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Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Author(s): Ben Fallaw (Author)
- Publisher: Duke University Press Books
- Publication Date: 21 Jan. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 360 pages
- ISBN-10: 0822353229
- ISBN-13: 9780822353225
Book Description
Ben Fallaw argues that previous scholarship has not appreciated the pervasive influence of Catholics and Catholicism on postrevolutionary state formation. By delving into the history of four understudied Mexican states, he is able to show that religion swayed regional politics not just in states such as Guanajuato, in Mexico’s central-west “Rosary Belt,” but even in those considered much less observant, including Campeche, Guerrero, and Hidalgo. Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico reshapes our understanding of agrarian reform, federal schooling, revolutionary anticlericalism, elections, the Segunda (a second Cristero War in the 1930s), and indigenism, the Revolution’s valorization of the Mesoamerican past as the font of national identity.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This important book forces a rethinking of the efficacy and influence of agrarian and cultural revolutions not only in Mexico but throughout the world. In what is nothing short of a massive reappraisal of the pivotal presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, Ben Fallaw demonstrates how conservative Catholic opposition at the local and state levels consistently obstructed Cardenista reform. Based on his detailed reconstruction of circumstances and events in four very different Mexican states, he reminds us that conditions differed enormously among locales, even between two villages in the same state. His research is blockbuster in every possible way.”—
Terry Rugeley, author of Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876“In this impressively researched, organized, and written work, Fallaw (Colby College) examines one of the major themes facing Mexico in the 1930s—the conflict between the Catholic Church and the state.”
— J. B. Kirkwood ―
“…the author provides one of the best portraits of how the Mexican state’s anticlericalism, rationalist educational reforms, land reform, anticlerical agitation, and indigenism were intertwined and thus galvanized opponents.” — Edward Wright-Rios ―
American Historical Review“Fallaw’s study proves utterly striking, as his study details in multiple ways clerical and governmental failures to serve the basic needs of an impoverished and poorly educated public. His study reveals some of the ways that widespread cultural ignorance of the complex material cultural needs of the Mexican population persisted during the postrevolutionary period.” — Marjorie Becker ―
Catholic Historical Review“[Fallaw’s] careful marshaling of evidence and his sound analysis make clear why agrarian reform and changing religious practice and devotion were extremely difficult to achieve.” — Linda B. Hall ―
Hispanic American Historical Review“Overall,
Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico is one of the most important books on twentieth century Mexico of the last ten years. Original, thoroughly researched, and ambitious in scope, the work is a must read for those interested in revolutionary Mexico, modern Catholic sensibilities, or the overlap of politics and religion.” — Benjamin Smith ― The Americas“Ben Fallaw’s extraordinary new book,
Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, ostensibly explains religious violence in four Mexican states: Campeche, Hidalgo, Guerrero, and Guanajuato. In the process, however, Fallaw tells us much more. Challenging a number of widely held assumptions about this period, he describes convincingly how and why the revolutionary project failed in the countryside.” — Stephanie Mitchell ― The Latin Americanist“This is a superbly researched and enduring contribution to the history of the Mexican Revolution and Latin America’s political and religious history. For the many researchers who continue to ponder how Mexico’s regions responded to national institutions and discourses, Fallaw’s book will be indispensable.” — Thomas Rath ―
Journal of Latin American Studies“This is a prodigiously researched work that weaves together the specificity of four cases within a satisfying analytic framework. It is likely to encourage further work on religion and state formation.” — Jeffrey Mosher ―
EIALAbout the Author
Ben Fallaw is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at Colby College. He is the author of Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán, also published by Duke University Press, and a coeditor of Peripheral Visions: Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan and Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico
By BEN FALLAW
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5322-5
Contents
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixAbbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………………………………xiGlossary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xvINTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1CHAPTER 1. The Church and the Religious Question…………………………………………………………………………….13CHAPTER 2. Catholic-Socialists against Anti-Priests in Campeche……………………………………………………………….35CHAPTER 3. “The Devil Is Now Loose in Huejutla”: The Bishop, the SEP, and the Emancipation of the Indian in Hidalgo…………………63CHAPTER 4. Beatas, Ballots, and Bullets in Guerrero………………………………………………………………………….101CHAPTER 5. “Un sin fin de mochos”: Catholic Cacicazgos in Guanajuato…………………………………………………………..157CONCLUSION: The End of the Religious Question……………………………………………………………………………….219Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..227Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….295Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..317
Chapter One
The Church and the Religious Question
Behind the monolithic, ultramontane façade of the Church in Mexico, deep divisions lurked. Moderate prelates’ dominance riled confrontational bishops. Foreign regulars’ clout rankled Mexican diocesan priests. Ex-cristeros resented episcopal peacemaking. Rome’s radial strategy that sanctioned dendritic resistance to the revolutionary project unintentionally widened these rifts by undermining the Church’s hierarchical structure and encouraging lay autonomy.
