 1574, codifying this policy, which simultaneously strengthened the crown's role, since it had the power of royal patronage over the diocesan clergy, the ''
Patronato Real The ''patronato'' () system in Spain (and a similar '' padroado'' system in Portugal) was the expression of royal patronage controlling major appointments of Church officials and the management of Church revenues, under terms of concordats with ...
'', but not the mendicant orders. The ''Ordenanza'' guaranteed parish priests an income and a permanent position. Priests competed for desirable parishes through a system of competitive examinations called ''oposiones'', with the aim of having the most qualified candidates receiving benefices. With these competitions, the winners became holders of benefices (''beneficiados'') and priests who did not come out on top were curates who served on an interim basis by appointment by the bishop; those who failed entirely did not even hold a temporary assignment. The importance of the ''Ordenanza'' is in the ascendancy of the diocesan clergy over the mendicants, but also indicates the growth in the Spanish population in New Spain and the necessity not only to minister to it but also to provide ecclesiastical posts for the best American-born Spaniards (creoles).


Pious endowments

One type of institution that produced income for priests without a parish or other benefice was to say Masses for the souls of men and women who had set up chantries (''capellanías''). Wealthy members of society would set aside funds, often by a lien on real property, to ensure Masses would be said for their souls in perpetuity. Families with an ordained priest as a member often designated him as the ''capellán'', thus ensuring the economic well-being of one of its own. Although the endowment was for a religious purpose, the Church itself did not control the funds. It was a way that pious elite families could direct their wealth.


Tithes

The crown had significant power in the economic realm regarding the Church, since it was granted the use of tithes (a ten percent tax of agriculture) and the responsibility of collecting them. In general the crown gave these revenues for the support of the Church, and where revenues fell short, the crown supplemented them from the royal treasury.


Society of Jesus in Mexico, 1572–1767

At the same time that the episcopal hierarchy was established, the
Society of Jesus , image = Ihs-logo.svg , image_size = 175px , caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits , abbreviation = SJ , nickname = Jesuits , formation = , founders ...
or Jesuits, a new religious order founded on new principles, came to Mexico in 1572. The Jesuits distinguished themselves in several ways. They had high standards for acceptance to the order and many years of training. They were adept at attracting the patronage of elite families whose sons they educated in rigorous, newly founded Jesuit ''colegios'' ("colleges"), including Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo,
Colegio de San Ildefonso The Colegio de San Ildefonso was an educational institution run by the Society of Jesus in Cebu City, Philippines in the then Spanish Captaincy General of the Philippines. It was established by the Jesuits in 1595 thus making it the first Europe ...
, and the Colegio de San Francisco Javier, Tepozotlan. Those same elite families hoped that a son with a vocation to the priesthood would be accepted as a Jesuit. Jesuits were also zealous in evangelization of the indigenous, particularly on the northern frontiers.


Jesuit haciendas

To support their colleges and members of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits acquired landed estates that were run with the best-practices for generating income in that era. A number of these haciendas were donated by wealthy elites. The donation of an hacienda to the Jesuits was the spark igniting a conflict between seventeenth-century bishop of Puebla Don Juan de Palafox and the Jesuit ''colegio'' in that city. Since the Jesuits resisted paying the tithe on their estates, this donation effectively took revenue out of the church hierarchy's pockets by removing it from the tithe rolls.D.A. Brading, ''The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, 242. Many Jesuit haciendas were huge, with Palafox asserting that just two colleges owned 300,000 head of sheep, whose wool was transformed locally in Puebla to cloth; six sugar plantations worth a million pesos and generating an income of 100,000 pesos. The immense Jesuit hacienda of Santa Lucía produced ''pulque'', the fermented juice of the agave cactus whose main consumers were the lower classes and Indians in Spanish cities. Although most haciendas had a free work force of permanent or seasonal laborers, the Jesuit haciendas in Mexico had a significant number of black slaves. The Jesuits operated their properties as an integrated unit with the larger Jesuit order; thus revenues from haciendas funded ''colegios''. Jesuits did significantly expand missions to the indigenous in the frontier area and a number were martyred, but the crown supported those missions. Mendicant orders that had real estate were less economically integrated, so that some individual houses were wealthy while others struggled economically. The Franciscans, who were founded as an order embracing poverty, did not accumulate real estate, unlike the Augustinians and Dominicans in Mexico.


Jesuit resistance to the tithe

The Jesuits engaged in conflict with the episcopal hierarchy over the question of payment of tithes, the ten percent tax on agriculture levied on landed estates for support of the Church hierarchy, from bishops and cathedral chapters to parish priests. Since the Jesuits were the largest religious order holding real estate, surpassing the Dominicans and Augustinians who had accumulated significant property, this was no small matter. They argued that they were exempt, due to special pontifical privileges. In the mid-seventeenth century, bishop of Puebla Don
Juan de Palafox Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (26 June 1600 – 1 October 1659) was a Spanish politician, administrator, and Catholic clergyman in 17th century Spain and a viceroy of Mexico. Palafox was the Bishop of Puebla (1640−1655), and the interim Archbis ...
took on the Jesuits over this matter and was so soundly defeated that he was recalled to Spain, where he became the bishop of the minor diocese of
Osma Burgo de Osma-Ciudad de Osma is the third-largest municipality in the province of Soria, in the autonomous community of Castile and León, Spain. It has a population of about 5,250. It is made up of two parts: *the smaller Ciudad de Osma (c ...
. The mendicant orders were envious of the Jesuits’ economic power and influence and the fact that fewer good candidates for their orders chose them as opposed to the Jesuits.


Expulsion of the Jesuits 1767

In 1767, the Spanish crown ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its overseas territories. Their properties passed into the hands of elites who had the wherewithal to buy them. The mendicants did not protest their expulsion. The Jesuits had established missions in
Baja California Baja California (; 'Lower California'), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California), is a state in Mexico. It is the northernmost and westernmost of the 32 federal entities of Mex ...
prior to their expulsion. These were taken over by the Franciscans, who then went on to establish 21 missions in
Alta California Alta California ('Upper California'), also known as ('New California') among other names, was a province of New Spain, formally established in 1804. Along with the Baja California peninsula, it had previously comprised the province of , but ...
.


Convents


Establishments for elite creole women

In the first generation of Spaniards in New Spain, women emigrated to join existing kin, generally marrying. With few marital partners of equal ''calidad'' for Spanish men, there was pressure for Spanish women to marry rather than take the veil as a cloistered
nun A nun is a woman who vows to dedicate her life to religious service, typically living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the enclosure of a monastery or convent.''The Oxford English Dictionary'', vol. X, page 599. The term is o ...
. However, as more Spanish families were created and there were a larger number of daughters, the social economy could accommodate the creation of nunneries for women. The first convent in New Spain was founded in 1540 in Mexico City by the Conceptionist Order. Mexico City had the largest number of nunneries with 22. Puebla, New Spain's second largest city, had 11, with its first in 1568; Guadalajara had 6, starting in 1578; Antequera (Oaxaca), had 5, starting in 1576. In all, there were 56 convents for creole women in New Spain, with the greatest number in the largest cities. However, even a few relatively small provincial cities had convents, including Pátzcuaro (1744), San Miguel el Grande (1754), Aguascalientes (1705-07), Mérida (Yucatán) 1596, and San Cristóbal (Chiapas) 1595. The last nunnery before independence in 1821 was in Mexico City in 1811, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Over the colonial period, there were 56 nunneries established in New Spain, the largest number being the
Conceptionists , image = OrdoIC.jpg , size = 150px , abbreviation = OIC , nickname = Conceptionists , motto = , formation = , founder = Saint Beatrice of Silva) , founding_locatio ...
with 15, followed by Franciscans at 14, Dominicans with 9, and
Carmelites , image = , caption = Coat of arms of the Carmelites , abbreviation = OCarm , formation = Late 12th century , founder = Early hermits of Mount Carmel , founding_location = Mount C ...
with 7. Sor Juana's Jeronymite order had only 3 houses. The largest concentration of convents was in the capital, Mexico City, with 11 built between 1540 and 1630, and, by 1780 another 10 for a total of 21. These institutions were designed for the daughters of elites, with individual living quarters not only for the nuns, but also their servants. Depending on the particular religious order, the discipline was more or less strict. The Carmelites were strictly observant, which prompted Doña Juana Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana to withdraw from their community and join the Jeronymite nunnery in Mexico City, becoming Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz ''Doña'' Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (12 November 1648 – 17 April 1695) was a Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, and Hieronymite nun. Her contribut ...
, known in her lifetime as the "Tenth Muse". Nuns were enclosed in their convents, but some orders regularly permitted visits from the nuns’ family members (and in Sor Juana's case, the viceroy and his wife the virreina), as well as her friend, the priest and savant Don
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (August 14, 1645 – August 22, 1700) was one of the first great intellectuals born in the New World - Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain ( Mexico City). He was a criollo patriot, exalting New Spain over O ...
. Nuns were required to provide a significant dowry to the nunnery on their entrance. As "brides of Christ", nuns often entered the nunnery with an elaborate ceremony that was an occasion for the family to display not only its piety but also its wealth. Nunneries accumulated wealth due to the dowries donated for the care of nuns when they entered. Many nunneries also acquired urban real estate, whose rents were a steady source of income to that particular house.


For Indian noblewomen

In the eighteenth century, the Poor Clares established a convent for noble Indian women. The debate leading up to the creation of the convent of Corpus Christi in 1724 was another round of debate about the capacity of Indians, male or female, for religious life. The early sixteenth century had seen the demise of the
Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco The Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, is the first and oldest European school of higher learning in the Americas and the first major school of interpreters and translators in the New World. It was established by the Franciscans ...
, which had been founded to train Indian men for ordination.


Holy Office of the Inquisition

At the same time that the episcopal hierarchy in Mexico first had a secular cleric as archbishop, the tribunal of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy, conducting trials of suspected heretics. Studies of the records have found that the overwhelming majority of sentences consisted of penances, ...
was established in 1569 to maintain orthodoxy and Christian morality. In 1570, Indians were removed from the Inquisition's jurisdiction.


Crypto-Jews

Non-Catholics were banned from emigrating to Spain's overseas territories, with potential migrants needing to receive a license to travel that stated they were of pure Catholic heritage. However, a number of crypto-Jews, that is, Jews who supposedly converted to Christianity (''conversos'') but continued practicing Judaism, did emigrate. Many were merchants of Portuguese background, who could more easily move within the Spanish realms during the period 1580–1640 when Spain and Portugal had the same monarch. The Portuguese empire included territories in West Africa and was the source of African slaves sold in Spanish territories. Quite a number of Portuguese merchants in Mexico were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. When Portugal successfully revolted against Spanish rule in 1640, the Inquisition in Mexico began to closely scrutinize the merchant community in which many Portuguese merchants were crypto-Jews. In 1649, crypto-Jews both living and dead were "relaxed to the secular arm" of crown justice for punishment. The Inquisition had no power to execute the convicted, so civil justice carried out capital punishment in a grand public ceremony affirming the power of Christianity and the State. The Gran Auto de Fe of 1649 saw Crypto-Jews burned alive, while the effigies or statues along with the bones of others were burned. Although the trial and punishment of those already dead might seem bizarre to those in the modern era, the disinterment of the remains of crypto-Jews from Christian sacred ground and then burning their remains protected living and dead Christians from the pollution of those who rejected Christ. A spectacular case of sedition was prosecuted a decade later in 1659, the case of Irishman
William Lamport William Lamport (or Lampart) (1611/1615 – 1659) was an Irish Catholic adventurer, known in Mexico as "Don Guillén de Lamport (or Lombardo) y Guzmán". He was tried by the Mexican Inquisition for sedition and executed in 1659. He claimed to b ...
, also known as Don Guillén de Lampart y Guzmán, who was executed in an ''
auto de fe Auto may refer to: * An automaton * An automobile * An autonomous car * An automatic transmission * An auto rickshaw * Short for automatic * Auto (art), a form of Portuguese dramatic play * ''Auto'' (film), 2007 Tamil comedy film * Auto (play), ...
''.


Other jurisdictional transgressions

In general though the Inquisition imposed penalties that were far less stringent than capital punishment. They prosecuted cases of bigamy, blasphemy, Lutheranism (Protestantism), witchcraft, and, in the eighteenth century, sedition against the crown was added to the Inquisition's jurisdiction. Historians have in recent decades utilized Inquisition records to find information on a broad range of those in the Hispanic sector and discern social and cultural patterns and colonial ideas of deviance.


Indigenous beliefs

Indigenous men and women were excluded from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition when it was established, but there were on-going concerns about indigenous beliefs and practice. In 1629, Hernando Riz de Alarcón wrote the ''Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions that today live among the Indians native to this New Spain. 1629.'' Little is known about Ruiz de Alarcón himself, but his work is an important contribution to early Mexico for understanding Nahua religion, beliefs, and medicine. He collected information about Nahuas in what is now modern Guerrero. He came to the attention of the Inquisition for conducting ''autos-de-fe'' and punishing Indians without authority. The Holy Office exonerated him due to his ignorance and then appointed him to a position to inform the Holy Office of pagan practices, resulting in the ''Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions''.


Devotions to holy men and women


Virgin of Guadalupe and other devotions to Mary

In 1531, a Nahua,
Juan Diego Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known as Juan Diego (; 1474–1548), was a Chichimec peasant and Marian visionary. He is said to have been granted apparitions of the Virgin Mary on four occasions in December 1531: three at the hill of Tepeyac an ...
, is said to have experienced a vision of a young girl on the site of a destroyed temple to a
mother goddess A mother goddess is a goddess who represents a personified deification of motherhood, fertility goddess, fertility, creation, destruction, or the earth goddess who embodies the bounty of the earth or nature. When equated with the earth or t ...
. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe was promoted by Dominican archbishop of Mexico,
Alonso de Montúfar Alonso de Montúfar y Bravo de Lagunas, O.P., was a Spanish Dominican friar and prelate of the Catholic Church, who ruled as the second Archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to his death in 1572. He approved and promoted the devotion to Our Lady of ...
, while Franciscans such as
Bernardino de Sahagún Bernardino de Sahagún, OFM (; – 5 February 1590) was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain (now Mexico). Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, ...
were deeply suspicious because of the possibility of confusion and idolatry. The vision became embodied in a physical object, the cloak or ''tilma'' on which the image of the Virgin appeared. This ultimately became known as Our Lady of Guadalupe. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe grew in importance in the seventeenth century, becoming especially associated with American-born Spaniards. In the era of independence, she was an important symbol of liberation for the insurgents. Although the Virgin of Guadalupe is the most important Marian devotion in Mexico, she is by no means the only one. In
Tlaxcala Tlaxcala (; , ; from nah, Tlaxcallān ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tlaxcala ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Tlaxcala), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Political divisions of Mexico, Federal Entities of Mexico. It is ...
, the Virgin of Ocotlan is important; in Jalisco Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos and the
Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan The Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan ( es, Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Zapopan) and the abbey of Our lady of zapopan of Zapopan are a 17th-century Franciscan sanctuary built in downtown Zapopan, in the state of Jalisco, México. It is one of ...
are important pilgrimage sites; in Oaxaca, the Basilica of Our Lady of Solitude is important. In the colonial period and particularly during the struggle for independence in the early nineteenth century, the
Virgin of Los Remedios The Virgin of Los Remedios ( es, La Virgen de los Remedios) or Our Lady of Los Remedios ( pt, Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, es, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios) is a title of the Virgin Mary developed by the Trinitarian Order, founded in the lat ...
was the symbolic leader of the royalists defending Spanish rule in New Spain.


