A Catholic Alternative to Revolution: The Survival of Social Catholicism in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Alfredo Méndez Medina, writing from Belgium in January 1911, was possessed by the idea that Mexico's social and economic organization required radical change. Méndez Medina, a Mexican Jesuit priest and developing labor activist, had spent just a few years in Europe, sent by his superiors to learn the techniques, strategies, and ideology of Catholic social action. What he saw and experienced there helped shape his vision for Mexico and guided his work upon his return in late 1912. In Europe, the young Méndez Medina observed firsthand the Catholic unions, ministries, and propagandists of L'Action Populaire, an influential French social Catholic institution founded by Gustave Desbuquois, S.J. (1869-1959) in Reims. In a few brief notes, Méndez Medina wrote that Desbuquois's earthy, no-nonsense way of speaking to ordinary workers, and his profound spirituality, had impressed him deeply. To Méndez Medina, Desbuquois appeared to link seamlessly his religious faith, his social commitments, his sense of duty, and his politics.¹

As did so many others coming from Europe to Mexico, Méndez Medina would shape and tailor his ideas to fit the contours of the Mexican social and cultural landscape, which was rapidly changing at the time due to the course and process of the Mexican Revolution. Yet the social vision spun in Europe by the likes of Father Desbuquois, purchased as whole cloth by Méndez Medina and then resized for a Mexican context, looked much like the Catholic fashions already in production in Mexico. Since the late nineteenth century, numerous European and Latin American Catholics had conceived of a Christian vision for society—" social Catholicism"—a third or middle way between capitalism and socialism.² This third way became a pattern for Catholics worldwide. Historian Manuel Ceballos Ramírez argues that in Mexico social Catholicism presented an "alternative project," first to the liberal economic development associated with the long rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911) and thereafter to the revolutionary state's plans for national reconstruction (c.1920-1940).³ Méndez Medina helped design a social Catholic alternative using third-way ideas as a model. To unify and direct the burgeoning Catholic social movement, the Mexican hierarchy founded an institution called the Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM) in 1920 and appointed Méndez Medina its first director.⁴ Over the next five years, the Secretariat helped mobilize thousands of workers in competition with state-sponsored unionization drives.

But by 1925 Méndez Medina's Catholic alternative to revolution was unraveling. The Jesuit was fired from his position at the Secretariat and reassigned. State-sponsored anticlericalism became the official policy of the new president, Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928). Many social Catholics of the early 1920s became the Cristeros of the late 1920s, waging their epic civil war against the revolutionary state. The Church-state conflict deflated the Catholic social activism of the early 1920s, and during the Cristero Rebellion (1926-1929) the Secretariat functioned only as a shell of its former self, with its leader in European exile. When the guns of La Cristiada finally fell silent in June 1929, the Vatican and a temporizing Mexican hierarchy sought to pacify Catholic radicalism. Rome and the new archbishop of Mexico, the Jesuit moderate Pascual Díaz (1929-1936) laid out a new job for the reestablished Secretariat: the organization of Mexican Catholic Action, a hierarchically led lay apostolate that would focus on moralization and religious renewal instead of labor organization and socioeconomic reform. After the organization of Catholic Action in 1929, Mexican Catholicism severed its link with the social movement.⁵ In 1931, the new Federal Labor Law denied legal recognition to any professional union with a confessional identity. With that, social Catholicism suffered its death knell, or so the official story goes. However, this article is a revisionist history of social Catholicism in Mexico, which is in truth a story of survival.

This essay focuses on the continuity of Catholic social action in Mexico after the revolution, qualifying the conclusion that the Mexican Church...