After surveying the national Church-state conflict from 1910 to 1940, this chapter maps these internal fault lines and describes Mexico’s episcopate, clergy, and formal lay organizations. Next, it analyzes how priests and the ACM (the umbrella group for all officially sanctioned Catholic lay groups) set up semi-clandestine task forces to coordinate supposedly autonomous front groups, and why and how these groups so often escaped supervision. Lastly, it considers how Mexico’s spiritual geography shaped regional outcomes.
Origins of the Religious Question
Scholars of postrevolutionary state formation often explain postrevolutionary religious conflict with state-centered narratives. This approach crowds out Catholic perspectives, plasters over divisions in both the revolutionary camp and the Church over the religious question, and erases the agency exercised by individual clergy and lay leaders. It often glosses over how Catholics’ approach to the religious question was shaped by their historical experience. The Revolution’s partisans labeled the Church a conservative remnant of the Porfiriato; Catholics, however, pointed to Díaz’s positivism and freemasonry. For them, the Revolution interrupted the Church’s Mexican renaissance. Moreover, this Porfirian transformation predisposed Catholics to reject the Revolution.
The “global new Catholicism,” to use Christopher Clark’s phrase, had many dimensions. Although it continued Pius IX’s ultramontane authoritarianism, the Church now engaged rather than rejected modernity. To regain social influence, it educated the best and brightest young men, not just seminarians. Through parochial schooling with a vocational bent, it reached out to those left behind by economic development. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1893) promised a systematic response to illiteracy, disease, and poverty. Social Catholicism encouraged charitable works, promoted mutualism, and expanded education. Revitalized lay groups provided a Christian remedy for the shortcomings of soulless, laissez-faire capitalism and so indirectly countered Liberal attempts to compartmentalize religion. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Church was appropriating key parts of modernity, including the use of mass media to influence civil society and the recognition of women as social actors.
A new generation of young bishops educated at Rome’s Pius Latin College brought this global revolution to Mexico. The Vatican believed these so-called Romans, seconded by European regulars, would educate, discipline, and generally professionalize the often-wayward, native-born priesthood. Lay activists, typically middle- and upper-class women, gained new authority and added responsibilities under social Catholicism. These determined women helped defend the patria, property, and the patriarchal family.
Neo-Christendom, to use Anthony Gill’s expression, came to terms with some socioeconomic changes, but it also reinvigorated political conservatism. Rather than bless a Catholic party, the Church preferred to influence elections via discreet episcopal pressure on elites who would in turn sway civil society. The Church’s “traditionalizing effect” countered the spread of liberalism, inhibited “social pluralism,” and buttressed regional oligarchies. In Mexico, bishops supported Porfirian capitalist development and authoritarian political stabilization. Overmyer-Velázquez documents how Oaxacan archbishop Eulogio Gillow disciplined the working class via mutualist labor circles, guilds, reenergized parochial schooling, and charities. In the city of Oaxaca, social Catholicism and modernized pious associations created “social identity and regional pride” that greased the wheels of Porfirian material progress. In Yucatán, Archbishop Martin Tritschler y Córdoba forged a lasting alliance with the peninsular oligarchy headed by Olegario Molina, who was both governor and Díaz’s minister of development. The henequen boom underwrote churches, schools, orphanages, and mutualist labor associations in Yucatán. Tritschler, however, remained discreetly mum on the brutal debt peonage practiced on henequen plantations. In many dioceses, social Catholicism sanctioned the científicos’ positivist project without humanizing it.
After the collapse of the Porfiriato, many revolutionary military officers, labor leaders, and intellectuals went after the Church with a vengeance. Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalists alleged that the Church had propped up Díaz and then endorsed General Victoriano Huerta’s reactionary regime (1913–14) through its conspicuous consecration of the nation to the Sacred Heart on January 6, 1914. To Catholics, the revolutionary Constitution of 1917 was frankly antireligious, denying the Church and its clergy legal status, imperiling parochial education, and persecuting the majority’s faith. Yet presidents Carranza (1917–20) and Alvaro Obregón (1920–24) preferred not to enforce the Constitution’s anticlerical provisions in order to preserve social peace. Obregón did punish perceived Catholic provocations, but he preferred moderate, measured secularization to incendiary direct attacks.
During the early 1920s, the Church set out to recover its influence over everyday life by reviving social institutions and official lay groups. President Plutarco Elias (1924–28) broke Obregón’s tacit truce with the Church and urged governors to enforce Article 130 of the Constitution by drafting state-level ley de cultos. These anticlerical regulations imperiled the Church’s postrevolutionary recovery and outraged Catholics. Bishops protested by declaring a sacramental strike in mid-1926. In the Bajio (and elsewhere), some Catholics took up arms. Although Rome and some bishops hesitated to condemn the insurgency, their eventual loss of authority and the human cost of the conflict led them to seek an end to the war.