Devotions to Christ and pilgrimage sites

In colonial New Spain, there were several devotions to Christ with images of Christ focusing worship. A number of them were images are of a Black Christ. The Cristos Negros of Central America and Mexico included the Cristo Negro de Esquipulas; the Cristo Negro of Otatitlan, Veracruz; the Cristo Negro of San Pablo Anciano, Acatitlán de Osorio, Puebla; the Lord of Chalma, in Chalma, Malinalco. In
Totolapan Totolapan is a municipality in the north of the Mexican state of Morelos, surrounded by the State of Mexico to the north; to the south with Tlayacapan and Atlatlahucan; to the east and southeast with Atlatlahucan; and to the west with Tlalnepan ...
, Morelos, the Christ crucified image that appeared in 1543 has been the subject of a full-scale scholarly monograph.


Mexican saints

New Spain had residents who lived holy lives and were recognized in their own communities. Late sixteenth-century Franciscan Felipe de Jesús, who was born in Mexico, became its first saint, a martyr in Japan; he was beatified in 1627, a step in the process of sainthood, and canonized a saint in 1862, during a period of conflict between Church and the liberal State in Mexico. One of the martyrs of the Japanese state's crackdown on Christians, San Felipe was crucified.
Sebastian de Aparicio Sebastian may refer to: People * Sebastian (name), including a list of persons with the name Arts, entertainment, and media Films and television * ''Sebastian'' (1968 film), British spy film * ''Sebastian'' (1995 film), Swedish drama film ...
, another sixteenth-century holy person, was a lay Franciscan, an immigrant from Spain, who became a Franciscan late in life. He built a reputation for holiness in Puebla, colonial Mexico's second largest city, and was beatified (named Blessed) in 1789. Puebla was also the home of another immigrant, Catarina de San Juan, one who did not come to New Spain of her own volition, but as an Asian (''China'') slave.Ronald J. Morgan, ''Spanish American Saints'' pp. 119-142. Known as the "'' China Poblana''" (Asian woman of Puebla), Catarina lived an exemplary life and was regarded in her lifetime as a holy woman, but the campaign for her recognition by the Vatican stalled in the seventeenth century, despite clerics’ writing her spiritual autobiography. Her status as an outsider and non-white might have affected her cause for designation as holy. Madre
María de Ágreda Maria may refer to: People * Mary, mother of Jesus * Maria (given name), a popular given name in many languages Place names Extraterrestrial *170 Maria, a Main belt S-type asteroid discovered in 1877 *Lunar maria (plural of ''mare''), large, da ...
(1602–1665), named Venerable in 1675, was a Spanish nun who, while cloistered in Spain, is said to have experienced
bilocation Bilocation, or sometimes multilocation, is an alleged psychic or miraculous ability wherein an individual or object is located (or appears to be located) in two distinct places at the same time. Reports of bilocational phenomena have been made i ...
between 1620 and 1623 and is believed to have helped evangelize the
Jumano Jumanos were a tribe or several tribes, who inhabited a large area of western Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, especially near the Junta de los Rios region with its large settled Indigenous population. They lived in the Big Bend area in ...
Indians of west Texas and New Mexico. In the twentieth century, the Vatican beatified in 1988 eighteenth-century Franciscan
Junípero Serra Junípero Serra y Ferrer (; ; ca, Juníper Serra i Ferrer; November 24, 1713August 28, 1784) was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and missionary of the Franciscan Order. He is credited with establishing the Franciscan Missions in the Sierr ...
(1713–84) and canonized him in 2015. He founded most of the Franciscan Missions of California. Seventeenth-century bishop of Puebla and Osma (Spain), Don
Juan de Palafox y Mendoza Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (26 June 1600 – 1 October 1659) was a Spanish politician, administrator, and Catholic clergyman in 17th century Spain and a viceroy of Mexico. Palafox was the Bishop of Puebla (1640−1655), and the interim Archbis ...
was beatified in 2011 by
Benedict XVI Pope Benedict XVI ( la, Benedictus XVI; it, Benedetto XVI; german: link=no, Benedikt XVI.; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, , on 16 April 1927) is a retired prelate of the Catholic church who served as the head of the Church and the sovereig ...
. The Niños Mártires de Tlaxcala (child martyrs of Tlaxcala), who died during the initial "spiritual conquest" of the 1520s, were the first lay Catholics from the Americas beatified, done in 1990 by John Paul II.
Juan Diego Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known as Juan Diego (; 1474–1548), was a Chichimec peasant and Marian visionary. He is said to have been granted apparitions of the Virgin Mary on four occasions in December 1531: three at the hill of Tepeyac an ...
, the Nahua who is credited with the vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe was beatified in 1990 and canonized in 2002 by John Paul II in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Church has also canonized a number of twentieth-century Saints of the Cristero War; Father
Miguel Pro José Ramón Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, also known as Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ (January 13, 1891 – November 23, 1927) was a Mexican Jesuit priest executed under the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles on the false charges of bombing and atte ...
was beatified in 1988 by
John Paul II Pope John Paul II ( la, Ioannes Paulus II; it, Giovanni Paolo II; pl, Jan Paweł II; born Karol Józef Wojtyła ; 18 May 19202 April 2005) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his ...
.


Spanish Bourbon Era 1700–1821

With the death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 without heir, the crown of Spain was contested by European powers in the
War of the Spanish Succession The War of the Spanish Succession was a European great power conflict that took place from 1701 to 1714. The death of childless Charles II of Spain in November 1700 led to a struggle for control of the Spanish Empire between his heirs, Phil ...
. The candidate from the French
House of Bourbon The House of Bourbon (, also ; ) is a European dynasty of French origin, a branch of the Capetian dynasty, the royal House of France. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Spani ...
royal line became Philip V of Spain, coming to power in 1714. Initially, in terms of ecclesiastical matters there were no major changes, but the Bourbon monarchs in both France and Spain began making major changes to existing political, ecclesiastical, and economic arrangements, collectively known as the
Bourbon Reforms The Bourbon Reforms ( es, Reformas Borbónicas) consisted of political and economic changes promulgated by the Spanish Crown under various kings of the House of Bourbon, since 1700, mainly in the 18th century. The beginning of the new Crown's ...
. Church-state Bourbon policy shifted toward an increase in state power and a decrease in ecclesiastical. The ''Patronato Rea''l ceding the crown power in the ecclesiastical sphere continued in force, but the centralizing tendencies of the Bourbon state meant that policies were implemented that directly affected clerics. Most prominent of these was the attack on the special privileges of the clergy, the ''fuero eclesiástico'' which exempted churchmen from prosecution in civil courts. Bourbon policy also began to systematically exclude American-born Spaniards from high ecclesiastical and civil office while privileging
peninsular A peninsula (; ) is a landform that extends from a mainland and is surrounded by water on most, but not all of its borders. A peninsula is also sometimes defined as a piece of land bordered by water on three of its sides. Peninsulas exist on all ...
Spaniards. The Bourbon crown diminished the power and influence of parish priests, secularized missions founded by the mendicant orders (meaning that the secular or diocesan clergy rather than the orders were in charge). An even more sweeping change was the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and Spain's overseas territories in 1767. The crown expanded the jurisdiction of the Inquisition to include sedition against the crown. The crown also expanded its reach into ecclesiastical matters by bringing in new laws that empowered families to veto the marriage choices of their offspring. This disproportionately affected elite families, giving them the ability to prevent marriages to those they deemed social or racial unequals. Previously, the regulation of marriage was in the hands of the Church, which consistently supported a couple's decision to marry even when the family objected. With generations of racial mixing in Mexico in a process termed ''mestizaje'', elite families had anxiety about interlopers who were of inferior racial status.


Changes in the Church as an economic institution

In the economic sphere, the Church had acquired a significant amount of property, particularly in Central Mexico, and the Jesuits ran efficient and profitable
hacienda An ''hacienda'' ( or ; or ) is an estate (or '' finca''), similar to a Roman '' latifundium'', in Spain and the former Spanish Empire. With origins in Andalusia, ''haciendas'' were variously plantations (perhaps including animals or orchard ...
s, such as that of Santa Lucía. More important, however, was the Church's taking the role of the major lender for mortgages. Until the nineteenth century in Mexico, there were no banks in the modern sense, so that those needing credit to finance real estate acquisitions turned to the Church as a banker. The Church had accumulated wealth from donations by patrons. That capital was too significant to let sit idle, so it was lent to reputable borrowers, generally at 5 percent interest. Thus, elite land owners had access to credit to finance acquisitions of property and infrastructure improvement, with multi-decade mortgages. Many elite families’ consumption patterns were such that they made little progress on paying off the principal and many estates were very heavily mortgaged to the Church. Estates were also burdened with liens on their income to pay for the salary of the family's ''capellan'', a priest guaranteed an income to say Masses for the founder of the ''capellanía''. The Bourbon crown attempted to eliminate ''capellanías'' entirely. The lower secular clergy was significantly affected, many of whom not having a steady income via a benefice, or having a benefice insufficient to support them. The Bourbon monarchy increasingly tried to gain control over ecclesiastical funds for their own purposes. They eliminated tax exemptions for ecclesiastical donations, put a 15% tax on property passing into the hands of the Church in ''
mortmain Mortmain () is the perpetual, inalienable ownership of real estate by a corporation or legal institution; the term is usually used in the context of its prohibition. Historically, the land owner usually would be the religious office of a church ...
''. Most serious for elite creole families was the crown's law, the Act of Consolidation in 1804, which changed the terms of mortgages. Rather than long-term mortgages with a modest schedule of repayment, the crown sought to gain access to that capital immediately. Thus, families were suddenly faced with paying off the entire mortgage without the wherewithal to gain access to other credit. It was economically ruinous to many elite families and is considered a factor in elite creoles’ alienation from the Spanish crown.


Expulsion of the Jesuits 1767

The Jesuits were an international order with an independence of action due to its special relationship as "soldiers of the pope." The Portuguese expelled the Jesuits in 1759 and the French in 1764, so the Spanish crown's move against them was part of a larger assertion of regal power in Europe and their overseas territories. Since the Jesuits had been the premier educators of elite young men in New Spain and the preferred order if a young man had a vocation for the priesthood, the connection between the Jesuits and creole elites was close. Their churches were magnificent, sometimes more opulent than the cathedral (the main church of a diocese). Their estates were well run and profitable, funding both their educational institutions as well as frontier missions. The expulsion of the Jesuits meant the exile of their priests, many of them to Italy, and for many creole families connected to the order by placing a son there, it meant splitting of elite families. One Mexican Jesuit who was expelled was
Francisco Javier Clavijero Francisco Javier Clavijero Echegaray (sometimes ''Francesco Saverio Clavigero'') (September 9, 1731 – April 2, 1787), was a Mexican Jesuit teacher, scholar and historian. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish provinces (1767), he ...
, who wrote a history of Mexico that extolled the Aztec past.


Charitable Institutions

Pious works (''obras pías'') were expressions of religious belief and the wealthy in Mexico established institutions to aid the poor, sometimes with the support of the Church and the crown. The 1777 establishment of what is now called
Nacional Monte de Piedad The Nacional Monte de Piedad is a not-for-profit institution and pawnshop whose main office is located just off the Zócalo, or main plaza of Mexico City. It was commanded to be built between 1774 and 1777 by Don Pedro Romero de Terreros, the Cou ...
allowed urban dwellers who had any property at all to pawn access to interest-free, small-scale credit. It was established by the Count of
Regla Regla () is one of the 15 municipalities or boroughs (''municipios'' in Spanish) in the city of Havana, Cuba. It comprises the town of Regla, located at the bottom of Havana Bay in a former aborigine settlement named ''Guaicanamar'', Loma Model ...
, who had made a fortune in silver mining, and the pawnshop continues to operate as a national institution in the twenty-first century, with its headquarters still right off the
Zócalo The Zócalo () is the common name of the main square in central Mexico City. Prior to the colonial period, it was the main ceremonial center in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. The plaza used to be known simply as the "Main Square" or "Arms Sq ...
in Mexico City with branches in many other places in Mexico. The Count of Regla's donation is an example of private philanthropy in the late colonial period. A much earlier example was the endowment that conqueror
Hernán Cortés Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca (; ; 1485 – December 2, 1547) was a Spanish ''conquistador'' who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of w ...
gave to establish the ''Hospital de Jesús'', which is the only venue in Mexico City that has a bust of the conqueror. Another eighteenth-century example of private philanthropy that then became a crown institution was the ''Hospicio de Pobres'', the Mexico City Poor House, founded in 1774 with funds of a single ecclesiastical donor, Choirmaster of the Cathedral, Fernando Ortiz Cortés, who became its first director. That institution lasted about a century, until 1871, going from a
poor house A poorhouse or workhouse is a government-run (usually by a county or municipality) facility to support and provide housing for the dependent or needy. Workhouses In England, Wales and Ireland (but not in Scotland), ‘workhouse’ has been the ...
or
work house Work may refer to: * Work (human activity), intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the community ** Manual labour, physical work done by humans ** House work, housework, or homemaking ** Working animal, an animal ...
for adults to mainly being an orphanage for abandoned street children.


