Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados: The Politics of Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

4. The Clergy and How It Responded to Calls for Rebellion before the Mid-Nineteenth Century

anne staples Four. The Clergy and How It Responded to Calls for Rebellion before the Mid-Nineteenth Century A few years after independence a priest who was also a deputy to the national Congress proposed a plan for an indigenous monarchy, with a descendant of Moctezuma seated on the throne, accompanied by a white consort (or an Indian one, if the descendant turned out to be white), with whom he would procreate the beginnings of a new mestizo kingdom.1 This was hardly the first nor the last time that members of the clergy thought up ways to alter the course of events. What remains to be determined is how freely clerics signed pronunciamientos and representaciones, wrote newspaper articles, or participated in civic ceremonies that put a stamp of approval on violent measures against the government. Did they do so on their own initiative? Were they pressured by military commanders or higher-ranking churchmen? These are questions that are practically impossible to answer, but one can examine the occasions when clerics signed incriminating documents or participated in public events, proving that they were involved in some way. These instances can be divided into two groups: those in which religion is specifically mentioned and those in which local priests lent support, without the church playing a specific role. It is well to remember that the secular clergy, during the viceregal period, had no reason to rise up against the crown. As the The Clergy and Calls for Rebellion 69 king was the patron of the church and representative of the pope, appointments within the Church of New Spain depended on royal goodwill and benevolence; as such, the secular clergy had their hands tied, and their loyalty to the crown was assured. This was not the case with the regular clergy, who struggled to maintain independence, avoid being dominated by the secular clergy, and retain the prerogatives they had acquired during the first years of the conquest, when their evangelizing abilities were useful to the king. The Bourbon reforms and the War of Independence drastically altered this relationship. The lower clergy—poorly paid, working in parishes with sickly climates, isolated from urban society but in close contact with the daily struggles of rural communities —rebelled against the unjust distribution of tithes (of which they received little or nothing) and the threat of peninsular Spaniards taking from them the richest parishes, whether they spoke the local languages or not.2 The regular clergy had gone downhill. As a body it had lost its reason for being—its center of gravity—in the New World as of the middle of the eighteenth century, when the process of secularizing the parishes accelerated. As the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Mercedarians died off, the parishes they controlled were placed in the hands of secular priests. On many occasions the crown did not even await the incumbent’s death but ordered immediately turning the parishes over to the bishops. With nothing very challenging to do, the finest and brightest members of the New Spanish elite no longer found being a Franciscan, for example, particularly attractive. Their income had decreased noticeably , to a large extent because they no longer administered parishes . But more than any other factor contributing to their decline was their exclusion from evangelization, as the surviving members 70 Staples of the orders were secluded within their monasteries, returning to a life of meditation that they had renounced when they came to the New World. They had taken on the great project of Christianizing entire peoples, reorganizing their lives and their communities , teaching European industrial techniques and new forms of government, and introducing that most western of concepts, sin. Now they were reduced to prayers and wandering endlessly the corridors of their old decrepit monasteries, often built to house many friars but where only two or three now lived, trying to maintain a sense of community. No wonder that some of the bored escaped to the theater or were caught betting on cards or spending the night outside the cloister, who knows with whom.3 These frustrations provided fertile ground for a phenomenon that took place in New Spain but very infrequently in the rest of Latin America. According to the historian Nancy Farriss, 244 secular clergy and 157 members of religious orders participated in the War of Independence, although she feels that the number was even greater. In all of the Southern Hemisphere, there...