The Arreglos (arrangements) that ended the Cristiada (Cristero War) fell far short of the victory cristeros craved. From the state’s perspective, the Arreglos settled the religious question once and for all: Mexico would be secular, and the state would no longer meddle in the Church’s internal affairs. In return, the Church would suppress the cristeros and support the government. Initially, the ruling revolutionary party seemed anxious to reconcile with Catholics. With the apparent approval of Calles, now the country’s ultimate executive as jefe máximo, interim president Emilio Portes Gil (1928–30) nullified the most restrictive elements of anticlerical legislation. His successor, Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930–32), called upon all citizens, regardless of ideology, to join the ranks of the ruling party, the PNR. This left the door open politically to Catholics. In January 1930, speculation mounted that Catholics would even take seats in congress.
The Mexican episcopate’s co-leaders—the archbishop of Mexico City, Pascual Díaz, and the papal delegate and archbishop of Morelia, Leopoldo Ruiz—signed the Arreglos over the objections of hard-line Catholics and a few bishops. Now, with peace secure, Díaz and Ruiz seemed inclined to accept the regime’s discreet overtures as a way of broadening the Church’s influence in the political sphere. Archbishop Díaz’s Christmas 1930 pastoral instructed Catholics to convince “competent authorities” to rescind anticlerical legislation. It reminded them to act as individual citizens exercising their civil rights and not as a Catholic bloc.
Maintaining this blurry boundary between citizenship and creed mattered. The Church had long seen direct involvement in elections as politically risky and potentially corrupting of Catholic leaders. The Constitution still prohibited all political activity by religious organizations, and clergy could be legally prosecuted for such violations. Archbishop Ruiz lamented in 1935 that the Church had “been deprived of all power.” In the eyes of the prelates, however, separation of Church and state was only relative. Their reading of the Constitution allowed Church representatives to encourage Catholics to participate in politics as citizens as long as the Church stopped short of directly endorsing candidates. To influence politics legally, the Church sanctioned civic action: the education of Catholics as individual citizens without formal, explicit Church direction.
The institutional Church fully expected that Catholic citizens would be guided by clergy, shaped by parochial education, and informed by the ACM. Civic action stressed defending parental control over children’s education, protecting private property rights, and demanding freedom of religion. Catholics would vote as citizens to support candidates who opposed not just anticlericalism, but also key elements of the revolutionary project such as ejidos, federalization of schools, and left-leaning unions. Although priests had to remain “outside and above all political action,” the laity would act decisively in elections and protests “inside the limits of Catholic morality.” Through this “licit” (peaceful, legal, moral) civic action, the Church would settle the religious question by persuading civil society to reject the revolutionary project. Ortiz Rubio’s invitation to Catholics to resume their place in public life gave the Church a golden opportunity to do just that.
Revolutionaries, particularly those close to Calles, saw Catholic civic action after the Arreglos as pure Jesuitical perfidy. They feared Catholics would use the ballot box to win what the cristeros had lost on the battlefield. By 1931, the charge of crypto-Catholicism was a point of contention in a bitter dispute within the ruling party between Calles’s supporters (Reds) and partisans of President Ortiz Rubio (Whites). The Reds alleged the Whites were betraying the Revolution by allying with the Church. The example of fiery anticlerical governor Tomás Garrido Canabal of Tabasco nudged other governors to pass harsh new legislation on the Church. With Calles’s tacit support, in mid-1931 the Reds toppled White governors in Jalisco and Durango. The message from Mexico City was clear: governors who failed to zealously enforce anticlerical legislation would be next. When the Church ostentatiously celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s first miracle on December 12, 1931, the Reds blamed Ortiz Rubio and the Whites. The Arreglos that apparently had resolved the religious question were unraveling, and another Church-state confrontation loomed.
The new wave of revolutionary anticlericalism was not just orchestrated from above. It welled up from the ruling party’s base, too. Key leaders in the Sep, the federal army and other agencies, civilian politicos, and agrarista (recipients of or petitioners for land grants from the federal government) and labor leaders advocated a hard line. In September 1932, Calles finally replaced Ortiz Rubio with a trusted military man and millionaire, General Abelardo Rodríguez. While personally no radical, Rodríguez took a tougher stance than Ortiz Rubio on the religious question. The new president supported stricter anticlerical education and threatened to oust governors gone soft on the Church.
In retaliation, Pope Pius XI’s angry encyclical Acerba Animi (September 1932) accused the state of duplicity and tyranny and called on Mexicans to “continue defending the sacrosanct rights of the Church.” President Rodríguez exiled Archbishop Ruiz, and many state governments passed their own tough new ley de cultos. By early 1935, only four or five of Mexico’s thirty-four bishops were still in their dioceses, and hundreds of priests had fled or gone into hiding.
