Sotanas Rojinegras: Catholic Anticlericalism and Mexico’s Revolutionary Schism

As the recent clashes in Mexico City’s metropolitan cathedral show, it is not just clericalism that is making an apparent comeback in post-priísta Mexico: clericalism’s faithful alter ego, anticlericalism—provoked to violence when clanking church bells disturbed a political rally in the zócalo in November 2007—is also stirring anew.¹ This dialectical affinity between rival ideological traditions goes back a long way, as historic clashes over church bells—auditory symbols of institutional jurisdiction and influence—remind us:² and yet, as Alan Knight points out, neither the terrain, nor the terms, of the dispute between clericalism/anticlericalism have been mapped out with enough clarity by Mexicanist historians.³ The 1910–40 revolution, for instance, is associated with various anticlericalisms—be it the protestant variety studied by Jean-Pierre Bastian; the constitutionalists’ liberal clerophobia, irrupting circa 1914; masonic, spiritist, or popular anticlericalisms; or the “socialist” god-burning of the 1930s which climaxed in the iconoclasm studied by Adrian Bantjes.⁴ This trajectory—from priest-baiting to dechristianization within a generation—makes it tempting to posit an irreligious revolution, whose anticlericalism was a precursory form of mature godlessness.⁵ Some revolutionaries, like Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, encouraged such a conflation by using anticlerical restrictions—especially state licensing of priests, enshrined in constitutional Article 130—in a vindictive and secularizing way: squeezing the clergy so hard that priests were eradicated, not just rubber-stamped by the state.⁶ Such figures clearly hoped that persecuting priests would fatally mine belief: the day would come, Adalberto Tejeda hoped in 1926, when religion would expire and churches become places of recreation for apostate Indians.⁷ The Roman Catholic clergy, meanwhile, was fond of denouncing anticlericals as deicides, if not devils, and reinforced its own position by encouraging the association of anticlericalism with anti-Catholicism in the minds of the faithful.⁸

As we shall see, viewing revolutionary anticlericalism as Trojan horse secularization is reductionist on at least two counts: firstly, it obscures the existence of a dissenting, albeit minoritarian, voice within Mexican Catholicism; secondly, making anticlericalism the dividing line between reason and faith obscures the fact that some Mexican revolutionaries, too, were involved in sectarian struggles with Catholics over religious purity. In this essay, I hope to broaden our knowledge of revolutionary anticlericalism as a genre by exploring something of this purifying, even “apostolic,” character: not putting the Church out of business, but forcing it to revert to spiritual basics, to “clean up its act” in imitation of primitive Christianity. Such anticlericalism tended towards reform—driving the clergy to the political margins; eroding Catholicism’s temporal extensions; and reducing religion to an inner fuero of conscience—but not towards root and branch disenchantment. Instead, this was a confessional anticlericalism that sprang from personal, patriotic, or canonical disillusionment with the discipline and claims of the Roman Church: and its main supporters were dissident or liberal Roman clergy and Catholic revolutionaries. It is not often recognized that a Catholic anticlericalism emerged post-1910, as in the 1850s–60s:⁹ nor has the main carrier of this subgenre—the Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church (ICAM) founded by patriarch Joaquín Pérez in Mexico City in February 1925—been investigated in depth, usually because it is dismissed as a comic opera reformation sponsored by the Calles regime for base political reasons.¹⁰

If uncommon in Mexico’s polarized religious history, an internal Catholic anticlericalism is not the contradiction it might seem. Church and religion are obviously not the same thing: furthermore—as René Rémond’s classic analysis of nineteenth-century French anticlericalism eloquently shows—such an ideology only makes sense in a religious system which, like Catholicism, itself distinguishes between sacred and profane, clerical and lay. Because anticlericalism reaffirms this division between orders, for Rémond it is a positive political ideology, if not actually religious in origin. That is, anticlericalism is not just tied dialectically to clericalism—it grows within the same religious matrix and, therefore, is often deeply imbued with religion. At least in more moderate form, it rejects only...