The clergy and Mexican independence 1810–1821

The Bourbon Reforms had strengthened the role of the State at the expense of the Catholic Church. Parish priests and other secular clergy in particular experienced not only loss of status, but loss of income. The crown had created a new administrative regime as part of its civil reforms. In indigenous communities the parish priest, who under the Habsburgs had functioned as a representative of both the Church and the crown, was now supplanted by civil authorities. Curates could no longer use corporal punishment, manage confraternity funds, or undertake church construction projects without a license from the crown. The parish priest had often dealt with regulation of public morals, but changes in their powers meant they no longer could mete out punishment for drunkenness, gambling, adultery, or consensual unions without benefit of marriage. This loss of power and influence in local communities contributed not only to the alienation of the lower secular clergy from the crown, but also began to dismantle the judicial state. As the crown strengthened its own civil role, it unwittingly undermined the aura of the sacred from its power, so that the monarch came to be viewed more as an oppressive authoritarian rather than a benevolent father figure. The Bourbon crown's local representatives were often military men or administrators with no reverence for the Church as an institution; no respect for the local priest, whom they sometimes insulted publicly; and no understanding of local life ways. They burst into churches during Mass to arrest Indians, "sometimes shouting obscenities and insulting the priest if he objected."Taylor, "Early Latin American Social History", p. 152. This lower secular clergy was "often accused of leading unruly protests against the acts of royal officials." When
Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader wh ...
invaded Spain in 1808, forcing the Bourbon monarch to abdicate and placing his own brother
Joseph Bonaparte it, Giuseppe-Napoleone Buonaparte es, José Napoleón Bonaparte , house = Bonaparte , father = Carlo Buonaparte , mother = Letizia Ramolino , birth_date = 7 January 1768 , birth_place = Corte, Corsica, Republic ...
on the throne, there was a crisis of legitimacy of crown rule in Spain's overseas empire. Having spent decades alienating the lower clergy by its measures, the Bourbon monarchy found itself without priests supporting it, but who participated in the insurgency for independence. Two lower clerics led it,
Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla Don Miguel Gregorio Antonio Ignacio Hidalgo y Costilla y Gallaga Mandarte Villaseñor (8 May 1753  – 30 July 1811), more commonly known as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla or Miguel Hidalgo (), was a Catholic priest, leader of the Mexican W ...
and
José María Morelos José María Teclo Morelos Pérez y Pavón () (30 September 1765 – 22 December 1815) was a Mexican Catholic priest, statesman and military leader who led the Mexican War of Independence movement, assuming its leadership after the execution of ...
– national heroes in Mexico, with Mexican states named after them. Also extremely important in the struggle for independence was the symbolic role of the
Virgin of Guadalupe Our Lady of Guadalupe ( es, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe ( es, Virgen de Guadalupe), is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus associated with a series of five Marian apparitions, which are believed t ...
for insurgents, but also the symbolic role of the
Virgin of Los Remedios The Virgin of Los Remedios ( es, La Virgen de los Remedios) or Our Lady of Los Remedios ( pt, Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, es, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios) is a title of the Virgin Mary developed by the Trinitarian Order, founded in the lat ...
for the royalists. The insurgency for independence in the period 1810-13 was prominently led by lower secular clerics, but the top levels of episcopal hierarchy strongly condemned it. When Hidalgo was captured by royalist forces, he was first
defrocked Defrocking, unfrocking, degradation, or laicization of clergy is the removal of their rights to exercise the functions of the ordained ministry. It may be grounded on criminal convictions, disciplinary problems, or disagreements over doctrine or ...
as a priest and then turned over to civil authorities and executed. For parish priests, the Bourbon policies of the last 50 years had undermined their authority and distanced the allegiance to the monarch as the patron of the Catholic Church. Events in Spain again profoundly affected politics in New Spain and on the position of the leaders of the episcopal hierarchy. Following the ouster of Napoleon, Spanish liberals created a constitution for the first time, establishing the monarch not as an absolute ruler but as a constitutional monarchy, subject to a legislature or ''cortes''. The Spanish liberal
Constitution of 1812 The Political Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy ( es, link=no, Constitución Política de la Monarquía Española), also known as the Constitution of Cádiz ( es, link=no, Constitución de Cádiz) and as ''La Pepa'', was the first Constituti ...
had many objectionable elements for the clergy in New Spain, even though it pledged in Article 12: "The religion of the Spanish nation is, and ever shall be, the Catholic Apostolic Roman and only true faith; the State shall, by wise and just laws, protect it and prevent the exercise of any other." A mere constitution could be changed and liberalism as a philosophy did not support religious institutions as such. When Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne, he promised to abide by the constitution, but quickly repudiated it, reasserting Bourbon autocratic rule. Spanish liberals pushed back and a coup of 1820 re-established the constitution. In New Spain, the episcopal hierarchy was highly concerned, since their position would be affected. The emergence of royalist military officer
Agustín de Iturbide Agustín de Iturbide (; 27 September 178319 July 1824), full name Agustín Cosme Damián de Iturbide y Arámburu and also known as Agustín of Mexico, was a Mexican army general and politician. During the Mexican War of Independence, he built ...
as a champion of Mexican independence, his alliance with insurgent
Vicente Guerrero Vicente Ramón Guerrero (; baptized August 10, 1782 – February 14, 1831) was one of the leading revolutionary generals of the Mexican War of Independence. He fought against Spain for independence in the early 19th century, and later served as ...
, and the promulgation of the
Plan of Iguala The Plan of Iguala, also known as The Plan of the Three Guarantees ("Plan Trigarante") or Act of Independence of North America, was a revolutionary proclamation promulgated on 24 February 1821, in the final stage of the Mexican War of Independenc ...
in 1821 marked a turning point for the Catholic Church. In the vision it articulated of an independent Mexico, the Plan of Iguala kept the Catholic Church as the exclusive religious institution. The hierarchy saw the Catholic Church's best interests as being with an independent Mexico where they expected to maintain their power and privileges (''fueros''). As nineteenth-century conservative politician and historian
Lucas Alamán Lucas Ignacio Alamán y Escalada ( Guanajuato, New Spain, October 18, 1792 – Mexico City, Mexico, June 2, 1853) was a Mexican scientist, conservative statesman, historian, and writer. He came from an elite Guanajuato family and was well-tr ...
observed, Mexican independence "was the natural result of a simple change of front by the army, instigated by the higher clergy who were antagonistic to the Spanish ''Cortes'' arliamentnbsp;...Independence was achieved by the very ones who had opposed it." With these assurances, the hierarchy supported independence and parish priests gave sermons in support. The Catholic Church had judged well, since it emerged "from the struggles for independence as a much stronger power than the state."


Post-Independence Mexico, 1821-present

The initial period after Mexican independence was not marked by major changes in the role of the Catholic Church in Mexico, but in the mid-nineteenth century Mexican liberals initiated a reform to separate Church and State and undermine the political and economic role of the Church, codified in the
Constitution of 1857 The Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857 ( es, Constitución Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos de 1857), often called simply the Constitution of 1857, was the liberal constitution promulgated in 1857 by Constituent Co ...
. Mexican conservatives challenged those reforms and a decade of civil conflict ensued. Mexican liberals were ultimately the victors and began implementing laws passed in the late 1850s curtailing the power of the Catholic Church. The long presidency of
Porfirio Díaz José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori ( or ; ; 15 September 1830 – 2 July 1915), known as Porfirio Díaz, was a Mexican general and politician who served seven terms as President of Mexico, a total of 31 years, from 28 November 1876 to 6 Decem ...
(1876-1911) created a ''modus vivendi'' with the Church, which ended with the outbreak of the
Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution ( es, Revolución Mexicana) was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from approximately 1910 to 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It resulted in the destruction ...
in 1910. The revolutionary
Constitution of 1917 The Constitution of Mexico, formally the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States ( es, Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos), is the current constitution of Mexico. It was drafted in Santiago de Querétaro, in th ...
strengthened anti-clerical laws. A new Church-State ''modus vivendi'' ensued in 1940. In 1992, the Mexican constitution was amended to remove most of the anti-clerical elements. Roman Catholicism has remained the dominant religion in Mexico since the colonial era.


Independent Mexico in the nineteenth century

The nineteenth century saw initial continuity of church-state relations in Mexico, but Mexican liberals increasingly sought to curtail the power and privilege of the Roman Catholic Church. There were violent conflicts resulting from these differing views during the Liberal Reform, but during the regime of
Porfirio Díaz José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori ( or ; ; 15 September 1830 – 2 July 1915), known as Porfirio Díaz, was a Mexican general and politician who served seven terms as President of Mexico, a total of 31 years, from 28 November 1876 to 6 Decem ...
, a new, more peaceful mode of church-state relations was in place, although the
anticlerical Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
articles of the Constitution of 1857 remained in place.


The First Empire and Early Republic, 1821–1854

The church supported Mexican independence, since the
Plan of Iguala The Plan of Iguala, also known as The Plan of the Three Guarantees ("Plan Trigarante") or Act of Independence of North America, was a revolutionary proclamation promulgated on 24 February 1821, in the final stage of the Mexican War of Independenc ...
's first provision was the continuation of the existing standing and privileges of the Catholic Church. The Church played a crucial role in achieving it. In the immediate aftermath of the September 1821 fall of the Spanish royal government, a Constituent Assembly was created in February 1822 to implement the independence plan to a framework for the new sovereign state. The assembly included priests, so the interests of the Catholic Church were directly represented. Demonstrating the importance of the Catholic Church in the new order, before the assembly convened for the business of creating the governing document of the new state, all went to the cathedral to hear Mass and they took an oath to uphold the exclusivity of Catholicism in Mexico. Vicente Riva Palacio, an important, late nineteenth-century historian of Mexico and political liberal, assessed the significance, contending that "This religious ceremony indicates the supremacy of the clergy, without whose intervention in matters of policy, acts would have been illegal and all authority would have been insecure and weak." The Plan of Iguala had provided for a European prince to rule Mexico. When none presented himself to serve as monarch, in a series of political moves the royalist-turned-insurgent Agustín Iturbide with support of the Catholic Church (and with the opposition of those favoring a republic) became Emperor Agustín I of Mexico. Although most of the peninsular-born priests supported the new order, the archbishop of Mexico resigned, immediately creating a conflict with the Vatican about which entity had the power to name a replacement. The papacy had ceded the right of appointment and other significant privileges to the Spanish crown via the ''
Patronato Real The ''patronato'' () system in Spain (and a similar '' padroado'' system in Portugal) was the expression of royal patronage controlling major appointments of Church officials and the management of Church revenues, under terms of concordats with ...
''. But now that Mexico was a sovereign state, the issue was whether that right was transferred to the new national government. This question was a major issue until the Liberal
Reforma REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, more commonly known as REFORMA, is an affiliate of the American Library Association formed in 1971 to promote library services to Lat ...
and the definitive defeat of conservatives in 1867 with the fall of the
Second Mexican Empire The Second Mexican Empire (), officially the Mexican Empire (), was a constitutional monarchy established in Mexico by Mexican monarchists in conjunction with the Second French Empire. The period is sometimes referred to as the Second French i ...
. With the triumph of the liberals, the Catholic Church lost its exclusive standing as the only allowable religion and the Mexican State ceased to assert control over its patronage. But in the early Republic, established in 1824, the Catholic Church exerted both power and influence and sought to establish its complete independence of civil authority. The Mexican state asserted the right of what it called the ''Patronato Nacional'', that is the transfer of the ''Patronato Real'' with all rights and responsibilities was an essential element of political sovereignty, codified in the Constitution of 1824.Timothy J. Henderson, "Church and State: 1821–1910," in ''Encyclopedia of Mexico'', vol. 1, p. 254. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997. The papacy countered that the ''Patronato'' reverted to the Vatican now that the political situation was transformed, and that Mexico needed to petition to receive the concession in its own right. The Vatican's position was that until that occurred, replacement of ecclesiastics reverted to the ruling hierarchy of the dioceses.J. Lloyd Mecham, ''Church and State in Latin America'' p. 342. The effect of independence on the Catholic Church in Mexico and the patronage dispute meant that many dioceses lacked a bishop when one died or left Mexico, since who had the power to appoint a new one was not resolved. In Puebla, Mexico's second largest city, there was no bishop from 1829 until 1840. Even worse for many of the faithful in Mexico was the lack of parish priests, who had been important figures in local communities, despite all the Bourbon crown's efforts to undermine their authority.


Liberal reform of 1833

Anticlericalism Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
of Mexican liberals who opposed the institutional powers of the Catholic Church and its continued dominance in economic matters found expression when military hero
Antonio López de Santa Anna Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón (; 21 February 1794 – 21 June 1876),Callcott, Wilfred H., "Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez De,''Handbook of Texas Online'' Retrieved 18 April 2017. usually known as Santa Ann ...
was elected president in 1833 and, rather than exercising power himself, retired to his estate in Veracruz, leaving the government in the hands of his vice president, radical liberal Valentín Gómez Farías. Gómez Farías and liberals in the legislature enacted strong anticlerical measures that were a foretaste of the liberal reforms of the 1850s and 1860s.
José María Luis Mora José María Luis Mora Lamadrid (12 October 1794, Chamacuero, Guanajuato – 14 July 1850, Paris, France) was a priest, lawyer, historian, politician and liberal ideologist. Considered one of the first supporters of liberalism in Mexico, he fou ...
, a secular priest, was a force behind secularizing education, along with Lorenzo Zavala. The government asserted its right to appoint clerics, rather than the Church hierarchy, claiming the ''Patronato Nacional''.D.F. Stevens, "Valentín Gómez Farías" in ''Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture'', vol. 3, p. 78. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996 Catholic missions were dissolved and their assets confiscated by the State; the educational system was secularized, which ended religious dominance in education; the State ceased collecting tithes for the support of the Catholic Church, and declared that monastic vows were no longer binding. However sweeping these reforms were, liberals did not end Catholicism as the exclusive religion of Mexico. This brief period of reform ended when a coalition of conservatives and the Mexican army forced Gómez Farías's resignation in 1834.


Liberal reform (1857–1861)

Starting in 1855,
Benito Juárez Benito Pablo Juárez García (; 21 March 1806 – 18 July 1872) was a Mexican liberal politician and lawyer who served as the 26th president of Mexico from 1858 until his death in office in 1872. As a Zapotec, he was the first indigenous pre ...
issued decrees nationalizing church property, separating church and state, and suppressing religious institutes. Church properties were confiscated and basic civil and political rights were denied to religious institutes and the clergy. The Church supported the regime of Juárez's successor,
Porfirio Diaz Porfirio is a given name in Spanish, derived from the Greek Porphyry (''porphyrios'' "purple-clad"). It can refer to: * Porfirio Salinas – Mexican-American artist * Porfirio Armando Betancourt – Honduran football player * Porfirio Barba-Jac ...
, who was opposed to land reform. The first of the Liberal Reform Laws were passed in 1855. The Juárez Law, named after Benito Juárez, restricted clerical privileges, specifically the authority of Church courts, by subverting their authority to civil law. It was conceived of as a moderate measure, rather than abolish church courts altogether. The move opened latent divisions in the country. Archbishop Lázaro de la Garza in Mexico City condemned the Law as an attack on the Church itself, and clerics went into rebellion in the city of
Puebla Puebla ( en, colony, settlement), officially Free and Sovereign State of Puebla ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 217 municipalities and its cap ...
in 1855–56. Bishop of Michoacan Clemente de Jesús Munguía also vociferously opposed the reform laws and the requirement for Mexicans to swear fealty to the liberal
Constitution of 1857 The Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857 ( es, Constitución Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos de 1857), often called simply the Constitution of 1857, was the liberal constitution promulgated in 1857 by Constituent Co ...
. Other laws attacked the privileges (''fueros'') traditionally enjoyed by the military, which was significant since the military had been instrumental in putting and keeping Mexican governments in office since Emperor
Agustín de Iturbide Agustín de Iturbide (; 27 September 178319 July 1824), full name Agustín Cosme Damián de Iturbide y Arámburu and also known as Agustín of Mexico, was a Mexican army general and politician. During the Mexican War of Independence, he built ...
in the 1820s. The next Reform Law was called the
Lerdo Law The Lerdo Law ( Spanish: ''Ley Lerdo'') was the common name for the Reform law that was formally known as the Confiscation of Law and Urban Ruins of the Civil and Religious Corporations of Mexico. It targeted not only property owned by the Catho ...
, after Miguel Lerdo de Tejada. Under this new law, the government began to confiscate Church land. This proved to be considerably more controversial than the Juárez Law. The purpose of the law was to convert lands held by corporate entities such as the Church into private property, favoring those who already lived on it. It was thought that such would encourage development and the government could raise revenue by taxing the process. Lerdo de Tejada was the Minister of Finance and required that the Church sell much of its urban and rural land at reduced prices. If the Church did not comply, the government would hold public auctions. The Law also stated that the Church could not gain possession of properties in the future. However, the Lerdo Law did not apply only to the Church. It stated that no corporate body could own land. Broadly defined, this would include ''ejidos'', or communal land owned by Indian villages. Initially, these ''ejidos'' were exempt from the law, but eventually these Indian communities suffered an extensive loss of land. By 1857, additional anti-clerical legislation such as the Iglesias Law (named after
José María Iglesias José María Iglesias Inzáurraga (January 5, 1823 – December 17, 1891) was a Mexican lawyer, professor, journalist and liberal politician. He is known as author of the Iglesias law, an anticlerical law regulating ecclesiastical fees and aime ...
) regulated the collection of clerical fees from the poor and prohibited clerics from charging for
baptism Baptism (from grc-x-koine, βάπτισμα, váptisma) is a form of ritual purification—a characteristic of many religions throughout time and geography. In Christianity, it is a Christian sacrament of initiation and adoption, almost ...
s, marriages, or funeral services. Marriage became a civil contract, although no provision for divorce was authorized. Registry of births, marriages and deaths became a civil affair, with President Benito Juárez registering his newborn son in Veracruz. The number of religious holidays was reduced and several holidays to commemorate national events introduced. Religious celebrations outside churches, such as processions and outdoor Masses, were forbidden, use of church bells restricted, and clerical dress was prohibited in public. One other significant Reform Law was the Law for the Nationalization of Ecclesiastical Properties, which would eventually secularize nearly all of the country's monasteries and convents. The government had hoped that this law would bring in enough revenue to secure a loan from the United States, but sales would prove disappointing from the time it was passed all the way to the early 20th century.


