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Sotanas Rojinegras: Catholic Anticlericalism and Mexico's Revolutionary Schism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Matthew Butler
Matthew Butler*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
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Extract

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. 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: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , April 2009 , pp. 535 - 558
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2009

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Footnotes

*

My thanks are due to Roberto Blancarte, Antonio Celis, Ben Fallaw, and Cheasty Miller.

References

1 See La Jornada, 19–21 Nov. 2007.

2 See Staples, Anne, “El abuso de las campanas en el siglo pasado,” Historia Mexicana 47, no. 2 (1977), pp. 177-194.Google Scholar For a fine study of anticlericalism in this context, see Corbin, Alain, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1999).Google Scholar

3 For an excellent survey, Knight, Alan, “The Mentality and Modus Operandus of Revolutionary Anticlericalism,” in Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, ed. Butler, Matthew (New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 21-56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Bastían, Jean-Pierre, Los disidentes: sociedades protestantes y revolución en México, 1872-1911 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1989);Google Scholar Bautista García, Cecilia Adriana, “Maestros y masones: la contienda por la reforma educativa en México, 1930-1940,” Relaciones 104 (2005), pp. 219-276;Google Scholar Vanderwood, Paul, Juan Soldado: Soldier, Rapist, Martyr, Saint (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bantjes, Adrian A., “Idolatry arid Iconoclasm in Post-Revolutionary Mexico: The DeChristianization Campaigns, 1929-1940,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 13, no. 1 (1997), pp. 87-120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Voekel, Pamela notes a similar conflation of reformism and secularism for nineteenth-century Mexico. See “Liberal Religion: The Schism of 1861,” in Religious Cultures in Modern Mexico, ed. Nesvig, Martin Austin (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), pp. 78-105.Google Scholar For a summary argument that Mexican anticlericalism extends to anti-Catholicism, see Assad, Carlos Martinez, “Anticlericalism,” in Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society, and Culture, ed. Werner, Michael S. (2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearbourn, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 60-62.Google Scholar

6 Calles’s, Hence denials in 1926 that the “Calles Law” meant “decatholicization”: “La legislación sobre cultos no pretende la ‘descatolización’ de México,” in Plutarco Elías Calles: pensamiento político y social, antología (1913-1936), ed. Macias, Carlos (Mexico City: FCE, 1998), pp. 190-195.Google Scholar

7 Meyer, Jean, La cristiada (3 vols. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1973-4), vol. 2, p. 274.Google Scholar

8 de Jesús Manríquez, José y Zárate, , Luchando con la bestia (San Antonio, 1938).Google Scholar

9 Cf. Covo, Jacqueline, Las ideas de la reforma en México (1855-1861) (Mexico City: UNAM, 1983).Google Scholar

10 The only scholarly monograph to date is Rancano, Mario Ramírez, El patriarca Pérez: la Iglesia Católica Aposólica Mexicana (Mexico City: UNAM, 2006).Google Scholar Other Catholic schisms were attempted by carrancista revolutionaries: see Ulloa, Berta, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 1914-1917: la constitución de 1917 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1983), pp. 444-451.Google Scholar And a notorious French schismatic, René Vilatte—who earlier ministered to the cultuelles founded after France’s separation of Church and state—built a religious colony, “Vilatteville,” in Chihuahua in 1910: Theriault, Serge A., Msgr. René Vilatte: Community Organizer of Religion, 1854-1929 (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2006), pp. 177-181.Google Scholar

11 Rémond, René, L’anticléricalisme en France de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1976), pp. 1-43.Google Scholar Cf. Kley, Dale Van, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

12 Kaiser, Wolfram, ‘“Clericalism - That Is Our Enemy!’: European Anticlericalism and the Culture Wars,” in Clark, Christopher and Kaiser, Wolfram (eds.), Culture Wars: Secular and Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 47-76.Google Scholar For comparisons between Europe and Latin America, see Ivereigh, Austin (ed.), The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000).Google Scholar

13 Archivo de la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana (AICAM), “Nos, el Dr. D. Martín Tritschler, por la gracia de Dios y de la sta. sede apostólica arzobispo de Yucatán, por sí y a nombre del Ilmo. Obispo Dr. D. Carlos de Jesús Mejía, al limo, y Rmo. Sr. Dr. y Maestro D. José Mora y del Río, digmo. arzobispo de México, salud y paz en Nuestro Señor Jesucristo,” Mérida, 22 Mar. 1923.1 am grateful to Antonio Celis for permission to consult this collection, which is the only surviving branch of the original ICAM archive.

