The Bishops, Rome, and the Armed Struggle

The bishops, when they chose the path of resistance to the Government, were counting on the fidelity of the Catholics, and their hopes were not betrayed. The collective pastoral letter of 21 April 1926 contained the words ‘the moment has come to say NON POSSUMUS’, and that of 25 July asserted that ‘it would be criminal on our part to tolerate such a situation’; on 12 September, when the conflict had begun in earnest, a further letter exhorted the faithful to ‘imitate the constancy of the early Christians … who died like good men, and their blood was the seed of new converts’.

At the same time, the bishops made it clear that they did not desire any form of resistance that was not passive and peaceful. The impetuous Mgr Manríquez, who was later to become a supporter of the Cristeros, three times in the period 1925–6 forbade recourse to violence, and the other bishops did the same. It was, in fact, the episcopal decision to suspend public worship that unleashed the Cristiada, but the bishops were not formally responsible.

In the face of the fait accompli of the Cristero rising, the Church reacted with the utmost prudence, and did so at first in the theological sphere. Many of the insurgents had first consulted their parish priests as to the legitimacy of the insurrection; the parish priests in turn consulted the bishops, who handed the problem over to the theologians.

The English version of La Cristiada is the last of several versions to appear, which is paradoxical, since it has played a decisive role in the publication of my work in various forms. The work originated as a thesis of 2,500 mimeographed pages, at the end of seven years' research – a manuscript unpublishable as it stood, from which publishers recoiled!

It is the Cambridge University Press who deserve the credit for having restored the author's hope and awakened the interest of other publishers; the encouragement of its academic readers and the invitation to sign a contract to transform this enormous manuscript into a different book led me to rewrite entirely (and not simply to summarise) my thesis. Reassured by the scholarly guarantee that this commitment on the part of the Cambridge University Press represented, the other publishers made up their minds. Siglo XXI published the reconstructed thesis in Mexico (1973–4), recast (but not rewritten) in three almost self-contained volumes (La Guerra de los Cristeros; El Conflicto entre la Iglesia y el Estado; Los Cristeros: sociedad e ideologia), under the general title La Cristiada, Gallimard published in 1974, in Paris, Apocalypse et Révolution au Mexique: la guerre des Cristeros (a collection of documents with commentary), and Payot, also in Paris, brought out in 1975 La Christiade: l'Eglise, l'Etat et le Peuple dans la Révolution Mexicaine, a book that corresponds to, without entirely duplicating, the present English edition.

The Government: the Nature of Its Power, and the Objectives Pursued

Between 1920 and 1935 Generals Obregon and Calles, in one way or another, governed the country; they succeeded in resolving the problem of power, in establishing the rules of the political game in the form in which they have survived until the present day, and in creating the institutions needed for the growth of the modern state. They found themselves in difficulties on more than one occasion, and had to crush two serious military insurrections. They were obliged to ensure the goodwill of the United States at the price of important concessions, although their religious policy nearly destroyed everything else, for it provoked the great insurrection of the Cristeros. They triumphed, thanks to the control that they exercised within Mexico and to American support obtained from the outside.

To govern is to command. In what way is Mexico, a heterogeneous country, governable, and who exercises the imperium? The power of the state rested on the army and the labour unions within Mexico, and on American help outside Mexico. The army had been decisive in national politics since 1913; these Praetorians had only one weakness: they all expected to reach the presidency, and Obregon took advantage of this to eliminate them en masse.

The peasants did not share the culture of the elites; or, to put it more precisely, their culture remained rooted in a base which was once common to all and which the elites in the Western world had abandoned at least as early as the eighteenth century. According to the answers to the questionnaires, 60 per cent of the Cristeros had never been to school, which did not mean that they were complete strangers to the written word; the author knows of many who learned to read by themselves, and devoured devotional books, legal textbooks, and works on astronomy. The archives of the combatants reveal the problem only too clearly; in illustration, a letter is reproduced below:

The State

The period studied in this work comes at the end of a phenomenon of long duration, the last stage of the growth and definitive establishment of the modern state, the state that would create the nation, through a centralised system of control and repression intolerant of any alternative – the ‘nation-state’. The contemporary political system was established, complete with its institutions and ideology, and provided a solution to the problem of power in Mexican society, made up as it was of superimposed and juxtaposed groups.

If this was the character of the movement in the long term, the short-term crisis, the tragic moment, was that of the struggle of factions within the group that was master of the state and was building the state. Obregón had dreamed, like a new Porfirio Díaz, of having Calles as his devoted González, in order to return subsequently to the Presidency; the function made the man, Calles became a politician and, utilising the traitor Morones (he was a traitor in the eyes of Obregón because he had previously made a pact with him), obliged his former leader to consent to the alternating diarchy. The religious conflict took place against the background of these circumstances: Obregón feared it, Morones provoked it, and Calles made use of it.