Porfiriato (1876–1911)

Liberal general
Porfirio Díaz José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori ( or ; ; 15 September 1830 – 2 July 1915), known as Porfirio Díaz, was a Mexican general and politician who served seven terms as President of Mexico, a total of 31 years, from 28 November 1876 to 6 Decem ...
, who became president in 1876, strengthened the Mexican government ties with the Catholic Church with an agreement formulated in 1905. The Church's influence over Mexico increased due to the large number of changes that occurred while Díaz was in power. These institutional reforms included: administrative reorganization, improved training of the laity, the expansion of the Catholic press, an expansion of Roman Catholic education, and the growth of the Church's influence in rural areas. The lack of enforcement of
anti-clerical Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
laws by Díaz can also be attributed to the profound influence of his wife, who was a devout Catholic. During the period 1876 to 1911, relations between the
Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...
and the
Mexican government The Federal government of Mexico (alternately known as the Government of the Republic or ' or ') is the national government of the United Mexican States, the central government established by its constitution to share sovereignty over the republ ...
were stable. This was a sharp contrast to the political discord that led to outright warfare between Mexican liberals who implemented anti-clerical laws during the ''
Reforma REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, more commonly known as REFORMA, is an affiliate of the American Library Association formed in 1971 to promote library services to Lat ...
'' (1855–1861) and conservatives, who sought continuing privileges for the Catholic Church. The
War of the Reform The Reform War, or War of Reform ( es, Guerra de Reforma), also known as the Three Years' War ( es, Guerra de los Tres Años), was a civil war in Mexico lasting from January 11, 1858 to January 11, 1861, fought between liberals and conservativ ...
(1858–61) ended with the defeat of conservatives. Then the liberal government of
Benito Juárez Benito Pablo Juárez García (; 21 March 1806 – 18 July 1872) was a Mexican liberal politician and lawyer who served as the 26th president of Mexico from 1858 until his death in office in 1872. As a Zapotec, he was the first indigenous pre ...
defaulted on foreign loans in 1861, opening the door to foreign intervention supported by Mexican conservatives. With the fall of the
Second Mexican Empire The Second Mexican Empire (), officially the Mexican Empire (), was a constitutional monarchy established in Mexico by Mexican monarchists in conjunction with the Second French Empire. The period is sometimes referred to as the Second French i ...
, liberal presidents Benito Juárez and, following his death,
Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada y Corral (; 24 April 1823 – 21 April 1889) was Mexican liberal politician and jurist who served as the 27th president of Mexico from 1872 to 1876. A successor to Benito Juárez, who died in office in July 1872, Le ...
implemented
anti-clerical Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
laws with even greater zeal. By contrast Porfirio Díaz was a political pragmatist and not an ideologue, likely seeing that if the religious question were re-opened there would be renewed political discord in Mexico and possible war with the U.S. "Persecution of the Church, whether or not the clergy enters into the matter, means war, and such a war, the Government can win against its own people only through the humiliating, despotic, costly and dangerous support of the United States. Without its religion, Mexico is irretrievably lost." When he rebelled against Lerdo, Díaz had the tacit and perhaps the explicit support of the Church. When he came to power in 1877, Díaz left the anticlerical laws in place, but the central government no longer enforced them. This ''modus vivendi'' with the Catholic Church was termed his "conciliation policy." A key player in the conciliation policy was Eulogio Gillow y Zavala, a wealthy and well-connected cleric, whom Díaz met via agricultural expositions. Gillow's appointment as archbishop of Oaxaca, Díaz's home state, and his personal relationship with Díaz, positioned him to influence church-state relations in Mexico. The conciliation policy meant that the Catholic Church regained a level of freedom of action, but one not protected by the constitution, so that their loyalty or prudence in criticism of the Diáz regime, or both, were in the Church's best interest. In a number of regions, the Church re-emerged, but others saw a less full role. Individual Mexican states in Mexico's federated republic could and did differ in their constitutions, a manifestation of Mexico's regional differences. Some states amended their constitutions to enshrine anticlerical measures of the Constitution of 1857, but ten states retained their constitutions without those amendments. Diaz strengthened the Mexican government ties with the Catholic Church with an agreement formulated in 1905. The Church's influence in Mexico increased while Díaz was in power. These institutional reforms included: administrative reorganization, improved training of the laity, the expansion of the Catholic press, an expansion of Catholic education, and the growth of the Church's influence in rural areas. The lack of enforcement of
anticlerical Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
laws by Diaz can also be partially attributed to the profound influence of his second wife,
Carmen Romero Rubio Fabiana Sebastiana Maria Carmen Romero Rubio y Castelló (20 January 1864 – 25 June 1944), second wife of Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico. Youth Carmen Romero Rubio was born on January 20 of 1864 in Tula, Tamaulipas to a wealthy family ...
, who was a devout Catholic. She became a go-between to alert ecclesiastical establishments, such as nunneries, if anticlerical forces attempted to enforce statues against the Church. During the late Porfiriato, the Jesuits were allowed to return to Mexico and they were to play an important role in twentieth-century political struggles in Mexico. The Catholic Church recovered economically, with intermediaries holding land and buildings for it. It also pursued charity work inspired by Catholic social doctrine. In addition, it had newspapers promoting its positions. In 1895, the
Virgin of Guadalupe Our Lady of Guadalupe ( es, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe ( es, Virgen de Guadalupe), is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus associated with a series of five Marian apparitions, which are believed t ...
was crowned "Queen of Mexico", in very public ceremonies.Krauze, ''Mexico: Biography of Power'', p. 227. In an apparent ''quid pro quo'', the Fifth Provincial Council of Mexico ordered Mexican Catholics to "obey civil authority." Despite an increasingly visible role of the Catholic Church during the Porfiriato and much better Church-State relations, the Vatican was unsuccessful in getting the reinstatement of a formal relationship with the papacy. It was not until 1992 under the presidency of
Carlos Salinas de Gortari Carlos Salinas de Gortari CYC DMN (; born 3 April 1948) is a Mexican economist and politician who served as 60th president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. Affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), earlier in his career he wor ...
that the Holy See – Mexico relations were normalized.


The Mexican Revolution


The end of the Porfiriato

Although the anticlerical provisions of the liberal
Constitution of 1857 The Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857 ( es, Constitución Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos de 1857), often called simply the Constitution of 1857, was the liberal constitution promulgated in 1857 by Constituent Co ...
theoretically remained in force, in fact, Díaz had come to a ''modus vivendi'' with the Catholic Church in the latter years of his presidency. As Díaz aged the question of presidential succession became important. Díaz ran again in 1910, despite previously saying he would not, but his initial announcement set off great political activity and the rise of
Francisco Madero Francisco Ignacio Madero González (; 30 October 1873 – 22 February 1913) was a Mexican businessman, revolutionary, writer and statesman, who became the 37th president of Mexico from 1911 until he was deposed in a coup d'etat in February 1 ...
, a member of a rich, estate-owning family in the state of Coahuila. Anti-Díaz forces coalesced behind Madero, whom Díaz arrested and imprisoned prior to the election. Madero escaped from jail, fled to the United States, and proclaimed the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling for the ouster of Díaz. This was accomplished in May 1911 after a series of revolts in the north and in the state of Morelos, just 50 miles from Mexico City. With Díaz's ouster and exile, Madero was poised to take power in Mexico, but did so only after nationwide elections. The Catholic Church was already on edge about what changes might occur in this new government, perhaps particularly so since Madero himself was a follower of spiritism, and not obviously or even nominally Catholic.


Madero, 1911–1913

Although Francisco Madero's 1910 Plan of San Luis Potosí called for the overthrow of the Díaz government, there was little in it explicitly addressing the Catholic Church or religion. However, the Church had concerns about the Plan's call for land reform, which might have affected properties held for the Church, but more alarming was the Plan's call to reform public education and expand it. Madero was not overtly anticlerical but many of his supporters were, and the Catholic Church saw the need to organize opposition. Under Madero this was possible, since as an ardent adherent of democracy, he valued the right and exercise of freedom of expression and association, including the formation of political parties. The National Catholic Party in Mexico was organized with the support of the Church but not with its direct involvement in the interim between the exile of Díaz and the election of Madero. It advocated for "fair elections, democracy, and the application of Catholic principles (as expressed in ''
Rerum novarum ''Rerum novarum'' (from its incipit, with the direct translation of the Latin meaning "of revolutionary change"), or ''Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor'', is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891. It is an open letter, pa ...
'' and the Catholic congresses that had met to discuss these issues)".Schell, "An Honorable Avocation for Ladies", p. 79. They were accused of actively disseminating information that undermined public confidence in Madero and his policies. Even before Madero had been officially elected president, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico wrote his superiors in Washington that " e Roman Catholic Church and the party that takes its name have become violently antagonistic to Madero, and are busily engaged through the Republic in criticizing his motives, decrying his policies, and censuring the weakness and vacillation which is supposed to characterize his direction of affairs." Madero was elected in a landslide and took the oath of office, despite the National Catholic Party's attempt to undermine his popularity. As a political novice who had never held office before becoming president, Madero found governing Mexico extremely challenging. In supporting freedom of the press, the Mexican press was ruthless in its criticisms of Madero. In supporting the formation of unions, unions struck and made life difficult for city dwellers. Peasants saw his inaction on land reform as a betrayal, and in Morelos
Emiliano Zapata Emiliano Zapata Salazar (; August 8, 1879 – April 10, 1919) was a Mexican revolutionary. He was a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, the main leader of the people's revolution in the Mexican state of Morelos, and the ins ...
drew up the
Plan of Ayala The Plan of Ayala (Spanish: ''Plan de Ayala'') was a document drafted by revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution. In it, Zapata denounced President Francisco Madero for his perceived betrayal of the revolutionary idea ...
in opposition. There were revolts by former supporters, such as
Pascual Orozco Pascual Orozco Vázquez, Jr. (in contemporary documents, sometimes spelled "Oroszco") (28 January 1882 – 30 August 1915) was a Mexican revolutionary leader who rose up to support Francisco I. Madero in late 1910 to depose long-time presi ...
, suppressed by General
Victoriano Huerta José Victoriano Huerta Márquez (; 22 December 1854 – 13 January 1916) was a general in the Mexican Federal Army and 39th President of Mexico, who came to power by coup against the democratically elected government of Francisco I. Madero wi ...
, who was a senior general under Díaz that Madero relied upon, having dismissed the revolutionary fighters who helped bring him to power, keeping the Federal Army. They were loyal to Madero right up to the point when they fomented a successful coup against him in February 1913.


Huerta, 1913-14

The Federal Army, the Catholic hierarchy, and the National Catholic Party, along with supporters of the Porfirian order and international investors, as well as the government of the United States, supported the coup against Madero and his vice president, though their assassination was not necessarily anticipated. General Huerta became head of state, vowing to restore the Porfirian order, in what many have called a reactionary government. Catholic support was not uniform, however, with some objecting to the coup that ended Mexico's experiment in democracy. However, the Church as an institution chose the losing side when it opted for Huerta. "Catholics seemingly feared radicalism more than they feared dictatorship," in the view of one historian. Madero as a martyr to democracy did what he was unable to do since his election, that is, bring together disparate forces into action against Huerta's government, while the National Catholic Party and the clergy stood with it. When Huerta was ousted in 1914, the Catholic Church and the National Catholic Party suffered the consequences of its support of his government.


The Constitutionalists

The main faction in the north of Mexico was Constitutionalists, led by the governor of Coahuila and formerly part of the Díaz government,
Venustiano Carranza José Venustiano Carranza de la Garza (; 29 December 1859 – 21 May 1920) was a Mexican wealthy land owner and politician who was Governor of Coahuila when the constitutionally elected president Francisco I. Madero was overthrown in a February ...
. The Constitutionalists took their name from their support of the liberal
Constitution of 1857 The Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857 ( es, Constitución Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos de 1857), often called simply the Constitution of 1857, was the liberal constitution promulgated in 1857 by Constituent Co ...
, deeming the Huerta government illegitimate. Because the Catholic Church and the National Catholic Party had supported Huerta, they were a target of the liberal Constitutionalists. As with liberals in the nineteenth century who sought to reduce the Catholic Church's power, the Constitutionalist were not necessarily anti-Catholic or atheists. As one scholar assessed the Constitutionalists’ position, "there seems to be no reason to reject the protestations of Mexican officials that the reform was not aimed at the Church in its spiritual sphere, but at the clergy in their temporal activities." Carranza himself was staunchly anticlerical. During the Constitutionalist struggle against Huerta as early October 1913, following the February Huerta coup, Carranza was clearly planning on strictly enforcing the Laws of the ''
Reforma REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, more commonly known as REFORMA, is an affiliate of the American Library Association formed in 1971 to promote library services to Lat ...
,'' which had been ignored in the later Díaz regime, though not repealed. The Constitutionalist targeting of clergy, churches, and sacred objects was likely no surprise. In areas controlled by the Constitutionalists, there was tremendous violence against church property and holy objects, including the smashing of religious statues and stabling horses in churches. The practice was defended by a Constitutionalist general, who said it was "for the deliberate purpose of showing the Indians that lightning would not strike – that the Constitutionalists were not the enemies of God as the priests told them." The Constitutionalists’ best general, Alvaro Obregón, took anticlerical measures when he entered Mexico City in triumph, imposing a fine of 500,000 pesos on the Church to be paid to the Revolutionary Council for Aid to the People. He also jailed and expelled nearly 200 clerics in Mexico City.


Zapatistas and religion

Venustiano Carranza assumed the presidency on May 1, 1915, but the country was not at peace. Emiliano Zapata and peasants in Morelos continued fighting against the central government. The differences between the revolutionaries of northern Mexico and those in the center and south were significant and made the conflict regional. Those fighting in Morelos were peasants seeking the return of their lands. Rather than armies of movement, as in the north of Mexico, the fighters were guerrillas. A significant difference between the Zapatistas and the Constitutionalists was cultural, since the Zapatistas fought under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe and often had a picture of her or other saints on their big hats "to protect them".Krauze, ''Mexico'', p. 297. Many leftist intellectuals and northern Constitutionalists disdained the Zapatistas as too Indian, too Catholic, the embodiment of traditional Mexico that the liberals sought to transform and modernize. In Morelos, priests were not persecuted, and some actively supported the guerrilla struggle. The priest in Cuautla typed the first copy of the
Plan of Ayala The Plan of Ayala (Spanish: ''Plan de Ayala'') was a document drafted by revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution. In it, Zapata denounced President Francisco Madero for his perceived betrayal of the revolutionary idea ...
; a priest gave Zapata his beautiful horse for the war. In Tepoztlán, the priest translated
Nahuatl Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have small ...
documents from Zapata's home community of Anenecuilco. Alvaro Obregón organized urban workers in "Red Battalions" to go to Morelos to fight the Zapatistas as well as the followers of Pancho Villa in the north. The Zapatistas have the distinction of opposing every government from Díaz to Madero to Huerta to Carranza for failing to protect and restore their lands to them. Carranza's solution to the problem was to arrange Zapata's assassination in 1919, effectively ending the struggle in Morelos against the central government.


