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Church and State in Mexico: A Corporatist Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Karl Schmitt
Karl Schmitt*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin, Texas
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Extract

Conventional wisdom holds that two sharp breaks occurred historically in Mexican church-state relations: the first during the Reforma (1857-1861), and the second during the Revolution (1910-1920). These breaks reflected growing estrangement and hostility between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, culminating finally, with the Constitution of 1917, in the most anti-clerical and even anti-religious legislation ever enacted in the hemisphere. This paper has no quarrel with the above interpretation as far as it goes. What I will argue here is that, despite these very real changes, certain basic continuities have persisted in the conceptualization of the relationship between Church and State. Moreover, a number of specific quarrels and modes of government response have roots that extend well into the colonial period. Anti-monasticism has some precedent in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, and the nationalization of Church property in 1859 and again in 1917, in the royal Consolidation of 1804.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , January 1984 , pp. 349 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1984

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References

1 Malloy, James M., “Authoritarianism, Corporatism and Mobilization in Peru,” The Review of Politics Vol. 36 (January 1974), No. 1, p. 57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For a discussion of democratic and authoritarian forms of corporatism see Schmitter, Philippe C., “Still the Century of Corporatism?,” The Review of Politics Vol. 36 (January 1974), No. 1, pp. 102–04.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5 Ibid., pp. 369–70.

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11 Tena Ramírez, pp. 126, .128, and 135.

12 For the text of the Constitution of 1824 see Tena Ramírez, pp. 168 ff.

13 Costeloe, pp. 69–75 thoroughly analyzes the constitutional debates on Church-State issues.

14 Ibid, pp. 75–81.

15 Ibid., pp. 116–17.

16 This ambivalence among the Puros is well exemplified in the thought of José María Luis Mora, the leading theorist of the time, who advocated both guarantees of individual liberty and the strengthening of state authority. See Hale, Charles A., Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp.298–302.Google Scholar

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23 For the text of these laws, see Tena Ramírez, pp. 636ff.

24 Knowlton, pp. 141–44.

25 For the text of the law, see Bassols, Narciso (ed.). Leyes de Reforma que afectan el Clero (Puebla: Imprenta del Convictorio, 1902), pp. 200–201 Google Scholar. On November 11, 1874, funeral ceremonies were declared exempt from the restriction; Bassols, pp. 204–05.

26 For the text of the constitutional reforms, see Tena Ramírez, pp. 697–98, and for the text of the organic law, see Bassols, pp. 205–11.

27 As business and labor organizations established themselves and grew in importance in the latter third of the nineteenth century, every administration from that of Benita Juárez onward has attempted to associate them with government and the political leadership with the object of restricting their autonomy and bringing them under government control. See Shafer, Robert Jones, Mexican Business Organizations. History and Analysis (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973), pp. 17–21 Google Scholar; Ashby, Joe C., Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution under Lázaro Cárdenas (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 3–5 Google Scholar; and Walker, David W., “Porfirian Labor Politics: Working Class Organizations in Mexico City and Porfirio Díaz, 1876–1902,” The Americas Vol. 37 (January 1981), No. 3, pp. 257–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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29 For the text of the Constitution of 1917, see Tena Ramírez, pp. 817ff; for analysis of the convention debates, see Niemeyer, E.V. Jr., Revolution at Querélare. The Mexican Constitutional Convention of 1916–1917 (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies by the University of Texas Press, 1974), pp. 61–95.Google Scholar