In this important and original new work, Pamela Voekel states her thesis succinctly in the first sentence: “At the heart of the Age of Revolution in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war.” By asserting that there were committed Catholics on both sides, she distinguishes her interpretation from an older tradition of scholarship that had seen secularization as key to understanding political conflict in this period. In this way, her work is more consistent with recent scholarship by Bianca Premo, Carlos Herrejón Peredo, and Dale K. Van Kley.
In the introduction, Voekel begins with an elaboration of the connections between the Mexican friar Servando Teresa de Mier and other members of what Van Kley called the Reform Catholic International. A mixture of brief biographies and literature review connects Mier to such other members of the movement as the Mexican Miguel Ramos Arizpe, the Venezuelan Juan Germán Roscio, and the reformist bishop of Havana, Juan José Espada y Landa. Such leaders were an educated elite whose ideas were not popular and did not motivate foot soldiers, but they provided “theological ammunition,” essential for the literate pro-independence leaders. The wars between Spain and the Americas were not rooted in a conflict between a monolithic Catholic Church united with an absolutist monarch against a secular movement hostile to religion. Rather, both sides in the conflict were essentially Catholic with opposing ideas on the role of hierarchy and democracy. Rather than drawing primarily on the French philosophes, Reform Catholics in Spain and Spanish America drew on a long history of theoretical and theological developments in the Spanish-speaking world, though they were also influenced by the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy and Abbé Henri Grégoire. They looked to church councils and bishops as more democratic sources of authority than the pope.
Voekel develops these themes in eight chapters. The first begins with the Cortes of Cádiz (1810–1814), especially a group of clergy and laity known as the sanjuanistas from the city of Mérida (then New Spain, now Mexico) and their transatlantic allies and influences. Chapter 2 develops similar conflicts of reformers and conservatives in the Kingdom of Guatemala (today, Central America plus Chiapas) and the Viceroyalty of New Granada (today, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela). Chapter 3 explains Central America's Civil War (1826–1829) with particular attention to conservative Archbishop Ramón Casaús y Torres, a fascinating ultramontane character. Chapter 4 takes us once again across the Atlantic following Victor Castrillo, who went to Rome in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Pope Leo XII to support a reformist national church in El Salvador. The next two chapters demonstrate the deep historical roots of both reformists and conservatives based on their correspondence (Chapter 5) and their publications, primarily pamphlets, sermons, and other short works (Chapter 6). Voekel's penultimate chapter tells us what happened after the liberal reformist victory in Central America in 1829: reformist governments began to put their ideas into practice. They banned most of the regular orders and tried to exile their members. They removed conservative secular priests and replaced them with reform clergy. Archbishop Casaús resisted these efforts and led his priests from exile in Havana, Cuba, where Spanish authorities retained control.
The final chapter leaps forward several decades and shifts the scene to Mexico during the late 1850s and 1860s. Traditional historiography has essentially accepted the ultramontanist accusations that liberals were secularists rather reformers who wanted to return the church to an earlier purity with a flattened hierarchy and emphasis on individual consciences in the Augustinian tradition. Voekel provides ample evidence that the leaders of Mexico's Reforma saw themselves and explained their movement as a continuation of the Spanish trans-Atlantic Reform Catholicism of earlier decades rather than being rooted in the Enlightened philosophes and the French Revolution. Like their conservative opponents, those Mexican liberals were a minority with little popular support. Although armies led by Reform Catholics triumphed in the wars and took command of the state, ultramontane clergy retained control of the church.
I would have liked more detail about the reduction of feast days, prohibition of religious processions in the streets, the banning of burials inside churches, the creation of suburban cemeteries, and the attempts to end the requirement for clerical celibacy, especially in the Central American context. Historians of the Spanish American independence wars often point out how unusual Mexico was in that both of the two major leaders of the movement in the early years, Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, were ordained priests. They receive little attention in this book, though Herrejón Peredo has demonstrated Hidalgo's interest in ecclesiastical history and his mastery of theology. Instead, Voekel devotes much more attention to Mier, who was a quirky character who doubted the traditional story of the Virgin of Guadalupe while maintaining that the Apostle Thomas had preached Christianity in the Americas long before the first Spaniards arrived.
It is unfortunate that this work is marred by an inexplicable assortment of typographical errors, misplaced accents, misspelled words, and assorted other lapses. This is an important book; it deserved better attention in the final stages of production.