Church-State relations, 1917–1940

The revolutionary faction that won the
Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution ( es, Revolución Mexicana) was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from approximately 1910 to 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It resulted in the destruction ...
began to consolidate power after 1917. The
Constitution of 1917 The Constitution of Mexico, formally the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States ( es, Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos), is the current constitution of Mexico. It was drafted in Santiago de Querétaro, in th ...
strengthened the State's power against the Church. For the first two presidents,
Venustiano Carranza José Venustiano Carranza de la Garza (; 29 December 1859 – 21 May 1920) was a Mexican wealthy land owner and politician who was Governor of Coahuila when the constitutionally elected president Francisco I. Madero was overthrown in a February ...
(1915–1920) and
Álvaro Obregón Álvaro Obregón Salido (; 17 February 1880 – 17 July 1928) better known as Álvaro Obregón was a Sonoran-born general in the Mexican Revolution. A pragmatic centrist, natural soldier, and able politician, he became the 46th President of Me ...
(1920–24), the State could have rigorously enforced anticlerical provisions, but there were many pressing issues to deal with in consolidating power and likely they were unwilling to provoke conflict with the Church at this juncture. Under President Calles (1924–28), and continued dominance in power when he ruled as Maximum Chief, there was extreme Church-State conflict. Calles was determined to enforce the anticlerical articles of the Constitution. The conflict was ended by mediation in 1929. Under the presidency of
Lázaro Cárdenas Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (; 21 May 1895 – 19 October 1970) was a Mexican army officer and politician who served as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Born in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, to a working-class family, Cárdenas joined the Me ...
(1934–40) there was less conflict. With his successor,
Manuel Ávila Camacho Manuel Ávila Camacho (; 24 April 1897 – 13 October 1955) was a Mexican politician and military leader who served as the President of Mexico from 1940 to 1946. Despite participating in the Mexican Revolution and achieving a high rank, he cam ...
(1940–1946), Church-State relations entered a new period of conciliation, similar to the Porfiriato.


1917 Mexican Constitution

The 1917 Mexican Constitution included many anti-clerical elements. Five elements in this Constitution were aimed at reducing the Catholic Church's influence in Mexican domestic affairs. Article 3 enforced secular education in Mexican schools. Monastic vows and orders were outlawed in Article 5. Article 24 prevented public worship outside the confines of the Church buildings. According to article 27, religious institutions were denied the right to acquire, hold, or administer real property. Furthermore, all real estate held by religious institutions through third parties, like hospitals and schools, was declared national property. Finally in article 130, it declared all basic civil responsibilities like voting or commenting on public affairs was taken away from Church officials. But Article 130's most important legal power against the Church was that it declared the State the final arbiter of public religious worship, including the power to limit the number of priests and requiring priests to register with the government as "professionals". Mexican bishops protested the articles from their exile in Texas and continued to object to the anticlerical articles in subsequent years. The Mexican government was firm in their attempt to eliminate the Catholic Church's legal existence in Mexico, but that led to decades-long conflict between Church and State. The Church immediately rejected the constitution and "call don Catholics to fight for its abolition." The constitution did not ban the Church as an institution, or prevent Mexicans from practicing Catholicism, but it forced some Catholics into a dilemma of respecting civil law or their conscience when the government enforced the anticlerical laws the 1920s. Some Catholics took up arms against the government.


Anticlericalism of Calles and violent church-state conflict 1926–1929

When Northern
caudillo A ''caudillo'' ( , ; osp, cabdillo, from Latin , diminutive of ''caput'' "head") is a type of personalist leader wielding military and political power. There is no precise definition of ''caudillo'', which is often used interchangeably with " ...
Plutarco Elías Calles Plutarco Elías Calles (25 September 1877 – 19 October 1945) was a general in the Mexican Revolution and a Sonoran politician, serving as President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928. The 1924 Calles presidential campaign was the first populist ...
was elected president in 1924, he was determined to enforce the constitutional provisions on religion. Calles was a known
anticlerical Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to ...
, more fanatical in his ideology than many other Constitutionalists, perhaps because he felt the sting of his status as a natural son of parents who had not married in the Church, nor had they bothered to baptize him; his father had abandoned him and his mother died when he was three. Some scholars view his illegitimacy as fundamentally shaping his attitude toward religion and the Catholic Church. His Sonoran origins also likely played a factor in his stance against the Catholic Church, since the North was far less traditionally Catholic than what some called "Old Mexico", the Center and South, with large indigenous populations, many large sized cities, and a strong Church presence dating from the sixteenth century. In the North there were vast spaces with few cities or towns and an indigenous population that was largely nomadic and converted to Christianity via the few missions established in the region. Also not to be discounted is the influence of the United States, a largely Protestant country but with separation of Church and State, and the efforts of mainline, U.S.-based Protestants in northern Mexico, who in the nineteenth century saw Mexico as a country ripe for the message of Protestant missionaries. A small but significant number of Protestants participated in the Mexican Revolution and they saw the diminution of the power of the Catholic Church aiding their own cause. In June 1926, Calles enacted a decree often referred to as "Calles Law." Under this provision, Article 130 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution was to be enforced. Catholic Church officials were not only alarmed by the suddenness of Calles's decision, but also by the profound shift in Church-State interactions. The crux of the conflict for the Church hierarchy was the assertion of State power over the autonomy of the Church in personnel matters. The State decreed the compulsory registration of the clergy and thereby put priests under the authority of the State rather than the Catholic hierarchy. The State could and did limit the number and nationality of clergy permitted in the country. Foreign priests were denied licenses. Although the Church had seminaries in Mexico that trained priests for placement in Mexico, there were many foreign priests, particularly from Spain, who were excluded from Mexico on nationalist grounds. In theory the State could have approved Mexican priests who were unacceptable to the Catholic hierarchy. By enforcing regulations that deemed priests as professionals like doctors or lawyers, the State asserted its power to control the institution but it also challenged the Church's function in the spiritual sphere. The Church had already ceased to contest the constitutional restrictions on its holding real property, forcing the sale of its landed estates during the liberal ''
Reforma REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, more commonly known as REFORMA, is an affiliate of the American Library Association formed in 1971 to promote library services to Lat ...
''. Nineteenth-century liberal priests, such as
José María Luis Mora José María Luis Mora Lamadrid (12 October 1794, Chamacuero, Guanajuato – 14 July 1850, Paris, France) was a priest, lawyer, historian, politician and liberal ideologist. Considered one of the first supporters of liberalism in Mexico, he fou ...
, and conservative intellectual and politician
Lucas Alamán Lucas Ignacio Alamán y Escalada ( Guanajuato, New Spain, October 18, 1792 – Mexico City, Mexico, June 2, 1853) was a Mexican scientist, conservative statesman, historian, and writer. He came from an elite Guanajuato family and was well-tr ...
, supported the diminution of Church power in the economic sphere, but not the spiritual sphere. The suppression of the Church included the closing of many churches and the killing or forced marriage of priests. The persecution was most severe in Tabasco under the
atheist Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no ...
governor
Tomás Garrido Canabal Tomás Garrido Canabal (September 20, 1891 – April 8, 1943) was a Mexican politician, revolutionary and atheist activist. Garrido Canabal served governor of the state of Tabasco from 1920 to 1924 and from 1931 to 1934. He was noted for his ...
. Events relating to this were famously portrayed in the novel ''
The Power and the Glory ''The Power and the Glory'' is a 1940 novel by British author Graham Greene. The title is an allusion to the doxology often recited at the end of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen." ...
'' by
Graham Greene Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquir ...
. In 1926, the Church hierarchy declared what was in essence a clerical strike, ceasing to say Mass or administer the sacraments. For the Mexican faithful, the suspension of the sacraments brought the Church-State conflict into their daily lives. The episcopal hierarchy supported boycotts on businesses, petitioned the government to not implement the proposed changes, and used other peaceful means of persuading and pressuring the State. Those who took up arms in the Cristero Rebellion did not receive the support of the Mexican Catholic hierarchy. In Michoacan, Archbishop
Leopoldo Ruiz y Flóres Leopoldo Ruiz y Flóres (13 November 1865 – 12 December 1941) was a Mexican prelate of the Catholic Church who served as Archbishop of Morelia from 1911 until his death in 1941. He was previously Bishop of Léon from 1900 to 1907 and Archbishop ...
refused to support the revolt and was accused of cowardliness and even freemasonry. However, the archbishop has been seen as being "guided by a keener appreciation of the ultimate realities of power than were those adamant clerics who pressed the Church to engage in mortal combat." When the Church-State negotiations resulted in the ''Arreglos'' that did not change the anticlerical articles of the constitution but did result in a ''modus vivendi'' similar to that in the ''Porfiriato'', Archbishop Ruiz y Flores supported them. Even though Archbishop Ruiz did not support the Cristeros’ resort to violence, he did advocate a response that profoundly affected the relations between the hierarchy and the laity. Since priests were the target of State action and since church buildings were no longer available for celebration of the sacraments, the archbishop enacted practices that in many ways harkened back to the early Church, with a more empowered laity and decentralized, secret worship, often in people's homes. Lay women in some cases became religious leaders in their communities, leading the liturgy of worship but in the absence of a priest, there was no communion. Catholics were urged to strengthen their inner faith, but for those who engaged in violent action what they wanted was the Church's blessing. As a long-term strategy, the archbishop put confidence in the survival of the faith, despite the political assault by the Mexican state. For most in rural Mexico, religion was an integral way of being, what urban secular Mexicans considered the "superstition" of backward peasants and a key reason that attacks on the Catholic Church as an institution were necessary to modernize Mexico.


Catholic lay organizations

For the Catholic laity, the restrictions on their ability to exercise freedom of worship in public settings and the closure of churches in their communities may have had greater resonance than the matter of State regulation of the clergy. Community celebrations of their patron saint, processions, pilgrimage to religious sites, and other visible manifestations of religious belief undermined the essence of many rural communities. The absence of a priest to baptize children, prepare Catholics for confirmation, hear confession, perform marriages, and administer the last rites of Extreme Unction before death, meant that the rhythm of the sacramental life cycle for individuals and their families as well as their larger community was being suppressed. Lay organizations became important during the crisis, a strategy of the hierarchy to strengthen Catholic resistance without the hierarchy's direct intervention, But there is also evidence of widespread lay Catholic desire to passively resist the anticlerical measures, as opposed to the active and often violent resistance of the Cristero fighters. A coalition of urban groups was brought together under the umbrella of the
National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty ( es, Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa – LNDLR) was a Mexican Catholic religious civil rights organization formed in March 1925 that played a crucial role in the Cristero War ...
, created in 1925, in the early part of Calles's presidential term, but prior to the 1926 promulgation of the Calles Law that same year. The Mexico City-based organization was created by former members of the short-lived National Catholic Party (''Partido Católico Nacional''); the Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies (''Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas''); a Catholic student organization, the
Jesuit , image = Ihs-logo.svg , image_size = 175px , caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits , abbreviation = SJ , nickname = Jesuits , formation = , founders ...
-led Catholic Association of Mexican Youth (''Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana'', ACJM); the
Knights of Columbus The Knights of Columbus (K of C) is a global Catholic fraternal service order founded by Michael J. McGivney on March 29, 1882. Membership is limited to practicing Catholic men. It is led by Patrick E. Kelly, the order's 14th Supreme Knight. ...
; the National Parents' Association; and the National Catholic Labor Confederation. The League had by June of its founding year 1925 about 36,000 members and chapters in almost every state of the country.


Catholic women and the church-state crisis

In 1912, Catholic women had organized themselves in Mexico City into the Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies (''Unión de Damas Católicos Mexicanas'', UDCM), "as a nonpolitical lay organization dedicated to re-Catholicizing Mexican society." Their work during the military phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) had been more in the social realm rather than the political, attempting to aid the urban poor who had suffered under Porfirio Díaz's economic policies. These Mexican elite women were responding to the 1891 papal encyclical ''
Rerum novarum ''Rerum novarum'' (from its incipit, with the direct translation of the Latin meaning "of revolutionary change"), or ''Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor'', is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891. It is an open letter, pa ...
'' for Catholic activism on behalf of the poor and working class against the new challenge of industrialization and capitalism. Their aid of the poor was an extension of their family role as Catholic nurturers and educators in the domestic sphere. Both lay and religious women also performed valuable services to the Catholic community in a less formalized fashion. They took leadership roles during the unsettled times that made priests the target of regulation and persecution, as an extraordinary measure, but that empowerment has been seen to have affected the emergence of different roles for Catholic women in the twentieth century.


End of the Cristero Rebellion, 1929

After three years’ of widespread violence (1926–1929), the U.S. brokered an agreement (''Arreglos'') that can be seen as an armistice between Church and State, since the anticlerical constitutional articles remained in force, but the Arreglos brought the conflict to an end. Brokered by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, Calles and the Mexican Catholic hierarchy came to an agreement that left the anticlerical elements of the
Constitution of 1917 The Constitution of Mexico, formally the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States ( es, Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos), is the current constitution of Mexico. It was drafted in Santiago de Querétaro, in th ...
in place, but brought an end to the conflict. Many Cristero fighters and supporters of the Church saw the hierarchy's settlement as "cowardly" and selling out the Church. However, it has been argued that the long-term interests of the Church were forwarded by coming to the settlement given that the State had backed away from its enforcement of the anticlerical articles of the Constitution.


Cristero saints

Although the Church hierarchy at the time did not support Cristero violence, it did recognize some of those who died fighting for religious rights in Mexico. In September 1988 the Vatican beatified Father
Miguel Pro José Ramón Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, also known as Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ (January 13, 1891 – November 23, 1927) was a Mexican Jesuit priest executed under the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles on the false charges of bombing and atte ...
, who had been summarily executed in crucifix posture; further beatifications and some canonizations occurred in 2000 and 2005, considered Saints of the Cristero War. This recognition can be considered in the context of Mexican national politics. In the July 1988 presidential elections, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had evolved from the party Calles had founded in 1929, was elected by the narrowest of margins and by fraudulent means. President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari Carlos Salinas de Gortari CYC DMN (; born 3 April 1948) is a Mexican economist and politician who served as 60th president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. Affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), earlier in his career he wor ...
announced in his December 1988 inaugural address that he would "modernize" Mexico and led the process to change the Mexican constitution, including most of its anticlerical provisions, that was passed in 1992. By 2000, the Vatican likely perceived no danger in recognizing Catholics who had participated in the conflict.


Impact of the War

The effects of the war on the Church were profound. Between 1926 and 1934 at least 40 priests were killed.Van Hove, Bria
Blood-Drenched Altars
Faith & Reason 1994
There were 4,500 priests serving the people before the rebellion, but by 1934 there were only 334 priests licensed by the government to serve fifteen million people. The rest had been eliminated by emigration, expulsion and assassination. By 1935, 17 states had no priest at all.