14 Meyer, , La cristiada, vol. 2, pp. 148-166, views the schism as ephemeral and urban.Google Scholar

15 Here I follow Roberto Blancarte’s definition of laicidad as denoting not Church-state separation but constitutional legitimacy deriving from popular sovereignty. Hence, though there was no question of the schism becoming an established church, callismo’s flirtation with religious legitimation violated the laicist principle. Blancarte, Roberto, “Laicidad y secularización en México,” Revista de Estudios Sociológicos 19, no. 57 (2001), pp. 843-855.Google Scholar

16 See Archivo Plutarco Elías Calles (APEC), exp. 5: Obregón, Alvaro: leg. 13/13: ff. 608-611: inv. 4038, Obregón to Calles, Navojoa, 15 Apr. 1925, f. 608; and “Mis puntos de vista sobre el aspecto que reviste el movimiento cismático religioso recientemente iniciado en nuestro país,” ff. 609-611. Buchenau, Jürgen, Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), p. 128,Google Scholar sees these missives as friendly advice, but their didactic tone means that they do not read that way. The animosity between obregonistas and CROM, whose leaders harbored presidential aspirations, also weakens the friendly counsel thesis: Díaz, Rafael Loyola, La crisis Obregón-Calles y el estado mexicano (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1998).Google Scholar

17 Garridista Tabasco, where ICAM failed miserably, was the exception.

18 Some historians, of course, conceptualize all anticlericalism in fundamentally political/structural terms, which seems as reductionist as any purely cultural reading. According to Owen Chadwick, “modern” anticlericalism—the partisan identification of religion as the antithesis of liberty—was a function of political modernization and could not, therefore, exist in throne-and-altar societies: rather, it only came into being in incipient democracies where powerful religious parties held sway over peasan-tized electorates. In such a competitive climate, Chadwick argues, anticlericals and clericals alike advanced claims whose essential purpose was to gather a party: “In these conditions, God was a political slogan, anti-God another political slogan.” The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1975), pp. 107-139, quote, p. 124.

19 Butler, Matthew, “God’s Campesinos? Mexico’s Revolutionary Church in the Countryside,” forthcoming in Bulletin of Latin American Research, 28:2 (2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Brading, David, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1749-1810 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 112-116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 See, for instance, the letter in AICAM by Pbro. José Luis Lazarini to patriarch Pérez, dated Santa María Actopan (Puebla), 18 Oct. 1929. “Llegué a esta sin más novedad que haber caminado tres leguas y media a pie … El recibimiento que me dispensaron nunca creí que me lo hicieran a mi que no lo merezco, repiques de campanas, confeti, tiradero de flores por donde iba caminando, en fin derroche de alegría, todo como digo sin merecer pues en mi interior me compadecía de esta gente tan llena de respeto … pues parezco Conde de los del tiempo de los Virreyes, con mozos de estribo, criados, mayordomos, y servidores que quieren servirme al pensamiento, disputándose cualquier orden que doy, así que por ahorita estoy como en mi insula.”

22 This body was not recognized by the European Old Catholics who, as stated, had broken with Rome in protest against the Vatican Council of 1869–70.

23 E.g., Balderrama, Luis C., El clero y el gobierno de México: apuntes para la historia de la crisis en 1926 (2 vols. Mexico City: Editorial Cuauhtémoc, 1927).Google Scholar

24 Bastían, , Los disidentes, pp. 32-48, on early liberal schisms.Google Scholar

25 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de México (AHAM), Cisma, “Bases fundamentales de la Iglesia Ortodoxa Católica Apostólica Mexicana,” 18 Feb. 1925. Republished in ICAM’s newspaper, Restauración, 1 Aug. 1926.

