The Pope and the Mexican Revolution

Part I of Breaking God’s Syndicate | Chapter 2

AGUASCALIENTES, AGUASCALIENTES – Many historians have chosen to ignore or minimize the influence of Mexico’s government-sponsored schismatic movement in the lead up to the so-called Cristero war that erupted in 1926 and pitted federal troops against passionate, but outnumbered defenders of the Catholic Church.

The war, which lasted three years, resulted in close to 100,000 people killed. Most of the casualties were sustained by the Mexican military, however. This fact, typically glossed over by chroniclers of the conflict, points to the unspoken reality that despite the obvious superiority of the Mexican army, the guerilla forces cobbled together by the pro-Catholic resistance actually won the war.

Without the context of the schismatic movement and its origins in the heart of the post-revolutionary Mexican state, the Cristero war of 1926-29 loses all historical meaning and is relegated to an anachronistic anomaly devoid of contemporary relevance. 

This narrative of omission is encouraged by historical accounts of the Cristero war from sources sympathetic to the Catholic Church as well, who like to frame the conflict as a holy war waged by believers against the anti-religious policies of the Calles administration. The latter only scratches the surface of the truth, while the former is merely a nostalgic appeal to colonial-era imaginaries harking back to epics of the Reconquista.

Once the Mexican schismatic movement is given its proper place in the historical record and the protagonism of the post-revolutionary government in its creation and attempted diffusion is acknowledged, the Cristero war can be examined in light of what it really was: A proxy civil war between the diminished conservative, propertied classes, and an emboldened federal entity that sought to remove their last protector in Rome.

Close to the Easter festivities in March, 1925, the governor of Aguascalientes convened a group of agrarian party members to form the state’s chapter of the Order of the Knights of Guadalupe, provoking a wave of popular discontent. This was followed by the establishment of an organization called “Asociación Pro Patria” in support of Perez Budar and a manifesto railing against the Roman Catholic hierarchy was published simultaneously in the daily Diario Nuevo.

Soon thereafter, copies of the manifesto began to appear in public spaces, posted on church walls and causing an uproar among the Catholic residents, some of whom were arrested for taking them down. Rumors also started circulating of Perez Budar’s designs on three of the city’s most important churches, including the Diocese of Aguascalientes, located in the Church of San Marcos.

On the 28th of March, the Bishop of Aguascalientes Ignacio Valdespino y Díaz, held a special mass to condemn the events that had transpired weeks before in the nation’s capital at the Templo de la Soledad and to reaffirm his church’s oath to Roman Catholicism. Members of the congregation packed the house of worship for the highly charged service, punctuated by spontaneous cries of devotion to Rome and the pope.

Meanwhile, partisans of Perez Budar were gathering outside of the church to await the ceremony’s conclusion and meet the exiting congregation with defiant shouts of “Viva Calles” and “Death to the Pope”. Tensions quickly escalated to armed violence as members of the congregation climbed to the bell towers and started firing on the national church advocates.

The melee continued for several hours and turned more tragic after federal troops arrived at around 10:30 that evening. While a faithful accounting of events is hard to come by, the final tally left 20 people dead and nearly 260 wounded. One corpse, found with 47 stab wounds, reflected the intense level of animosity between the factions.

An Immovable Object

Efforts by the Mexican government to displace the power of the Catholic Church was nothing new and, in strictly legislative terms, extended as far back as the middle of the 19th century, with the first attempts to curb the Church’s property rights and tithe collection privileges provided for in the Constitution of 1857, but harkened all the way back to the war for independence and the possibility of ending the system of real patronato⁹.

In place even before Christopher Columbus claimed the first colony for the King and Queen of Castile and Aragon, the real patronato had since become inextricably bound to the socio-economic matrix of “New Spain” and extirpating it meant disrupting the economic interests of an entrenched upper class with contemporary ties to the mother country and a religious institution that had positioned itself as ‘protector’ of an oppressed Indigenous class.

Mexico’s Faustian social order persisted long after the war of independence and only started to show fissures towards the latter half of the 19th century, when Perez Budar was born to a relatively well-established family in Oaxaca. 

Witness to the economic exploitation by the Catholic Church of the poorest native communities through their monopoly of sacramental services, such as baptisms, communion and last rites, Perez Budar had started to identify with notions of an independent church early on and through association with characters like Bishop Eduardo Sanchez Camacho¹⁰ and other schism-minded priests of late 19th century Mexico, his anti-papal sentiments would crystalize along these lines.

Point N^o 5 of Perez Budar’s Manifiesto a la Nación de la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana reflected this, declaring that all sacraments should be administered free of charge to “put an end to the Simonist commerce that exists in the Church of Rome” (emphasis added). Simony, defined as the sin of buying or selling ecclesiastical posts and holy orders, harkened back to the Middle Ages, when the corrupt practice had become widespread.

As such, the proposition of the Mexican Church tapped into old, familiar grievances that also happened to resonate with the revolutionary mood of the country, which was still in the process of redistributing the land pried from legacy colonial arrangements and whose new leaders were keen to dress up in foundational propaganda, spinning tales of a new national consciousness around the pre-Columbian symbols of a vanquished civilization. 