Cárdenas, 1934-40

By the time
Lázaro Cárdenas Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (; 21 May 1895 – 19 October 1970) was a Mexican army officer and politician who served as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Born in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, to a working-class family, Cárdenas joined the Me ...
was elected president of Mexico in 1934, the Mexican government had backed away from its enforcement of many of the anticlerical articles of the constitution. However the articles and enforcing statutes remained on the books. In the midst of the
Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
, it seemed prudent to deal with matters other than the role of the Catholic Church in Mexican life. Although Cárdenas was elected, Calles doubtless expected to continue to be the actual power behind the presidency during the period of the ''
Maximato The ''Maximato'' was a transitional period in the historical and political development of Mexico from 1928 to 1934. Named after former president Plutarco Elías Calles's sobriquet ''el Jefe Máximo'' (the maximum leader), the ''Maximato'' was ...
''. Cárdenas accepted the political platform of the new PNR as his own, campaigned on it, and his first cabinet was essentially chosen by Calles. So there was the potential for continued Church-State conflict. The Church-State situation began deteriorating. In 1935, the government nationalized every Church building used in any way to forward its mission, including private homes that had been used for religious services ("house churches") or for religious schools, as well as bookstores selling religious books. A less confrontational policy of the government was its encouragement of Protestant missionaries in Mexico, in an attempt to create religious competition and undermine the power of the Catholic Church. Cárdenas welcomed the benignly named
Summer Institute of Linguistics SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...
(SIL) in 1936, a division of the
Wycliffe Bible Translators Wycliffe Global Alliance is an alliance of organizations that have objective of translating the Bible into every language. The organisation is named after John Wycliffe, who was responsible for the first complete English translation of the whol ...
whose linguists translated the Bible into a plethora of languages. The SIL began work in southern Mexico, a region of large indigenous populations with strong religious traditions, where the SIL produced Bibles in indigenous languages. From this small group, Protestantism in Mexico began to spread. In 1936, rather than Church-State relations going from bad to worse, Cárdenas changed the government's approach to one of conciliation. He said "The government will not commit the error of previous administrations by considering the religious question as a problem of preeminence to other issues involved in the national program. Antireligious campaigns would only result in further resistance and definitely postpone economic revival." This was a major policy change in Mexico, but it is also significant that it was reported in the ''New York Times''. The implementation of the policy was marked by statements of the Secretary of the Interior (''Gobernación'') that religious liberty and freedom of conscience would be respected and that the government would not provoke conflict with the Church. These were also reported in the ''New York Times''. There were changes in the Church hierarchy during this period, with the death of Archbishop of Mexico Díaz and the resignation of the
Apostolic Delegate An apostolic nuncio ( la, nuntius apostolicus; also known as a papal nuncio or simply as a nuncio) is an ecclesiastical diplomat, serving as an envoy or a permanent diplomatic representative of the Holy See to a state or to an international ...
Archbishop Ruiz y Flores, both of whom had played decisive roles during the height of Church-State conflict under Calles. The Vatican appointed Luis María Martínez as Archbishop of Mexico, who was considered "a realist who believed in moderation in the defense of the Church's rights and interests." The change in government policy and the new leader of Mexico's Church hierarchy implementing a policy of flexibility with the government, resulted in an effective policy of conciliation. For Cárdenas, this new relationship meant that when he nationalized oil in March 1938, the Church not only supported Cárdenas's move, but Cárdenas also publicly acknowledged the Church's cooperation a month later.


Government-mandated socialist education and Catholic pushback

Earlier in the 1930s, the Mexican government under Cárdenas attempted to impose socialist education, emphasizing Marxist thought including the idea of class conflict. This imposition of a particular ideology was destabilizing in Mexico, which had just experienced the religious crisis of the 1920s, and mobilized an array of middle class opponents, including Catholics.Vikram K. Chand, ''Mexico's Political Awakening''. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2001, p. 157. At the
National Autonomous University of Mexico The National Autonomous University of Mexico ( es, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) is a public research university in Mexico. It is consistently ranked as one of the best universities in Latin America, where it's also the bigges ...
(UNAM), the Jesuit-founded ''Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos'' (UNEC – National Union of Catholic Students) founded in 1931 mobilized to resist the government's push. The rector of UNAM,
Manuel Gómez Morín Manuel Gómez Morín (27 February 1897 – 19 April 1972) was a Mexican politician. He was a founding member of the National Action Party, and one of its theoreticians. Prior to this he was considered a leading figure in Mexican monetary policy, ...
, who had held other posts in post-revolution Mexico, was concerned about the government's attack on academic freedom and freedom of thought. Gómez Morín encountered in UNEC the leaders who successfully thwarted implementation of socialist education at UNAM. This alliance between Gómez Morín and UNEC had enduring consequences, becoming the foundation for the creation of the National Action Party of Mexico (PAN), in 1939. Although not directly connected to the Catholic hierarchy, the PAN was an independent, pro-democratic, nonviolent, opposition political party with many Catholic members. Two Catholic universities were founded to give Catholic students an alternative to socialist education at public universities. The
Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara The Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (, ''Autonomous University of Guadalajara''), commonly abbreviated to UAG or Autónoma, is a coeducational, independent, private university based in the Mexican city of Guadalajara. Established in 1935, ...
was founded in 1935 and the
Universidad Iberoamericana The Ibero-American University ( es, Universidad Iberoamericana), also referred to by its acronym ''UIA'' but commonly known as ''Ibero'' or ''La Ibero'') is a private, Catholic, Mexican higher education institution, sponsored by the Mexican provi ...
was founded in Mexico City in 1943. The university in Guadalajara was established during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, when church-state tensions were still quite evident. The establishment of the Universidad Iberoamericana was facilitated by the rector of UNAM, Rodolfo Brito Foucher, who along with many academics saw the imposition of socialist education as an infringement on academic freedom. Brito Foucher was a lawyer and had headed UNAM's faculty of law. In his reading of the Constitution of 1917 on the restrictions on the Church being involved with education, he noted the restrictions only applied to primary and secondary education. Founding a Catholic university, therefore, was not in violation of the constitution. Although UNAM's rector played an important role, the establishment of Catholic institutions of higher learning could not have gone forward without the approval of the hierarchy. In 1940 Manuel Avila Camacho came to the presidency openly identifying as Catholic. He effectively put an end to church-state tensions, and during his term the constitutional amendment mandating social education was repealed. The founding of two Catholic universities in this period is an important step toward a different relationship between church and state regarding education.


Growth during the new Church-State modus vivendi, 1940–1980

With the cessation of open conflict between Church and State beginning with the Avila Camacho presidency (1940–46), the Catholic Church entered a new period of growth and consolidation. The ''modus vivendi'' was the result of both Church and State realizing that further conflict was damaging to both, and the government might have seen a better relationship with the Church as fostering legitimacy for the regime. The president's actions "established the concept of conciliation as an acceptable policy in the political arena, generating a climate favorable to a more open implementation of the conciliation strategy." The number of functioning churches doubled during these four decades, as did the number of seminaries training Mexican priests. The number of priests tripled, which matched the growth in Mexico's population which was rapidly urbanizing. A conservative, pro-Catholic political party had been established in 1939, the National Action Party, and the Church began urging parishioners to vote for the PAN in a number of elections, starting in 1955. Some clerics criticized the government's economic development strategy, but in general, the Church did not intervene in civil matters in any major way. The Catholic Church and the Mexican government had visibly warming relations, with President
Luis Echeverría Luis Echeverría Álvarez (; 17 January 1922 – 8 July 2022) was a Mexican lawyer, academic, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who served as the 57th president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously ...
(1970–76) visiting
Pope Paul VI Pope Paul VI ( la, Paulus VI; it, Paolo VI; born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, ; 26 September 18976 August 1978) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City, Vatican City State from 21 June 1963 to his ...
in 1974 and the president's support for the new basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. When Pope
John Paul II Pope John Paul II ( la, Ioannes Paulus II; it, Giovanni Paolo II; pl, Jan Paweł II; born Karol Józef Wojtyła ; 18 May 19202 April 2005) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his ...
visited Mexico in 1979 as part of the
Conference of Latin American Bishops The Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America was a bishops' conference held in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia, as a follow-up to the Second Vatican Council which it adapted in a creative way to the Latin American context. It took as the theme f ...
' gathering in Puebla, President Miguel López Portillo (1976–82) gave the pope a warm welcome even though this was not a state visit. The top echelons of the hierarchy sought to continue the ''modus vivendi'' in Mexico, but as the Catholic Church underwent changes as a result of the
Second Vatican Council The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the , or , was the 21st Catholic ecumenical councils, ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. The council met in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome for four periods (or sessions) ...
, so too did a number of Mexican bishops and laypeople. The bishop of Cuernavaca,
Sergio Méndez Arceo Sergio Méndez Arceo (28 October 1907 in Tlalpan – 5 February 1992 in Morelos) was a Mexican Roman Catholic bishop, activist and human rights supporter. A product of a wealthy family, Méndez Arceo's father was a successful lawyer and his un ...
, initially appointed in 1953, became an active adherent of
liberation theology Liberation theology is a Christian theological approach emphasizing the liberation of the oppressed. In certain contexts, it engages socio-economic analyses, with "social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples". In ...
. He promoted the creation of grassroots
ecclesial base communities A base community is a relatively autonomous Christian religious group that operates according to a particular model of community, worship, and Bible study. The 1968 Medellín, Colombia, meeting of Latin American Council of Bishops played a maj ...
that promoted a new way of the laity to engage in their faith by promoting their activism. This was similar to the rise of such lay groups under Church supervision in Brazil and in Central America. Méndez Arceo on his own account investigated the circumstances of prisoners following the 1968 student movement,
Mexico 68 The 1968 Summer Olympics ( es, Juegos Olímpicos de Verano de 1968), officially known as the Games of the XIX Olympiad ( es, Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada) and commonly known as Mexico 1968 ( es, México 1968), were an international multi-sport eve ...
, mobilized around opposition to the 1968 Olympics hosted in Mexico, but expanding to become a larger critique and mobilization against the Mexican state. His report to the Mexican hierarchy received no action, in keeping with the hierarchy's policy to maintain its ''modus vivendi'' with the state. Two other major clerics influenced by Vatican II were
Adalberto Almeida y Merino Adalberto Almeida y Merino ( Bachíniva, Chihuahua, June 6, 1916 – Chihuahua, Chihuahua, June 21, 2008) was a Mexican prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as Bishop of Tulancingo, 1956–1962; Bishop of Zacatecas, 1962–1969 and ...
, bishop of Zacatecas at the time of Vatican II, and Manuel Talamás Camandari, head of the Mexican Social Secretariat, an entity under the control of the hierarchy that dealt with social issues. Both men attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council and the two drafted a major critique of Mexican social policy. "The Development and Integration of our Country" was a pastoral letter that addressed marginalization of Mexicans and income inequality during Mexico's rapid period of growth, the so-called Mexican Miracle. Bishop Almeida participated in the 1968 meeting of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín, Colombia, which Pope
Paul VI Pope Paul VI ( la, Paulus VI; it, Paolo VI; born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, ; 26 September 18976 August 1978) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City, Vatican City State from 21 June 1963 to his ...
attended. Significant documents articulating liberation theology were drawn up at the meeting, with Almeida helping draft documents on justice and peace.Chand, ''Mexico's Political Awakening'', p. 168. The bishop of
San Cristóbal de Las Casas San Cristóbal de las Casas (), also known by its native Tzotzil name, Jovel (), is a town and municipality located in the Central Highlands region of the Mexican state of Chiapas. It was the capital of the state until 1892, and is still consid ...
, Chiapas,
Samuel Ruiz Samuel Ruiz García (3 November 1924 – 24 January 2011) was a Mexican Catholic prelate who served as bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, from 1959 until 1999. Ruiz is best known for his role as mediator during th ...
also became an important advocate for liberation theology in his poor, southern Mexican diocese. He attended Vatican II, as well as a 1971 bishops' retreat attended by Peruvian cleric
Gustavo Gutiérrez Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino (born 8 June 1928) is a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest, regarded as one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. He currently holds the John Cardinal O'Hara Professo ...
, who wrote the seminal text on liberation theology; Sergio Méndez Arceo, bishop of Cuernavaca; and Salvadoran bishop
Óscar Romero Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (15 August 1917 – 24 March 1980) was a prelate of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He served as Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, the Titular Bishop of Tambeae, as Bishop of Santiago ...
. Ruiz's diocese had a high proportion of indigenous Mayan parishioners. As he came to know his diocese better, he paid increasing attention to the marginalization and oppression of the Maya. In keeping with the move toward the formation of grassroots
ecclesial base communities A base community is a relatively autonomous Christian religious group that operates according to a particular model of community, worship, and Bible study. The 1968 Medellín, Colombia, meeting of Latin American Council of Bishops played a maj ...
, Bishop Ruiz actively promoted them. In 1989 he founded the Fray
Bartolomé de Las Casas Bartolomé de las Casas, OP ( ; ; 11 November 1484 – 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish landowner, friar, priest, and bishop, famed as a historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman then became a Dominican friar ...
Center of Human Rights, as a step to push back against violence against indigenous and poor peasants. When the 1994 rebellion in Chiapas erupted, Ruiz was named as a mediator between the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (, EZLN), often referred to as the Zapatistas (Mexican ), is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Sin ...
(
EZLN The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (, EZLN), often referred to as the Zapatistas (Mexican ), is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Since ...
) and the Mexican government. His role was a significant departure from government practice of working with the Catholic hierarchy, but not giving them power.


Liberation Theology in Mexico

The passage above mentions the different bishops that played the role of liberationists in Mexico. Though this is important, Liberation Theology in Mexico is much deeper and will be explained in the following information. Liberation Theology as one could put it is a call to action. This call to action would lead to a huge change for the Catholic church and the indigenous people, especially the poor, living in Latin America. Liberation Theology established progressive ideologies with Catholic teachings. One bishop described liberation theology as a “progressive prototype of Catholic faith-an enlightened Christianity that is organic to people's way of life and empowers them to work for social justice for themselves and for others in their community.” Liberation Theology is said to have two different strategies: one using interpreting catholic the gospel to contemporary problems and how the faithful should take action on these problems.


Christian Base Communities

One of the bigger actions that were taken was the establishment of Christian Base Communities (CEB). CEBs were initially encouraged by the Catholic Church in Mexico, due to reasons such as the deficiency of priests and nuns in Mexico particularly in the rural areas. As well as the church was worried about the growing number of protestants. CEBs provided an opportunity for aid for many of the Mexican communities. In addition to rural areas, CEBs flourished in places with high places of poverty, extremely low unemployment rates, alarming overall malnutrition, and more. For example, in communities in a CEB in Santa Cecilia,
Guadalajara Guadalajara ( , ) is a metropolis in western Mexico and the capital of the list of states of Mexico, state of Jalisco. According to the 2020 census, the city has a population of 1,385,629 people, making it the 7th largest city by population in Me ...
, and San Juanito,
Oaxaca Oaxaca ( , also , , from nci, Huāxyacac ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca), is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of Mexico. It is ...
, In the 1970s in San Juanito, the CEB in Santa Cecilia was led by hundreds of working-class women in the community. They provided aid to the community in a variety of different ways from improving water infrastructure to creating a night school for adults. It wasn't just aid that was provided but the education of progressive ideologies such as gender equality. For example, the community had weekly group discussions and sometimes workshops that reflected on sexism and relationships between men and women. Another CEB that played an important role in its community was in San Juanito,
Oaxaca Oaxaca ( , also , , from nci, Huāxyacac ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca), is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of Mexico. It is ...
, Mexico. The first establishment in San Juanito was in 1980 but started to see growth with the arrival of Maryknoll nuns in 1982. The CEB in San Juanito did a number of great things to improve daily life for the community. For example, they set up agriculture practices such as planting crops, setting up health nutrition classes, and weekly meetings discussing peoples' daily problems. The CEBs were not the only contribution to come out of Liberation Theology in Mexico, but also the emergence of radical progressive movements.