26 Covo, , Ideas de la reforma, pp. 147-228.Google Scholar

27 Restauración, 1 Aug. 1925, “Nuestro programa.”

28 Ibid., 1 Aug. 1926, “Rasgos característicos de la sucesión papal.”

29 Ibid., 1 Aug. 1926, “Sin verdad, sin convicción, ni sentimientos religiosos: solo la ambición del dinero.”

30 Ibid., 15 Dec. 1926, “Los católicos romanos no son los católicos mexicanos.”

31 AHAM, Cisma, “Carta circular al venerable clero seglar y regular de la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Romana,” 26 Feb. 1925.

32 Archivo Miguel Palomar y Vizcarra (AMPV), c. 98/exp. 710/f. 5867, El Faro, 25 Jul. 1926, “Poliantea.”

33 Restauración, 1 Aug. 1925, “Nuestro programa.”

34 AICAM, “Excitativa de la santa sede episcopal del estado de Veracruz a la feligresía en particular y a los católicos en general,” Dec. 1931.

35 Ibid.

36 Arguably ICAM fared worse than the Porfirian Church, which in places did attempt to recruit a more indigenous pastorate. For the colony, see Menegus, Margarita and Aguirre, Rodolfo, Los indios, el sacerdocio, y la universidad en Nueva España. Siglos XVI–XVIII (Mexico City: UNAM, 2006);Google Scholar Poole, Stafford, “Church Law on the Ordination of Indians and Castas in New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1981), pp. 637–650.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Covo, , Ideas de la reforma, pp. 198–201.Google Scholar

38 See Taylor, William, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

39 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

40 AICAM, “Nuestra profesión de fe, razonada,” n/d.

41 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

42 Genesis, 2:24, cited in AICAM, “Nuestra profesión de fe, razonada,” n/d.

43 AICAM, official permit, signed Hermenegildo Díaz, Mexico City, 17 Oct. 1929.

44 AICAM, patriarch Pérez to José González B., Mexico City, 9 Jan. 1929. For a discussion of the colonial period, see Taylor, , Magistrates, pp. 185–188.Google Scholar

45 See Fallaw in this collection.

46 Restauración, 15 Dec. 1926, “Panteón clandestino en la C. de Tulancingo.”

47 AHAM, Cisma, , “Quienes son y que hacen los Caballeros de Colón,” 13 Feb. 1925.Google Scholar

48 At the 1856 liberal constitutional congress, Castillo Velasco argued for religious tolerance on the grounds that priests of a state church were not accountable to society and that tolerance, by abolishing exclusivity, would create a more responsible clergy. There should be no “dominant castes” in the liberal order, Ponciano Arriaga agreed. Covo, , Ideas de la reforma, p. 193.Google Scholar

49 Ibid, pp. 491–8, for comparisons with nineteenth-century liberalism.

50 Restauración, 15 Aug. 1926, “Antecedentes y fundamentos del movimiento evolutivo religioso de México, para establecer la Iglesia Ortodoxa, Católica, Apostólica, Mexicana.”

51 Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama dreamed of a “revolutionary piety” in which priests would be moral pastors; Luis León, Calles’s agriculture minister, believed in a “revolutionary Christ,” persecuted and penniless; Vicente Lombardo Toledano argued in a 1923 pamphlet that agrarismo was the realization of the Gospel. Even Calles claimed that his reforms were applied Christianity. Meyer, , La cristiada, vol. 2, p. 277;Google Scholar León, Luis L., Crónica del poder en los recuerdos de un político en el México revolucionario (Mexico: FCE, 1987), pp. 142–143, 256;Google Scholar Krauze, Enrique, Caudillos culturales en la revolución mexicana (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1985), pp. 121–124;Google Scholar Buchenau, , Plutarco Elías Calles, p. 127.Google Scholar

52 French revolutionaries, Ozouf, Mona writes, “delighted in the notion that a tabula rasa was being made of the past. But the past that was being rejected was not the whole past: in destroying history, the men of the Revolution were merely retying a broken thread, either with a primitive history … or with Nature herself, in her primal purity.” Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 34.Google Scholar

53 Restauración, 15 Aug. 1926, “Antecedentes y fundamentos. . . .”

54 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales,” 1925.

