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

3: The Unión National de Estudiantes Católicos, the University of Mexico, and the Partido Acción Nacional: Student Politics, National Politics

35 CHAPTER TWO The Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana, the Mexican Revolution, and the Cristero Rebellion, 1912–1929 [Our goal] is nothing less than the coordination of the living forces of Mexican Catholic youth for the purpose of restoring Christian social order in Mexico. —ACJM, “General Statutes” Introduction The Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM, Mexican Catholic Youth Association) was the creation of a French Jesuit cleric, Bernardo Bergöend, and represented a part of a greater social Catholic effort to refashion Mexican society or, in the words of Bergöend, to “re-Christianize” the nation in accordance with Catholic social doctrine. Bergöend’s ACJM targeted the “living forces” of Mexican society; it educated young men drawn primarily from urban Catholic middle-class families who, thanks to the indoctrination carried out at the ACJM’s study groups, would become the agents of Mexico’s transformation . According to Bergöend, the ACJM also served as a surrogate Catholic university in a country where such an institution could not exist due to the political realities of the day. Bergöend’s demand that the members of his organization become active agents of Mexico’s so-called re-Christianization meant that it was inevitable that these young men would be drawn into the bloody Cristero Rebellion of 1926–1929, a conflict that cost the lives of some 90,000 people, with uniformly disastrous results.1 This conflict exposed bitter divisions within the church hierarchy between those who wanted a negotiated settlement to the war and those who rejected any agreement that allowed the hated revolutionaries to remain in power. Archbishop 36 c h a p t e r t w o Pascual Díaz, the leader of the clerics seeking a modus vivendi, used the newly introduced Catholic Action in order to rein in radicalized Catholic organizations like Bergöend’s ACJM that opposed the church’s truce with the government. The ACJM lost its former dynamism once it came under stricter control by the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the internal democracy that existed within the organization had been eliminated. The history of Bergöend’s ACJM is an important stepping stone in the story of the creation of the Universidad Iberoamericana. The ACJM indoctrinatedyoungmenwholateroncontributedtotheIberoamericana’s creation and development. And, as will be seen in chapter 3, the ACJM helped develop the The Unión National de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC, National Catholic Student Union) that in the 1930s was a major player in the world of university student politics. The UNEC went to form a generation of Catholic political activists that assumed leadership positions in the newly created Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, National Action Party), one of contemporary Mexico’s major political institutions, after it was created in 1939. President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) was, in fact, the son of the 1930s UNEC leader Luis Calderón. Chapter 4 of this work will then demonstrate how the UNEC was used by the church hierarchy to provide much of the material and human resources to create the embryonic Universidad Iberoamericana. Origins of the Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana The ACJM owed a great deal to the Roman Catholic Church’s resurgence during the late Porfiriato, emerging from the milieu created by the Catholic congresses of the early 1900s. The ACJM’s history is inseparably linked to the energetic Jesuit priest Bernardo Bergöend. Born in the Alpine region of France in the year 1871, the short, bespectacled cleric entered the Jesuit Order in 1889 and served in Spain before being transferred to Mexico in the early 1900s, precisely at the moment when Catholics there were beginning to study and embrace, at least in part, the social and religious message contained in Rerum Novarum. Bergöend entered fully into this environment, training and educating Catholic labor leaders in Guadalajara, traditionally a conservative Catholic city, and drew up plans for a “Political-Social Union of Mexican Catholics” that sought to take advantage of the progress that Mexican Catholics had made in creating an independent political voice during the recent t h e a c j m , m e x i c a n r e v o l u t i o n , a n d c r i s t e r o r e b e l l i o n 37 Catholic congresses, a goal brought to fruition in...