Radical Clerical Organizations

Another idea that came out Liberation Theology was the idea for The Preferential Option for the Poor. The idea would be incorporated with Catholic women's organizations and a foundation to help the strugglers of the workers, peasants, farmers, railroad workers and more. Priests involved with this concept, would also reached out to wealthy catholics and people with the power of influence to reconsider their belief in Catholicism and look to help their fellow Catholics who suffer. Based off the idea of the theological idea of the option for the people emerged two progressive movements political popular and priest for the people. Before explaining the different radical movements, it is important to mention one Jesuit Priest Rodolfo Escamilla García. Escamilla García was one of the prominent radical priests or the "rebellious priests." Such as movements such priests for the people Garcia joined Mexican Social Secretariat in 1952 and was the founder of the Juventud Obrera Católica (Catholic Workers’Youth, JOC). He advocated the radical “See, Judge, Act” form of socio-religious activism method for public action. Such as priests like García were radical thinkers that would have a large role in the lives of people in Mexican communities educating them on issues such as social justice. Although, some paid the cost by imprisonment, torture, and at worst death. As for García, he was seen as a threat to the Mexican Government that was a PRI (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party), which sided with a very conservative Church and Escamilla García was violently murdered by the Mexican Government in Mexico City in 1977. That same year, Mexico saw another killing of another priest, Rodolfo Aguilar Álvarez. Aguilar Alvarez was from Chihuahua and who offered his support to a group of forcibly displaced Campesinos. As mentioned above, some radical priests prided themselves on educating people on the leftist ideologies. Such ideologies include
Maoism Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of Chi ...
and
Marxism Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
. In 1971, it was the priests in Torreón who brought in the Política Popular (PP) Maoists, and together they had a large influence on the people primarily the students in La Laguna. Throughout 1971-1974, students would be influenced by Maoist activists who would in infiltrate their schools by even becoming their teachers. Their influence would lead to a long string of student protests. The range of ages of students were from high school to college where they protested by marching in the streets to even the suspension of classes. The priests and the maoists combined the new Catholic teachings post-Vatican II and the political beliefs of the Maoism all circulating back to the belief of helping the people and poor. Many of the protests were fighting for better conditions for the working class and especially the poor as well. Even the Bishop of Torreon, Fernando Romo declared that “We have to understand that, in case of doubt, Christians should always act on behalf of those in need because that was the position of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Along with Política Popular, Sacerdotes para el Pueblo (Priest for the People, SPP) was also another prominent radical clerical movement in Mexico. SPP was founded in 1972, by a group of theologians who very embraced the Preferential Option for the Poor and socialism. Headed by Dominican Alex Morell, and the movement was centralized around four main goals: The strengthening ties with the popular sectors of society; helping them succeed at economic and political independence from caciques and political parties; educating them the foundations of liberation theology as useful tools to improve their everyday lives; and calling for a socialist alternative to capitalism. The movement ultimately folded in 1975 due to pressure from higher ecclesiastical authority and the violence that priests were facing.


Liberation Theology in Seminary Training

From 1969 to 1990, the Bishops of Southern Mexico (including Bishop
Samuel Ruiz Samuel Ruiz García (3 November 1924 – 24 January 2011) was a Mexican Catholic prelate who served as bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, from 1959 until 1999. Ruiz is best known for his role as mediator during th ...
) worked together to operate the Regional Seminary of the Southeast (el Seminario Regional del Sureste, SERESURE). Located in the town of Tehuacán, Puebla, Mexico, SERESURE intended to train priests to be active participants in solving the problems pervasive in the indigenous countryside of southern Mexico such as "economic and political marginalization, caciquismo, land loss, and environmental degradation." They set up the seminary to work with the indigenous people. Scholars argue that SERESURE work on pastoral training separated themselves from other seminaries. This was due to SERESURE’s consistent emphasis on socially aware pastoral work along with hosting annual conferences on indigenous pastoral work. The training in SERESURE focused on three pillars: theological training, intellectual training, and pastoral formation. They believed instead of them teaching the indigenous people about god in their life, the indigenous should be the ones to figure out themselves with the help of the seminary, to be "agents of their own liberation." Liberation Theology was making progress in Mexico improving the lives of the indigenous people’s and their societies as different Church workers and scholars would come and go. In the 1980s, there would be shift in the Catholic church and the Vatican would eventually lean away from Liberation theology which led to a clampdown on Liberation Theology.


Changing church-state relations, 1980–2000


Clampdown on liberation theology

In 1979 with the election of Pope
John Paul II Pope John Paul II ( la, Ioannes Paulus II; it, Giovanni Paolo II; pl, Jan Paweł II; born Karol Józef Wojtyła ; 18 May 19202 April 2005) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his ...
, the Polish-born prelate began to systematically dismantle liberation theology. Italian cleric
Girolamo Prigione Girolamo Prigione (12 October 1921 – 27 May 2016) was an Italian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who worked in the diplomatic service of the Holy See from 1951 to 1997. He became an archbishop in 1968 and from then until retirement held pos ...
had been appointed in 1978 as the pope's representative in Mexico. With the papacy of John Paul II, he became a key instrument in reining in of activist bishops who had a liberationist stance. In Cuernavaca, liberationist
Sergio Méndez Arceo Sergio Méndez Arceo (28 October 1907 in Tlalpan – 5 February 1992 in Morelos) was a Mexican Roman Catholic bishop, activist and human rights supporter. A product of a wealthy family, Méndez Arceo's father was a successful lawyer and his un ...
was replaced by
Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo (11 November 1926 – 24 May 1993) was an Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Mexico who served as the eighth archbishop of the see of Guadalajara and as a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. Posadas Ocampo was ...
, who dismantled the liberationist programs in the diocese and promoted charismatic Catholicism.Michael Tangeman, ''Mexico at the Crossroads: Politics, the Church, and the Poor''. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1995, p. 63. Over time, Prigione helped the Vatican select 31 new bishops whose theological outlook was acceptable to the Vatican, basically replacing liberationist bishops with conservative ones. But also important was the Vatican's practice of assigning administrative coadjutors to dioceses and archdioceses, which undermined the power of those bishops who were outspoken and activist. These included Bartolomé Carrasco, bishop of Tapachula in Southern Mexico; Manuel Talamás, bishop of Ciudad Juárez; and
Adalberto Almeida y Merino Adalberto Almeida y Merino ( Bachíniva, Chihuahua, June 6, 1916 – Chihuahua, Chihuahua, June 21, 2008) was a Mexican prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as Bishop of Tulancingo, 1956–1962; Bishop of Zacatecas, 1962–1969 and ...
of archbishop of Chihuahua.


Church push for civic culture in Chihuahua

In the 1980s, the Church in Chihuahua began to take an activist stance on creating a new civic culture in which citizen participation was aimed at promoting clean elections and rule of law. In Chihuahua, Archbishop
Adalberto Almeida y Merino Adalberto Almeida y Merino ( Bachíniva, Chihuahua, June 6, 1916 – Chihuahua, Chihuahua, June 21, 2008) was a Mexican prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as Bishop of Tulancingo, 1956–1962; Bishop of Zacatecas, 1962–1969 and ...
began to be outspoken against electoral fraud and government corruption. Almeida issued a document in 1983 entitled "Vote with Responsibility: A Christian Orientation," in which the archbishop urged citizens to vote. Voter apathy had become a problem in Mexico, since many citizens saw the process as corrupt and assumed their vote would not count. Almeida called upon voters to participate and then continue involvement by monitoring winners’ performance in office. This document was the reassertion of the Church's right to "evangelize the totality of human existence including the political dimension." The archbishop did not explicitly advocate for a particular party, although the National Action Party was gaining increasing numbers of votes in northern Mexico. In the municipal elections in Chihuahua that year, voter participation increased significantly and the Institutional Revolutionary Party's candidates fared badly. This touched off an attack by the PRI, that denounced Church participation in elections, and a response from Almeida criticizing the PRI's characterization, saying that their "vision, in addition to being unjust, ingenuous, and arrogant, inevitably leads to an absolutist conception of power, with the consequent destruction of democracy." During the 1980s the
National Action Party (Mexico) The National Action Party ( es, Partido Acción Nacional, PAN) is a conservative political party in Mexico founded in 1939. The party is one of the four main List of political parties in Mexico, political parties in Mexico, and, since the 1980s, ...
began to expand its voter base from mainly Catholics to one of the larger Mexican middle class. In Chihuahua, the PAN gained a larger share of votes, and in 1986, was widely expected to win the gubernatorial election. The PAN did not win, due to rigging of the vote, which the PRI justified as "patriotic fraud." Immediately after the election, Archbishop Almeida preached a powerful sermon, cast as the parable of the Good Samaritan, but its meaning was clear, that the voters of Chihuahua had been mugged and brutalized by the PRI's actions.Chand, ''Mexico's Political Awakening'', p. 183. Almeida went further and planned on closing churches in Chihuahua in protest. The Apostolic Delegate in Mexico,
Girolamo Prigione Girolamo Prigione (12 October 1921 – 27 May 2016) was an Italian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who worked in the diplomatic service of the Holy See from 1951 to 1997. He became an archbishop in 1968 and from then until retirement held pos ...
, the closest official to a papal ambassador since Mexico and the Vatican had no diplomatic relations, overruled the archbishop. Prigione did not want to see another wave of anticlericalism in Mexico by allowing the church closure. However, the stance that the Church took in challenging electoral fraud in Chihuahua gained it greater legitimacy amongst ordinary Mexicans who also sought to have free and fair elections.


Salinas, the Vatican, and reform of the constitution

The 1988 election in Mexico was a watershed event. For the first time there were three viable candidates for the presidency,
Carlos Salinas de Gortari Carlos Salinas de Gortari CYC DMN (; born 3 April 1948) is a Mexican economist and politician who served as 60th president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. Affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), earlier in his career he wor ...
, an economist and technocrat from the dominant PRI;
Manuel Clouthier Manuel de Jesús Clouthier del Rincón (June 13, 1934 – October 1, 1989) was a Mexican agriculturalist, businessman and politician. His 1988 presidential campaign challenged the dominance of Mexico's PRI party in the nation's politics, with ...
, a charismatic figure of the PAN; and Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, the son of President
Lázaro Cárdenas Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (; 21 May 1895 – 19 October 1970) was a Mexican army officer and politician who served as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Born in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, to a working-class family, Cárdenas joined the Me ...
, who split from the PRI to form a leftist coalition. The election was again widely seen to have fraudulent results, with Salinas winning, but with the smallest margin ever. Cárdenas and Clouthier and their supporters protested the election results, but Salinas took office in December 1988. Salinas transformed Church-State relations in Mexico during his term and the Vatican and the PAN became important players in that transformation. Religion was an issue in the 1988 elections, with the leftist newspaper ''La Jornada'' surveying the prospective candidates about their stance on religious freedom in Mexico. Technocrat Carlos Salinas de Gortari declined to answer the survey and Mexican bishops were concerned about Salinas's attitude toward Church-State relations.Tangeman, ''Mexico at the Crossroads'' p. 69. The presidential election took an unexpected turn, with the bolting of Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas from the Institutional Revolutionary Party to become a candidate. Mexican bishops urged Mexican voters to "overcome apathy" and fight electoral fraud by participation in the election. The election result of a Salinas victory was almost universally considered to be fraudulent. The Mexican bishops did not make public statements about the election results. Behind the scenes the apostolic delegate to Mexico, Prigione, Mexican bishops, and government officials had a series of secret meetings that hammered out the outlines of a new Church-State relationship. At this point, the PRI needed an ally to shore up its wavering grip on power, and the Church proved to be such an ally. It has been considered a ''quid pro quo'' agreement. Sometime during the presidential campaign, the PRI had indicated to the Church that a Salinas victory would be beneficial to the Church. A delegation of the leadership of the episcopal hierarchy attended the inauguration of Salinas on December 1, 1988. In his inaugural address, Salinas de Gortari announced a program to "modernize" Mexico via structural transformation. "The modern state is a state which ... maintains transparency and updates its relation with political parties, entrepreneurial groups, and the church." His declaration was an articulation of the direction of change, but not list of specifics. The implementation of reforms entailed amending the constitution, but before that overcoming opposition on the Left and also in the Catholic Church itself.Blancarte, "Recent Changes in Church-State Relations in Mexico", p. 2. After considerable debate, the Mexican legislature voted for these fundamental revisions in Church-State policy. The Constitution of 1917 had several anticlerical restrictions. Article 5 restricted the existence of religious orders; Article 24 restricted church services outside of church buildings; Article 27 empowered the State over fundamental aspects of property ownership and resulted in expropriation and distribution of lands, and most famously in 1938, the expropriation of foreign oil companies. Article 27 also prevented churches from holding real property at all. For the Catholic hierarchy, Article 130 prevented the recognition of the Church as a legal entity, denied to clergy the exercise of political rights, and prevented the Church from participating in any way in political matters. The Church had contested all these restrictions from the beginning. With the possibility of changed relations between Church and State, "the main demand of the Catholic hierarchy was centered on the modification of Article 130" to recognize the Church as a legal entity, restore political rights to priests, and to end restrictions "on the social actions of the Church and its members." The initial reaction to changing the constitution was quite negative from members of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party The Institutional Revolutionary Party ( es, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, ; abbr. PRI) is a political party in Mexico that was founded in 1929 and held uninterrupted power in the country for 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, first as the Nati ...
who saw anticlericalism as an inherent element of post-Revolution Mexico. It was clear that given the contested nature of the 1988 elections that Salinas could not expect to operate with a mandate for his program. However, the debate was now open. The leftists led by Cárdenas opposed any change in the anticlerical articles of the constitution, since they were seen as the foundation for the power of the secular state. However, the
National Action Party (Mexico) The National Action Party ( es, Partido Acción Nacional, PAN) is a conservative political party in Mexico founded in 1939. The party is one of the four main List of political parties in Mexico, political parties in Mexico, and, since the 1980s, ...
in alliance with the weakened PRI became allies to move toward fundamental reforms. The Vatican likely sensed a sea-change and in 1990 John Paul II visited Mexico for the first time since 1979 for the Puebla conference of Latin American bishops. After the announcement of his intentions, the Mexican Minister of the Interior (''Gobernación'') stated flatly that the government would not amend Article 130. Nonetheless, the Mexican government began moves to normalize diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The pope's second 1990 trip in May put increased pressure on the Mexican government to take steps to normalization, particularly after the Vatican and the Soviet Union did so that year. Although Salinas planned a trip to the Vatican in 1991, the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico did not want normalization of relations with the Vatican without discussion of significant changes to the constitution. An even more significant change came when in his official state of the nation address in November 1991, Salinas stated that "the moment has come to promote new judicial proceedings for the churches," which were impelled by the need "to reconcile the definitive secularization of our society with effective religious freedom."Blancarte, "Recent Changes in Church-State Relations in Mexico," p. 4. The government proposed changes to the constitution to "respect freedom of religion," but affirmed the separation of Church and State and kept in place secular public education as well as restrictions on clerics’ political participation in civic life and accumulating wealth. The bill to amend the constitution was submitted to the legislature to reform Articles 3, 5, 24, and 130. The bill passed in December 1991 with the support of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). The enabling legislation was debated far more than the initial bill, but in July 1992, the ''Ley de Asociaciones Religiosas y Culto Público'' (Religious Associations Act), the implementation legislation, passed 408–10. The leftist ''Partido Revolucionario Democrático'' struggled with whether to support this significant change to Mexico's anticlericalism, but most PRD legislators did in the end.


