"Restoring Christian Social Order": The Mexican Catholic Youth Association (1913-1932)

[our goal] is nothing less that the coordination of the living forces of Mexican Catholic youth for the purpose of restoring Christian social order in Mexico . . .

(A.C.J.M.'s "General Statutes")

Introduction

The Mexican Catholic Youth Association emerged during the Mexican Revolution dedicated to the goal of creating lay activists with a Catholic vision for society. The history of this Jesuit organization provides insights into Church-State relations from the military phase of the Mexican Revolution to its consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s. The Church-State conflict is a basic issue in Mexico's political struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the Church mobilizing forces wherever it could during these years dominated by anticlericalism. During the 1920s, the Mexican Catholic Youth Association (A.C.J.M.) was in the forefront of the Church's efforts to respond to the government's anticlerical policies. The A.C.J.M.'s subsequent estrangement from the top Church leadership also serves to highlight the complex relationship that existed between the Mexican bishops and the Catholic laity and the ideological divisions that existed within Mexico's Catholic community as a whole.

A brief examination of Church-State relations in Mexico puts the early twentieth-century conflicts in perspective. Beginning in the late eighteenth century when the Bourbon reforms subordinated the Church to the State, the Church had its powersharing role threatened. In the early nineteenth century, conservative churchmen came to see political independence from Spain as a means for the Catholic Church to regain substantial power. The Catholic Church in Mexico emerged from the wars of independence not only with much of its personnel and property intact but also with its monopoly as the nation's sole religious institution. However, Mexico's liberals contested the privileged status of the Church in the new republic, seeing it as a stumbling block to modernization and antithetical to individual rights. The Liberal constitution of 1857 marked a direct assault on the Church's power, depriving it of the power to hold property as a corporation, to serve as recorder of the nation's vital statistics, and to be the nation's exclusive religious institution. Mexican conservatives fought these changes in the War of Reform, which they lost to Benito Juárez and the liberals. They subsequently invited a foreign prince, Maximilian Hapsburg, to rule Mexico as its emperor, and when he fell in 1867 the thoroughly discredited conservatives went into political exile.

During the long rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911) liberal and conservative positions began to shift. Although Díaz considered himself a liberal, he was at the core a pragmatic military man who saw virtue in not inciting further conflict over the religious question. During the later years of the Porfiriato, the Catholic Church was not a direct participant in Mexico's political life, but neither was it a persecuted institution. Díaz's rapprochement with the Church allowed it to function as a religious institution and to hold property through loyal Catholic laymen. However, as Díaz's economic policies began to have a major deleterious impact on Mexico's peasants and workers, the Catholic Church in Mexico began to move on the social question in response to the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891).

During the early stages of the Mexican Revolution the Church aligned itself with conservatives. It supported the regime of Victoriano Huerta (r. 1913-1914), who had established himself in power by a military coup that cost the life of the "apostle of democracy" Francisco Madero. With the triumph of the Constitutionalist forces in 1916, the winners wrote a new constitution based on the liberal principles of the 1857 constitution, but which limited the powers of the Church even more radically. The implementation of anticlerical articles of the Constitution of 1917 led to an ecclesiastical strike in Mexico and the Catholic uprising known as the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-1929.

The...