Seeds of Apostasy: Mexico’s National Church
Part I of Breaking God’s Syndicate | Chapter 1
MEXICO CITY – Unbeknownst to the men gathered in the office of Luis N. Morones, Secretary of Industry, Commerce and Labor in the post-revolutionary government of Plutarco Elías Calles, several meters below them, under the foundations of the colonial-era, neoclassical palace, laid the ruins of an Aztec temple dedicated to the goddess Cihuacóatl (See-wua-kowhat’l).
Central to the Mexica creation story, Cihuacóatl represented the feminine principle in Nahua cosmological constructs, fashioning mankind from the bones of the old dwellers of the earth. Associated with soil fertility and water1, she guided the souls of women who died in childbirth – a fate honored as highly as a warrior’s death in battle – to the special place reserved for them in the afterlife.
Cihuacóatl’s representations as half woman, half-snake, led European missionaries to compare her to the biblical Eve2, though her place in the pantheon of Aztec mythology is much more profound and, given that her temple3 also housed the deities assigned to subjugated peoples, much more prescient as well.
Mexico’s chaotic revolution was technically over, with the establishment of a constitutional government seven years earlier and the ascension of a new ‘liberal’ elite controlled by a clique of caudillos from the northern state of Sonora, who took the baton dropped by the tragically vacillating instigator of the revolution, Francisco I. Madero.
The campesinos and rural masses who had proved critical during the first phase of the conflict and filled the ranks of the armies led by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, would be relegated to the same socio-economic strata they had fought to escape by the industrial-minded “Sonorans”, whose Constitutionalist army concluded the victorious, second part of the conflict by defeating them.
Despite lip service offered to the grassroots agrarian reform ideals that had motivated the masses to rise up, the post-revolutionary government followed a land redistribution policy4 geared towards consolidating political power and accruing favor with large corporate interests, like the mining sector and shifting the center of the political base from smallholders to the proletarian worker.
Upon the election of Elías Calles, unionized labor took center stage in the political life of Mexico, spearheaded by Calles’ Secretary of Industry, Commerce and Labor, Luis Morones and his Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), which he had founded in 1918 after rising to prominence as a strike leader5 for workers of the Mexican Telegraph and Telephone Company during the revolution.
Sometime in December, 1924, Morones assembled a small cadre of co-conspirators in his office for a confidential meeting. The newly-installed labor secretary had a plan to rid himself and the fledgling revolutionary government of the most insidious force for conservatism in the country and the biggest obstacle for radical liberal reforms: The Catholic Church.
After searching far and wide for the right candidate to lead the bold caper, the group had settled on a 73-year old itinerant Roman Catholic priest, with a colorful background, a known antipathy to the Pope and a history of social agitation.
The Patriarch
As a youth, José Joaquín Perez Budar took part in the armed rebellions that brought Porfirio Díaz to power, before enrolling in seminary school and becoming an ordained priest by the age of 30, though his dissolute lifestyle resulted in his pastoral license being revoked several times.
Seemingly torn between spiritual and political ambitions, he turned to freemasonry and joined a Masonic lodge6 owned by his friend and governor of Oaxaca, Albino Zertuche, called “Friends of the Light” before the turn of the century.
Perez Budar had seen the inside of a jail more than once, but in 1897 while living in Puebla, he was inspired by the anti-Papal diatribes of a disaffected Catholic bishop, to write a letter to the Holy See’s envoy – sent by the Vatican to remove the rebellious bishop – asking for the abrogation of church fees. His audacity landed him a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence after clerics and state government officials colluded to convict him on trumped up charges.
No one was more predisposed to carry out Morones’ designs against the Church than Perez Budar, who accepted the labor secretary’s mission to find other priests like himself, with a Vatican-sized chip on their shoulder, and write a manifesto stipulating the principles upon which a new, fully independent national Catholic Church would be founded in Mexico.
Such a mission in a country as fervently Catholic as Mexico was a very dangerous proposition and had a very low chance of succeeding. The backlash from the general population alone made it a suicide mission, which is why the conspiracy would require protection from the state to have even the slimmest hope of getting off the ground.
At the same time, overt government involvement would likewise doom the plot, leading Morones and company to devise a strategy that could provide the necessary security in covert fashion, while also doubling as a propagandistic exercise for the budding revolutionary government.
The Order of the Knights of Guadalupe was invented in the labor secretary’s office to bring together CROM toughs who, under the guise of pious advocacy for a national church professing revolutionary values, would accompany the core schismatics recruited by Perez Budar in their campaign to establish the seat for a sovereign Mexican Pope and run Rome straight out of the country.
Guadalupe, the name of the most venerated religious symbol in Mexico, was chosen deliberately by Morones to awaken an instinctual acquiescence from the masses. But, it was sadly ironic that a government seeking to legitimize itself through appeals to indigeneity, would use a syncretic image propagated by the colonial power to supplant the feminine principle embodied in the goddess Cihuacóatl, whose effigy was sinking right beneath their feet.