Protestant groups and constitutional reform

Although the legislation was inclusive of all "religious associations", the Catholic Church in Mexico had been the object of the government's regulation of religious institutions, worship, and personnel. Protestant groups remained largely silent during the debates, although in both theory and practice they would be affected. Evangelical churches suffered initially with the new regulations, since in order for a religious group to register with the government, it has to have been functioning for five years and have sufficient property to support itself.


Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's murder

In 1993,
Cardinal Cardinal or The Cardinal may refer to: Animals * Cardinal (bird) or Cardinalidae, a family of North and South American birds **''Cardinalis'', genus of cardinal in the family Cardinalidae **''Cardinalis cardinalis'', or northern cardinal, the ...
Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo (11 November 1926 – 24 May 1993) was an Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Mexico who served as the eighth archbishop of the see of Guadalajara and as a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. Posadas Ocampo was ...
of
Guadalajara Guadalajara ( , ) is a metropolis in western Mexico and the capital of the list of states of Mexico, state of Jalisco. According to the 2020 census, the city has a population of 1,385,629 people, making it the 7th largest city by population in Me ...
was shot 14 times at point blank range at the international city's airport, as he waited in his car for the arrival of the apostolic nuncio. The Mexican government claimed that the cardinal's murder was the result of mistaken identity by narcotrafficker hitmen. The Catholic hierarchy has disputed the story and during the presidency of
Vicente Fox Vicente Fox Quesada (; born 2 July 1942) is a Mexican businessman and politician who served as the 62nd president of Mexico from 1 December 2000 to 30 November 2006. After campaigning as a Right-wing populism, right-wing populist, Fox was elec ...
(2000–06), the investigation was re-opened but with no definitive results. The US Congress also held hearings on the case in 2006.


Issues in the 21st century


Child sex abuse scandals

Several cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests have come to light. The best known case is that of
Marcial Maciel Marcial Maciel Degollado (March 10, 1920 – January 30, 2008) was a Mexican Catholic priest who founded the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi movement. He was general director of the Legion from 1941 to 2005. Throughout most of his car ...
, founder of the
Legion of Christ The Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ ( la, Congregatio Legionariorum Christi; abbreviated LC; also Legion of Christ) is a Roman Catholic clerical religious order made up of priests and candidates for the priesthood established by Marci ...
. Father Maciel was accused of abusing dozens of boys over a period of fifty years; although he was never convicted of a crime and always maintained his innocense, both the Legion of Christ and the Catholic Church apologized for his actions and the coverup after his death. In December 2019 the Legion admitted that 33 priests had sexually abused at least 175 children ages 11–16 between 1941 and 2019. Sixty of the cases were related to Maciel and the total does not include 90 pupils abused by 54 seminrians. Cardinal
Norberto Rivera Carrera Norberto Rivera Carrera (born 6 June 1942) is a Mexican prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who was archbishop of Mexico City from 1995 to 2017. He was made a cardinal in 1998. He was Bishop of Tehuacán from 1985 to 1995. Early life and minis ...
was pressured into retirement in 2007 after he was accused of covering-up sexual abuse. In 2012, Fr. Manuel Ramírez García was accused of abusing thirteen children in
San Pedro Garza García San Pedro Garza García ''(''also known as San Pedro or Garza García'')'' is a city-municipality of the Mexican state of Nuevo León and part of the Monterrey Metropolitan area. It is a contemporary commercial suburb of the larger metropolitan c ...
, Nuevo Leon. Fr. Carlos López Valdez of
Tlalpan Tlalpan ( nci, Tlālpan, , place on the earth, ) is a borough (''demarcación territorial'') in Mexico City. It is the largest borough, with over eighty percent under conservation as forest and other ecologically sensitive area. The rest, almost ...
, Mexico City, was sentenced to 60 years of prison in 2018 for abusing a boy. Fr. Luis Esteban Zavala Rodríguez of the Diocese of Irapuato was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl in 2019; he received 65 years in prison.


Priests targeted by narcotraffickers

Since 2012, the violence by narcotraffickers has widened to include Catholic priests; those in the southern state of
Guerrero Guerrero is one of the 32 states that comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 81 municipalities and its capital city is Chilpancingo and its largest city is Acapulcocopied from article, GuerreroAs of 2020, Guerrero the pop ...
are particularly at risk. The Catholic hierarchy in the state issued a plea to the Mexican government to deal with drug violence. A Mexican sociologist, Bernardo Barranco, states that "the rise of violence against priests reflects the role in which they place themselves: as warriors on the front lines of the struggle for human rights in the midst of drug-related violence."


Pope Francis visit

Pope Francis in his visit to Mexico was criticized by some for his effort to not antagonize the government. "He focused on one of his main talking points, inequality, while skipping any thorny local political issues." But at the USA border in
Ciudad Juárez Ciudad Juárez ( ; ''Juarez City''. ) is the most populous city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. It is commonly referred to as Juárez and was known as El Paso del Norte (''The Pass of the North'') until 1888. Juárez is the seat of the Ju ...
, he "delivered a stinging critique of leaders on both sides of the fence" for the "humanitarian crisis" of forced migration. And "he went to the heart of the cartel's dark territory in
Morelia Morelia (; from 1545 to 1828 known as Valladolid) is a city and municipal seat of the municipality of Morelia in the north-central part of the state of Michoacán in central Mexico. The city is in the Guayangareo Valley and is the capital and larg ...
,
Michoacán Michoacán, formally Michoacán de Ocampo (; Purépecha: ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Michoacán de Ocampo ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Michoacán de Ocampo), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of ...
, and told the young crowd that Jesus wants them to be disciples, not 'hitmen'." In
Chiapas Chiapas (; Tzotzil language, Tzotzil and Tzeltal language, Tzeltal: ''Chyapas'' ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas), is one of the states that make up the Political divisions of Mexico, ...
he told the indigenous people that "the world needs their culture and asked for forgiveness for those who had contaminated their lands." He broke with Vatican tradition in celebrating Mass with these indigenous peoples, and challenged Catholic bishops in Mexico to "show singular tenderness" toward them.


Falling membership

The census conducted by
INEGI The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI by its name in es, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática) is an autonomous agency of the Mexican Government dedicated to coordinate the National System of Stat ...
in 2020 revealed that 97.8 million Mexicans (77.7%) of a total population of 126 million identify as Catholics. This represents an increase from 2010 when 84 million people (82.7%) were Catholics, which is a "drastic fall" in percentage according to a Church spokesperson. Protestant and Evangelical congregations have grown 7.5% in the last decade, and 10.2 million people (8.1%) have no religion, double that of ten years ago. The Catholic weekly ''Desde la Fe'' wrote in an editorial, ''"El bien generalmente no es noticia, el mal, siempre es magnificado. La Iglesia ha tenido un desgaste moral ante la sociedad, por el mal ejemplo de algunos. Es tiempo de conversión hacia el interior."'' ("Good is generally not news, evil is always magnified. The Church has suffered a moral erosion before society, due to the bad example of some. It is time for inward conversion.")


Further reading


General

*Blancarte, Roberto. ''Historia de la Iglesia Católico en México.'' Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económico / El Colegio de Méxiquense 1992. *Cuevas, Mariano, S.J. ''Historia de la Iglesia de México''. 5 vols. 1921–28. *Mecham, J. Lloyd. ''Church and State in Latin America'' (revised edition). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1966. *Schmitt, Karl. ''The Roman Catholic Church in Modern Latin America.'' New York 1972. *Smith, Benjamin. ''The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2012.


Colonial Era - 1519–1821

*Baudot, Georges. ''Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chroniclers of Mexican Civilization, 1520–1569.'' University of Colorado Press 1995. * Brading, D.A. ''Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001. *Burkhart, Louise. ''The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.'' Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1989. *Cline, Sarah. "Church and State: Habsburg New Spain," in Encyclopedia of Mexico vol. 1, p. 248-50. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997. *Cline, Sarah. "Church and State: Bourbon New Spain," in Encyclopedia of Mexico vol. 1, p. 250-53. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997. *Cline, Sarah. "The Spiritual Conquest Re-Examined: Baptism and Church Marriage in Early Colonial Mexico." ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 73:3(1993) pp. 453–80. *Costeloe, Michael. ''Church Wealth in Mexico: A Study of the Juzgado de Capellanías in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800–1856.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1967. *Delgado, Jessica L. ''Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630-1790''. Cambridge University Press 2018. * Farriss, N. M. ''Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821.'' London: Athlone Press 1958. *Greenleaf, Richard. ''The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century, 1536–1543.'' Washington DC: Academy of American Franciscan History 1962. *Gruzinski, Serge. ''The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World 16th-18th Centuries.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993. *Kubler, George. ''Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century.'' New Haven: Yale University Press 1948. *Lafaye, Jacques. ''Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1532-1815''. Trans.
Benjamin Keen Benjamin Keen (1913–2002) was an American historian specialising in the history of colonial Latin America. Keen received his PhD from Yale and taught at Amherst College, West Virginia University, and Jersey State College before joining Northe ...
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1976. * Lavrin, Asunción. ''Brides of Christ. Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico'' Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008. * Leibsohn, Dana, and Barbara E. Mundy, “Otherworldly Visions,” ''Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820'' (2015). http://www.fordham.edu/vistas. *Morgan, Ronald J. ''Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810.'' Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2002. *Pardo, Osvaldo F. ''The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico''. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2004. *Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. ''Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2014. * Phelan, John Leddy. ''The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World.'' Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1970. * Poole, Stafford. "Church Law on the Ordination of the Indians and ''Castas'' in New Spain". ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 61, no. 4, (1981): 637–50. *Poole, Stafford. ''Pedro Moya de Contreras.'' Berkeley: University of California Press 1987. *Poole, Stafford. ''Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797.'' Tucson: University of Arizona Press. *Ramirez, Paul. ''Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2018. *Ramos-Kittrell, Jesús. ''Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain''. New York: Oxford University Press 2016. *Ricard, Robert. ''The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico''. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press 1966. (originally published in French in 1933). *Schwaller, John Frederick. ''Church and Clergy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.'' Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1987. *Schwaller, John Frederick. ''The Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico.'' Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1985. *William B. Taylor (historian), Taylor, William B. ''Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.'' Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996. *von Germeten, Nicole. ''Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans.'' Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2006.


Nineteenth century

*Bazant, Jan. ''Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1856–1875.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1971. *Callcott, Wilfred Hardy. ''Church and State in Mexico, 1822–1857.'' Durham: Duke University Press 1926. *Ceballos Ramírez, Manuel. "La Encíclica Rerum Novarum y los Trabajadores Católicos en la Ciudad de México, 1891–1913." ''Historia Mexicana'' 33:1 (July–September 1983). *Chowning, Margaret. "Culture Wars in the Trenches? Public Schools and Catholic Education in Mexico, 1867-1897". ''Hispanic American Historical Review'', 94:4 (November 2017) pp. 613–650. *Costeloe, Michael P. ''Church and State in Independent Mexico: A Study of the Patronage Debate, 1821–1857.'' London: Royal Historical Society 1978. *Knowlton, Robert J. ''Church Property and the Mexican Reform, 1856-1910''. 1976. *Mijanos y González, Pablo. ''The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2015. *Powell, T.G. "Priests and Peasants in Central Mexico: Social Conflict During 'La Reforma'". ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 57, no. 2 (1977), 296–313. *Powell, T.G. ''El liberalismo y el campesiando en el centro de México, 1850-1876''. 1974. *Schmitt, Karl M. " Catholic Adjustment to the Secular State: The Case of Mexico, 1867–1911." ''Catholic Historical Review''XLVIII No. 2 (July 1962) 182–204. *Scholes, Walter V. "Church and state in the Mexican Constitutional Convention, 1856-57." ''The Americas'' IV No. 2. (October 1947), pp. 151–74. *Brian A. Stauffer. ''Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. .


Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

*Bailey, David C. ''Viva Cristo Rey!: The Cristero Rebellion and Church-State Conflict in Mexico.'' Austin: University of Texas Press 1974. *Bantjes, Adrian. "Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Mexico: The Dechristianization Campaigns, 1929–1940." ''Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos'' 13:1 (winter 1997), pp. 87–120. *Blancarte, Roberto. "Recent Changes in Church-State Relations in Mexico: An Historical Approach," ''Journal of Church & State'', autumn 1993, Vol 35. Issue 4. *Butler, Matthew. "Keeping the Faith in Revolutionary Mexico: Clerical and Lay Resistance to Religious Persecution, East Michoacán, 1926–1929." ''The Americas'' 59:1 July 2002, 9-32. *Camp, Roderic Ai. ''Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico.'' New York: Oxford University Press 1997. *Ceballos Ramírez, Manuel. ''El Catolicismo Social: Un Tercero en Discordia, Rerum Novarum, la 'Cuestión Social,' y la Movilización de los Católicos Mexicanos (1891–1911)''. Mexico: El Colegio de México 1991. *Chand, Vikram K. ''Mexico's Political Awakening''. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2001. *Ellis, L. Elthan. "Dwight Morrow and the Church-State Controversy in Mexico." ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' Vol 38, 4 (November 1958), 482–505. *Espinosa, David. ''Jesuit Student Groups, the Universidad Iberoamericana, and Political Resistance in Mexico, 1913–1979.'' Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2014. *Jrade, Ramón, "Inquiries into the Cristero Insurrection Against the Mexican Revolution." ''Latin American Research Review'' 20:2 (1985. *Mabry, Donald J. ''Mexico's Acción Nacional: A Catholic Alternative to Revolution.'' Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1973. *Meyer, Jean. ''La Cristiada''. 3 vols. Mexico City: Siglo XXI (1985). *Meyer, Jean. ''The Cristero Rebellion: Mexican People Between Church and State.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976. *Muro, Victor Gabriel. ''Iglesia y movimientos sociales en México, 1972–1987.'' Mexico: Colegio de Michoacán 1994. *Muro, Victor Gabriel. "Catholic Church: Mexico" in ''Encyclopedia of Mexico'', vol. 1. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997, 219–222. *Nesvig, Martin Austin, ed. ''Religious Culture in Modern Mexico''. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2007. *Purnell, Jennie. "The Cristero Rebellion" in ''Encyclopedia of Mexico.'' vol. 1. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997, 374–377. *Purnell, Jennie. ''Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán.'' Durham: Duke University Press 1999. *Quirk, Robert E. ''The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910–1929.'' Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1973. *Reich, Peter. ''Mexico's Hidden Revolution: The Catholic Church in Law and Politics Since 1929''. South Bend:University of Notre Dame Press 1996. *Rice, Elizabeth Ann. ''The Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Mexico as Affected by the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Mexico, 1925-29.'' Washington DC 1959. *Schell, Patience A. ''Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2003. *Sherman, John W. "Liberation Theology" in ''Encyclopedia of Mexico'', vol. 1, 742–45. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997. *Vargas, Jorge A. "Freedom of Religion and Public Worship in Mexico: A Legal Commentary on the 1992 Federal Act on Religious Matters," ''BYU Law Review'' Volume 421 (1998), Issue 2, article 6. *Wright-Rios, Edward. ''Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revolution in Oaxaca, 1887–1934.'' Durham: Duke University Press 2009.


See also

* List of the oldest churches in Mexico *Roman and Eastern Catholicism in Mexico *Religion in Mexico


References

{{History of the Roman Catholic Church, state=collapsed History of the Catholic Church by country, Mexico History of Catholicism in North America History of Mexico Catholic Church in Mexico