55 Restauración, 1 Aug. 1925, “Nuestro Programa.”

56 AHAM, Cisma, “Carta circular al venerable clero secular y regular de la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Romana,” 26 Feb. 1925.

57 Covo, Ideas de la reforma, pp. 199, 208, 212.

58 Matthew, 16:18.

59 Restauración, 18 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1927, “Carta abierta al Sr. Pbro. Don Encarnación Anaya, exvicario del pueblo de Apam, Hidalgo.”

60 Meyer, La cristiada, vol. 2, pp. 149–151.

61 Deuteronomy, 6:5.

62 Romans, 12:14.

63 Matthew, 5:44.

64 Archivo de la Diócesis Anglicana de Mexico (ADAM), La Buena Lid, vol. 2/no. 40, Apr. 1925, “Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana: sermón predicado por el Pbro. B. Gómez R., en la parroquia de la Soledad y Santa Cruz, el domingo 8 de Marzo de 1925 ante una escogida y numerosa concurrencia.” My emphasis.

65 Christopher Michael, Domínguez, Vida defray Servando (Mexico City: Era, 2005), pp. 1–123.Google Scholar

66 Las Casas was admired because of his proto-indigenista ministry in sixteenth-century Chiapas. Restauración’s logo showed him atop the teocali with a slain Mexica warrior lying at his feet, a grieving woman clasping his habit, and the peaks of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepétl, church cupolas, and the angel of independence, all piercing the horizon. Las Casas, “one of the greatest Christian missionaries of the conquest,” was described as “the personification of charity and love for the Mexican Indians,” whose selfless concern brought “the sublime redemption of the Crucified” to the vanquished Indians. Such exemplarity was sufficient “to bring the children of unfortunate Anáhuac into the breast of God’s Church.” Las Casas’s priesthood also embodied “the sacrifice and holy resignation that the Mexican Priest must have in obedience to the laws of God” (Restauración, 1 Aug. 1926). Still, a search for the schism’s colonial origins was unusual. Franciscan attempts to found an Indian clergy, for instance, were acknowledged only rarely (in one self-conscious history, ICAM claimed descent from Martín Durán, a sixteenth-century Nahua priest allegedly burned in Tlatelolco for attacking Rome). The noble friars were precursors in terms of purifiying Catholicism (there had always been, Restauración wrote, a tendency “within the breast of the Roman Church [towards] … a restoration of primitive Christian practices”): but they were ultimately suspect because their evangelical tendencies had not led them into a breach with Rome. Restauración, 15 Aug. 1926, “Antecedentes y fundamentos … ”

67 Los concilios provinciales en Nueva España: reflexiones e influencias, ed. Martínez López-Cano, María del Pilar and Cervantes Bello, Francisco Javier (Mexico City: UNAM, 2005).Google Scholar

68 As noted above, sixteenth-century friars were still Spanish colonizers; “enlightened” eighteenth-century clergy, likewise, were agents as well as victims of Spanish absolutism; even fathers Hidalgo and Morelos could only fit ICAM’s vision of church patriotism if their rebellions were misrepresented as attempts to found independent churches not independent nations. The solution was to find a remedial vision of the Church in the distant past and jump straight to the liberal schisms pioneered by Juárez and Ocampo.

69 Restauración, 1 Aug. 1925, “Carta pastoral del patriarca de la Iglesia Ortodoxa Apostólica Mexicana, a nuestros muy amados hermanos campesinos,” and 1 Sep. 1926, “El agrarismo en México.”