Even more revealing, perhaps, was the fact that Cihuacóatl’s primary meaning in Aztec cosmology revolved around cultivation of crops and everything related to fertility of the earth, placing her at the center of spiritual concepts surrounding agricultural production, sustenance and the land Zapata’s Liberation army, composed in large part by Indigenous campesinos, fought and failed to regain.
Morones, like many of his ilk in Mexico’s post-revolutionary political class, had other allegiances and was perfectly willing to exploit Indigenous culture to strengthen the federal state, which he in turn used to enrich himself and his cronies, distinguishing himself as one of the most infamously corrupt politicians in the history of the country.
Perez Budar may have been less cynical than his government sponsor, but was no less motivated by personal vendettas and ego-driven fantasies, which he laundered through the ideological constructs of social justice in his head. His 10-point manifesto began with allusions to the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, John Wycliff, Clavin and others.
Printed at the CROM’s print shops, the document was posted on telegraph poles, doors and walls across downtown on February 18, 1925 to only marginal reactions from the Church hierarchy. Mexico’s Archbishop José Mora y del Río scoffed at the notion and ridiculed the press for even covering such an event.
Two days later on February 21, Perez Budar and fellow priests Ángel Jimenez and Manuel Luis Monge, flanked by about a hundred “Knights of Guadalupe” (CROM members), barged into the Templo de la Soledad y Santa Cruz in the neighborhood of La Merced, demanding that the church and its archives be turned over to them, declaring that it was now the official seat of the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church (ICAM).
Taking the Temples
At least one person died in the violence that erupted over the following days at the Temple, largely emanating from scandalized Catholics physically attacking Perez Budar and the other priests as they attempted to perform mass.
One group of women, pretending to form part of the congregation approached Perez Budar during a service on the 26th and once they were within striking distance began laying into the septuagenarian with blows and scratches. The five women were joined by others, knocking the schismatic priest to the floor until the “knights” were able to rescue him from the mob.
President Calles, who had been in on the conspiracy from the start, vouched for the usurpers and ordered municipal authorities to grant the necessary permits. But, dissension was already starting to seep through the ranks. Father Monge, himself attacked in a separate incident, began to reconsider his association with the anti-Rome enterprise and, fearing excommunication or worse, disappeared without a trace the next day.
Nevertheless, Perez Budar knew he counted with official support and while he never admitted to it, claiming it was all a product of propitious timing and his own unshakable faith7, powerful people continued to pull the strings behind the scenes to cement the pillars of the schism in the face of growing public resistance.
Besides Perez Budar, Monge and Jimenez, only two other clerics, Eleuterio Gómez Ruvalcaba and Antonio López Sierra, had formed part of the schismatic nucleus. The latter, a Catholic priest in suspensio*, also happened to be the brother-in-law of powerful CROM union leader, Ricardo Treviño8, who managed the roll call for the “Knights of Guadalupe”.
Neither Perez Budar or any of the rebel priests would show their faces again over the next few weeks as a number ofcromista cells, led by police detectives masquerading as “Knights”, took possession of more churches throughout the city and other states.
The strategy, which was repeated all over the country, consisted of identifying churches located in CROM strongholds and inviting the local parishioner to join the schismatic movement, who invariably declined. Upon receiving the priests’ negative response, the cromista mob moved into the targeted church building and expelled the clerics by force, thereafter proclaiming it to be part of ICAM’s mare nostrum.
Results tended to be unfruitful in most cases, with communities loyal to the Roman Catholic ministry rejecting the national church’s ambitions en masse. In Mexico City, neighborhoods organized 24-hour watch crews to sound the alarm, by way of the church bells, should a contingent of ICAM ruffians attempt to seize another temple leading to many violent confrontations as a ICAM attempted to take-over of 16 churches in the capital.
However, the countryside would see the worst of it. Setting their sights on a number of states with a preponderance of unionized textile workers to maximize their chance of success, CROM-affiliated mobs tried to continue the absorption of church buildings into ICAM, culminating in the massacre of Aguascalientes in north central Mexico – part of an important region known as el Bajío, that would come to play a significant role in the religious war that was about to engulf the entire nation.
[1 https://mediateca.inah.gob.mx/islandora_74/islandora/object/articulo:11654]
[2 https://mediateca.inah.gob.mx/repositorio/node/5044]
[3 https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/optika/9/diez.html]
[4 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23030582]
[5 https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3030&context=gradschool_disstheses]
[6 El Patriarca Pérez: la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana, Rancaño]
[7 San Antonio article]
[8 https://escholarship.org/content/qt4bp155zp/qt4bp155zp_noSplash_a339d1f7ad59f6552fa0079eb10a8193.pdf]
*According to Church canon law, a temporary censure that deprives clerics of their ability to hold any kind of ecclesiastical office or use the power of orders (sacraments).