Renewed anticlericalism roiled regional politics. Governors had to stiffen anticlerical regulations or risk their own removal, yet many relied on Catholic votes. As one U.S. consul put it in 1931, “It may be good politics in Mexico City to attack an official for sympathy to the Church but it is poor politics in Durango…. The recent charges against [Governor] Valdez as a church sympathizer will almost certainly force Church feeling to become an element in local politics.” The adoption of socialist education in late 1933 further inflamed Catholics by tasking schools with eradicating “fanaticism” —roughly defined as superstitious, unpatriotic, wasteful, and backward. In July 1934, Calles visited Guadalajara and called for a Psychological Revolution to make socialist education mandatory and defanaticize Mexico’s youth.
Catholics, already alarmed by coeducation, feared that the new curriculum included sexual education. In hindsight, such concerns seem greatly exaggerated; in 1932, the prospect was dashed by a huge wave of Catholic demonstrations. Even in officially atheist Tabasco, teachers steered clear of it. Nevertheless, Catholics were convinced socialist education would lead to the sexual abuse of children. Conservative newspapers in Mexico City often printed lurid tales of teachers promoting nude sunbathing and worse. Such narratives reflected widespread anxiety regarding the dissolution of parents’ authority over children, teachers’ authority over students, and even men’s authority over women. In fact, almost all federal teachers supported the patriarchal family structure (including the glorification of motherhood) and discouraged free unions outside of marriage. Catholic anxiety about sex in the federal classroom was not entirely specious, however.
Socialist education seemed to pose an existential threat for many Catholics. For some, it justified a second insurgency. According to David Raby, during the 1930s segunderos (Catholic combatants in the Segunda) killed three hundred federal teachers. As with most insurgencies, we do not know for sure when the Segunda began or ended. Especially in parts of the Bajio region, some cristeros never laid down their arms, and others accepted amnesty in 1929 only to take up arms again against socialist education in the 1930s. Some of these recristeros fought until the early 1940s. The Segunda peaked in early 1935, coinciding with the strictest anticlerical restrictions and the rancor provoked by socialist education. Too weak and disorganized to capture strategic targets or wage set-piece battles, the segunderos fought a classic guerrilla war: opportunistically congregating into larger bands, they swarmed isolated federal schools or ejidos, then dispersed into the surrounding civilian population before government forces arrived. Only a handful of segunda leaders campaigned continuously or commanded more than a few dozen men: Lauro Rocha in the Altos of Jalisco; José Velasco in Aguascalientes; Enrique “El Tallarín” Rodríguez in Morelos and Puebla; and Trinidad Mora, Florencio Estrada, and Federico Vasquez in Durango’s rugged Mezquital.
Was the Segunda a Catholic insurgency? Its would-be national command, the EPL (Ejército Popular Libertador, or Popular Liberating Army), its self-appointed civilian front, the LNDL (Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad), and Rocha all denied it. However, segunderos could not fight without Catholic support, their proclamations echoed Catholic dogma of natural rights, and their discourse mirrored Catholic fears of revolutionary tyranny. Because these connections endangered the Arreglos and their own authority, Díaz and Ruiz marginalized the LNDL and punished any clergy and lay leaders linked to the revolt. The Church, however, refused to condemn individual segundero combatants. For instance, Archbishop Ruiz rejected another Cristero War in November 1934, but the next month he said of violence that “neither the Episcopate nor the Clergy ought to meddle in it, either by promoting it or prohibiting it.” The Vatican seemed even more ambiguous. In March 1937, Pope Pius XI wrote that citizens could not passively submit to assaults on basic religious liberties. Still, the pontiff barred both clergy and official lay groups from supporting the Segunda and warned that violence must be proportionate and cause more good than harm.
What explains this contradictory position of condemning the Segunda and all Church involvement in it while refusing to condemn segunderos? The first pastoral letter (April 12, 1936) of José Garibi Rivera, moderate archbishop of Guadalajara, offers some insight. He forbade his priests and official lay groups from “taking part in either warlike or political activities, but as to violent resistance to evil, [this] author prays he will not incite anyone but it is beyond his mission to say whether it is licit or not.” He went on to add that socialist education was “pagan” and “immoral and shameful,” and that its spread was “rooting out the faith from the hearts and minds of both teachers and pupils.” On the one hand, the Church hierarchy hoped to preserve the Arreglos to prevent renewed anticlerical legislation or another Cristiada as well as retain a modicum of control over radicals in both the clergy and laity. On the other hand, Church dogma stated individuals could defend their natural rights by force as a last resort. For the Church, socialist education threatened one of the most precious of natural rights: that of parents to religiously educate their children.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexicoby BEN FALLAW Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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