Jesuit Student Groups, the Universidad Iberoamericana, and Political Resistance in Mexico, 1913-1979

2: The Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana, the Mexican Revolution, and the Cristero Rebellion, 1912–1929

15 CHAPTER ONE Church-State Relations from the Porfiriato to the Mexican Revolution, 1876–1917 Persecution has unleashed all its fury. Clergy have been expelled, Catholic schools closed . . . priests have been arrested and the celebration of the mass impeded. . . . All Hell has broken out. —Letter from Miguel Palomar Vizcarra to Gabriel Fernández Smollera, 1914 Introduction The early decades of the twentieth century were characterized by dramatic twists and turns in the Roman Catholic Church’s fortunes in Mexican society, an institution that had once exercised a near hegemonic influence in Mexico from the time of the Spanish Conquest until the final triumph of anticlerical liberals over their church-supported conservative rivals in 1867. Utterly discredited as a consequence of its disastrous support of the ill-fated, French-installed regime of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, the Roman Catholic Church had recovered a measure of its lost vitality during the lengthy dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz, a hero of the war against Maximilian’s French-supported government. Unable to exercise a formal political role in Mexico during the so-called Porfiriato (1876–1911), the church instead concentrated its efforts in unglamorous but highly significant institution-building activities . New parishes were created and staffed by Mexican-born priests educated in recently established seminaries, which served both to increase the church’s contacts with the general population as well as to strengthen the national identity of the clergy. However, during the last decade of the Porfiriato (the first decade of the twentieth century) the church and lay social Catholic activists began to take a decidedly more open political stance; these players were reacting both to political factors endogenous to Mexico as well as to the religious-ideological currents emanating from the Vatican and the broader Catholic world. 16 c h a p t e r o n e The church and social Catholic activists responded both to the abject failure of the Porfirian regime to constructively address the legitimate needs and demands of the Mexican laboring classes and the emphasis that the Roman Catholic Church had recently given to the “social question,” most importantly in Pope Leo X’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), by holding a series of conferences that paternalistically examined the nation’s severe social ills. These gatherings, held in different cities in central Mexico from 1903 to 1909, also created a cadre of militant politically active Catholics eager to shake off the subservient role that practicing Catholics and the church had occupied in the nation’s political life since 1867. These efforts bore fruit in 1911 when taking advantage of the democratic opening created by Francisco Madero’s successful revolution against Díaz’s regime. Established in close coordination with the Catholic Church hierarchy , the Partido Católico Nacional (PCN, National Catholic Party) soon became one of the country’s most influential political parties, winning offices at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Despite the fact that Mexican Catholics had been one of the principal beneficiaries of the political freedoms ushered in by Madero’s revolution, the church hierarchy and its political arm failed to support the new government; indeed, these forces welcomed Madero’s overthrow in February 1913 and supported General Victoriano Huerta’s brutal counterrevolutionary government. The fallout from the Catholic Church’s disastrous political decisions became all too apparent as revolutionary armies, seeking to overthrow Huerta’s de facto regime, took numerous opportunities to punish the church and its institutions as they victoriously advanced toward Mexico City. The revolutionaries’ anticlerical ire, manifested in a more or less unorganized fashion during their struggle against Huerta (1913–1914), was codified in the Constitution of 1917; this document formed the epicenter of the church-state conflict that afflicted Mexico in the coming decades. Drafted by the often-dysfunctional revolutionary “family,” the 1917 Constitution reflected the revolutionaries’ determination to break the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on Mexico. The Catholic Church’s refusal to recognize the Constitution of 1917 hampered the consolidation of the new political order. The revolutionary general Álvaro Obregón, who became president in 1920, sidestepped a frontal confrontation with the Catholic Church by not enforcing the Constitution’s anticlerical provisions.1 Plutarco Elías Calles’s determination to enforce the law during his administration (1924–1928) was met with fierce opposition c h u r c h - s t a t e r e l a t i o n s 17 by...