70 In this, again, the schismatics harked back to early/mid-nineteenth-century liberals as well as later Protestants. Cf. Bastian, Jean-Pierre, Protestantismos y modernidad latinoamericana: historia de unas minorías religiosas activas en América Latina (Mexico City: FCE, 1994), pp. 76–100, 107–112.Google Scholar

71 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

72 Restauración, 15 Dec. 1926, “Los católicos romanos no son los católicos mexicanos.”

73 Ibid., 15 May 1927, “Es ud. católico apostólico cristiano.”

74 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

75 Matthew 10:10.

76 Restauración, 1 Oct. 1925, “¡Escuchad católicos romanos!”

77 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

78 Restauración, 1 Aug. 1925, “Limosnas.”

79 Ibid., 18 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1927, “Carta Abierta …” As a priest in 1890s Puebla, Pérez told the priest of Apam, he had been “pursued, imprisoned, and martyred like a criminal” because he “asked [the apostolic delegate] for the annulment of those impious tariffs.”

80 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

81 While it chimed with revolutionary propaganda against Catholic confessionals, this change antagonized Protestant sympathizers like Herbert Gambrell, for whom the dousing of hellfires was “a startling slant towards Universalism.” Benson Latin American Collection, Herbert Gambrell Papers, “The New Catholic Church of Mexico,” p. 4.

82 Ibid., p. 3.

83 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

84 AMPV, c. 61/exp. 467/f. 117, Iglesia Católica Liberal: información general, 1925 pamphlet.

85 Covo, , Ideas de la reforma, pp. 149, 150–151, 162–163Google Scholar, argues that Ocampo, like Rousseau’s vicaire savoyard, believed that individuals should heed the “the intuitions of conscience” implanted by God. Having recourse to a priest, when individuals could settle their affairs with God, was absurd.

86 This change resembles the rapid Pentecostalization of Latin American Protestantism since 1940. Cf. Bastian, , Protestantismos y modernidad, pp. 223–278.Google Scholar

87 AHAM, Cisma, “Bases fundamentales.”

88 Romero de Solís, José Miguel, “Apostasía episcopal en Tamaulipas, 1896,” Historia Mexicana 37, no. 2 (1987), pp. 239–282.Google Scholar

89 Herbert Gambrell Papers, “The New Catholic Church of Mexico,” p. 4.

90 Navarrete, Carlos, San Pascualito rey y el culto a la muerte en Chiapas (Mexico City: UNAM, 1982), pp. 15–52;Google Scholar García Valencia, Enrique Hugo, “Religión, política, y brujería,” Dimensión Antropológica 13, no. 37 (2006), pp. 151–180;Google Scholar Reck, Gregory, “Goodbye Ixoxolotl: Acculturation in a Mestizo-Indio Village in Mexico” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1972), pp. 71–77.Google Scholar

91 Roman Catholics saw ICAM’s indigenismo as risible. For such “crude Mexicanism” to be consistent, the archdiocese’s mouthpiece stated, then “everything must be Mexican both inside and out, above and below, and on all four sides,” meaning that it was necessary to deport even the donkey, chosen by Christ as his humble mount, “since these long-suffering animals were imported by the conquistadores.” Gaceta oficial del arzobispado de México, vol. 23, no. 4, 15 Apr. 1925, “El pretendido cisma: juicio contra los asaltantes.”

92 For these major points, which can only be summarised rather than substantiated here, see Matthew Butler, “Father Pérez’s Revolution: Or, Making Catholicism ‘Mexican’ in Twentieth-Century Mexico” (ms. in progress), which aims to provide a grassroots, as well as institutional, treatment of the schism.

93 McManners, John, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France (2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 350–351, 422,Google Scholar and especially p. 668 on pre-revolutionary Jansenism. “The curés were embracing only the ecclesiological aspects of the doctrine, the writings of the canonists of the party elaborating the New Testament and later historical precedents to justify the rights of the parish priests, arguments useful in their fight for fair salaries and a share in the government of the Church. … They were Gallicans, hostile to Rome and the Jesuits.”