The Birth of a Crisis: the Aggression of 1925

During his election campaign, President Calles had not had any opponent, apart from the rebels, except General Angel Flores, a dissident member of the revolutionary family, supported by the National Republican party, which was the remains of the Catholic party but lacked both its audience and its aggressiveness. The Church never gave it the slightest support. The beginning of 1925 was not marked by any new event; Garrido Canabal, the Governor of Tabasco, continued to harass Bishop Díaz, and in Jalisco Zuno continued the persecution that he had initiated in late 1924. This was intensified in January 1925, and the contagion spread to the neighbouring state of Colima. Zuno, a young, well-educated and respected man, had opposed the candidature of Calles, and it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that he had sympathised with the rebels supporting De la Huerta in 1924. It seemed logical to interpret the fierce attack which he mounted against the Church as a desperate attempt to bring to a halt the political machine that had been mobilised against him. It would not be long before the Senate would sit as a Federal grand jury and depose him.

Geographical Background

Every geographical account of an insurrection has an element of ambiguity: rebellion develops both where men wish to rebel and where they are capable of doing so. Abstention is difficult to analyse, because it may stem from a lack of willingness or a lack of opportunity; finally, the negative factors may prove insufficient to deter men from the moment when the desire to fight has become strong enough. One must, therefore, bear in mind that recruitment is not the same at the beginning as it is at the end of the rebellion, that it fluctuates over the course of time. The near-unanimous participation characteristic of the beginning, which is more in the nature of an assembly than a rising, is replaced by a process of individual commitment that varies according to local circumstances. Thus one sees recruits, in growing numbers and in regions as yet only slightly affected, overcoming measures of intimidation which are already proving effective, because everybody knows that the war is terrible and that it will be long.

Participation in the insurrection is not only governed by geographical, historical, and social factors, but also by psychological considerations. The Federal general Cristobal Rodríguez, who commanded the Querétaro zone, declared that ‘the same fanaticism’ reigned everywhere; nevertheless ‘the perfidious efforts of the Clergy did not achieve the same results in every place’.

From the Conquest to Independence

The Catholic Church arrived in Mexico at the same time as the Spanish conquistadors, and it is extremely difficult to distinguish between the spiritual and the secular in the acts and motivations of the former and the latter; this ambiguity was still further increased by the staunch determination of the Most Catholic monarchs to ‘protect’ the Church; this ‘protection’ was the underlying cause of all the conflicts between Church and state in the various regions which made up the Spanish Empire.

Iberian Catholicism, as reformed by Cisneros, was, of course, bound to exercise an overwhelming influence on the society of the New World, and this tendency was reinforced by the ancient chiliastic expectations aroused by the spectacle of a young and newly-discovered universe; the three centuries of the history of New Spain cannot be understood unless the historian bears in mind the ubiquitous presence of the Catholic religion and of the Church that enshrined it. It was, perhaps, the last time that Western medieval Christendom attempted to build the City of God here on earth, at the very moment when Europe was turning its back on this particular Utopia in order to pursue others.

Cristero Democracy

The mass uprising of January 1927, a resort to arms that was more symbolic than real, was a manifestation of an archaic conception of democracy, because it asserted a belief in popular suffrage and the immediate virtues of the unanimous presence of the people: it was not necessary to be armed; it was a question of demanding one's rights by the mere assertion of the multitude. This insurrection, accepted as a necessary evil by Anacleto González Flores, even though he resented it as a relapse for which the Government was responsible, was carried out in an atmosphere of primitive social rebellion, the League being either absent or ineffectual, and all ‘reasonable’ people (gente de razón) being certain of the victory of the state, renouncing the fight and leaving the peasants to fend for themselves.

What were the people, as a disorganised crowd and unarmed, trying to do? The abolition of the municipal councils and their replacement by authorities elected on the spot, by acclamation, was a proclamation of the downfall of the Government: in April 1927 Coalcomán informed the Federal Government that the canton no longer recognised its authority and was proclaiming its independence, since the Federal pact had been broken unilaterally.

The last Cristeros laid down their arms at the end of September 1929, ‘and have quietly returned to their homes without bothering with the formality of a surrender … to work on the farms from which they originally came’. ‘It was expected that after the religious warfare was ended a number of the Cristeros would turn bandit. This has not resulted.’

For the Cristeros, who were received as victors in their villages, the festivities of the summer of 1929 had a taste of ashes, despite the renewal of public worship, despite the good relations between Church and state. Although the mass of the people rejoiced without a second thought in what they sensed as a victory, the Cristeros felt that the Church had robbed them of a victory which they thought they were about to achieve with their rifles, and refused to believe in the good faith of the Government.

Without plans, lacking organisation, with no leaders, the Cristeros rose in rebellion and began operations by disarming the nearest enemies in order to take their rifles. Without uniforms, with no standard equipment, identified first by a black arm band, the sign of mourning, and later by an arm band in red and white, the colours of Christ, they were organised first in bands, then in companies, then in regiments, and finally in brigades. At the end of 1927 they called themselves the Army of National Liberation. When there were divisions composed of several thousand men, the shortage of ammunition was to limit the war to guerrilla operations; the basis still remained the local unit supported by one of the villages which supported the insurrection, where the combatants could return after the battle and the dispersal of their forces, and wait until the next time they mustered for an operation.

The war did not involve only the combatants, and the Cristeros mansos (non-combatants) guaranteed a rudimentary but effective logistical organisation. The people of the countryside provided both the soldiers and their civilian allies, whereas those of the towns worked to improve organisation, propaganda, and supplies; town and country were in continuous communication with each other, and the flow of refugees reinforced this continuity.