Providing free sacramental services and doing away with the tithe represented ICAM’s best chance to grow its flock, with most of its earliest congregations joining for this very reason. At the same time, this led Perez Budar’s government benefactors to realize the fundamental flaw in their plan to establish a national church as a counter to the power of the Catholic Church and set the stage for the inevitable distancing and, ultimately, the abandonment of the national church project by CROM and the Calles administration.

Pope Leo XIII’s Affront  

The CROM-Calles conspiracy to displace Rome by way of a federally controlled church – and indeed the CROM itself – was a direct response to Pope Leo XIII’s attempt to encroach on secular socialist ideals and emerging labor movements, laid out in the Rerum novarum¹¹ encyclical of 1891, titled “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”.

Product of the Fribourg Union¹², a seminal gathering between leading Catholic social thinkers of the late 19th century, Pope Leo synthesized their conclusions into the doctrine of Social Catholicism enshrined in the Rerum novarum and moving Catholic clerics all over the world to engage the proletarian masses on a political level.

Pope Leo left no doubt about his intention to have members of the clergy actively participate in organizing labor unions and other social benefit programs in a letter to the Archbishop of Tarragona in Spain, published in Mexico along with similar correspondence from the pontiff in 1895¹³.

Beginning in 1903, a series of Social Catholic congresses were held in different parts of the country. The first of these took place in the state of Puebla and resulted in the creation of a Church-run rural credit system¹⁴ called Cajas Raiffeisen, based on the ideas of German Cooperativist leader, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen.

Three more Social Catholic congresses were held before the outbreak of the revolution in 1910, with the last one slated to discuss the “Indigenous problem”, but its conclusions were never published due to the war. 

Nevertheless, Catholics moved quickly to make significant headway in the political sphere with the foundation of the Partido Católico Nacional (PCN) days before the abdication of the government of Porfirio Díaz and the pyrrhic victory of Francisco Madero, who made the fatal mistake of welcoming the new Catholic party into his “empire of democracy”.

Secrets of the Mexican Revolution

Madero’s confusion about who was really in charge caused the Mexican revolution to be aborted and restarted. The well-to-do, highly educated scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families failed to understand the nature of his mission or, perhaps, thought he could make a tent big enough to accommodate everyone.

Within weeks of his presidency, the Church had formed the Confederación de Obreros Católicos de la República Mexicana, a workers’ union that grew exponentially in the span of just two years. Meanwhile, the Cajas Raiffeisen rural credit system, first implemented in the Catholic stronghold of Guadalajara, Jalisco, had expanded to several other states by 1910 and was showing no signs of abetting.

To make matters worse for the enemies of the Church, the general election of 1912 gave the PCN four state governorships and 29 seats in the federal Congress. Even Francisco Orozco y Jimenez, a Catholic bishop fresh off of fomenting an armed insurrection¹⁵ during a factional dispute between land owners of the southern state of Chiapas, was appointed Archbishop of Guadalajara, center of Mexican Catholicism and the closest thing Mexico had to a pope.

Henry Lane Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, took matters into his own hands and directed the military coup¹⁵ that would take Madero out and set the stage for the creation of the Constitutionalist army, led by former Maderista, Venustiano Carranza and largely composed of troops from deposed dictator, Porfirio Díaz’ military.

The first order of business was to drive the Catholic clergy from the country. Carranza’s troops were notorious for burning churches, kidnapping priests and raping nuns among other atrocities against the Catholic establishment, leading a large number of high ranking clerics, like Orozco y Jimenez to self-imposed exile.

Once in power, Carranza dealt a serious blow to the power of the Church by adding articles 3º, 5º, 27º, 30 º y 130 º to the Constitution of 1917, prohibiting the institution from owning private property, forcing it to divest itself of any real estate that wasn’t germane to the offering of religious services, placing per capita limits on the number of clergy and banning the Church from imparting any educational services.

Back in Mexico, but now a fugitive and in hiding amongst loyal members of his flock, Orozco y Jimenez issued a pastoral letter condemning the provisions, joining the call of a group of exiled Mexican priests in the United States and the initiatives of a French Jesuit priest named Bernardo Bergoënd in Mexico City, who had been working to organize young Catholics.

Defeating the Villista forces in the north and the Zapatistas in the south, Carranza settled into his presidential role and softened his stance against the Church, which by then had been neutralized as well. Pursuing a somewhat conciliatory posture, neither he nor his two successors would enforce the anti-clerical laws at a federal level. That distinction would fall to Plutarco Elias Calles and his labor leader, Morones. 

[9 The Origins of “Real Patronato de Indias”, Mecham]

[10 “Como Fuego Semejante al de Lutero”: La Rebeldía de un Obispo Mexicano Frente a la Iglesia de Roma a Fines del Siglo XIX, García]

[11 Rerum Novarum Encyclical of Pope Leo Xiii On Capital and Labor]

[12 Social Catholicism and the Fribourg Union, Paulhus]

[13 La Guerra Cristera – Aspectos del Conflicto Religioso de 1926 a 1929, Sedano] 

[14 ibid.]

[15 La Guerra Secreta en México: Europa, Estados Unidos y la Revolución Mexicana, Katz]

[16 Los Inicios de la Política Anticlerical en Chiapas Durante el Periodo de la Revolución (1910-1920), Guillén]