For God and Liberty by Pamela Voekel

Author:Pamela Voekel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

The Long Shadow

Mexico’s Reforma

The combatants had withdrawn from the literal field of battle in Central America by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but the fundamental conflicts over theology and ecclesiology could still bring the opposing sides to arms. Mexico’s signal moment of constitutional conflict, the War of the Reform that rent the country from 1857 to 1860, was animated by many of the same concerns.1 The divisions remained salient in that war’s continuation, the French imperial intervention of 1861 to 1867, when the ultramontane church actively supported the foreign empire.

For more than forty years, the homeland of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier had been both denounced and championed throughout the Atlantic World as a critical breeding ground of the Reform Catholic International. The explosively dangerous cache of literature that had landed this father of Mexican independence in chains back in 1817 was, above all else, a portable library of Reform Catholic literature and of national constitutions and federalist writings. Mier would have recognized Mexico’s 1857 Constitution as the heir of this sacred intelligence. So did many of the constitution’s own champions at the time.

Their interpretation has been underrepresented in subsequent historical literatures. Instead, historians of Latin America’s mid-nineteenth-century liberals have concluded that the movement’s program of church-state separation amounted to an unambiguous secularization drive.2 Certainly the means suggest this end: between their initial success in the 1850s and their subsequent displacement by conservative forces allied with the French invaders, the liberals placed birth, death, and marriage rites under state auspices; ended the church’s special privileges and prerogatives; and removed religious expression from the streets and corralled it into the home or the church building.

But a closer look at the actors’ own paper trail suggests a radically different interpretation of their motives. Far from seeking to remove religion from Mexican national life, they were instead consumed with refashioning the Catholic Church from within, with paring down its hierarchy and simplifying its liturgy without eliminating its central mysteries. In place of Romish excess they envisioned not a secular society but a Godly alternative.

As we have seen, Reform Catholicism as far back as the early eighteenth century had advocated for civil control over the church, not out of animosity to religion but in order to create more godly empires and states. Central American reformers had imbibed this wisdom from such reformist luminaries as Pietro Tamburini and the Synod of Pistoía, who had described and circulated the civil power’s long historical genealogy of rightful dominance of the church.3 Mexico’s liberals formed a central node in the mid-century Reform Catholic International. They were anything but secular, and, like El Salvador’s reformist Catholic liberals we saw earlier, exhibited as much if not more religious passion than did the conservative forces they battled during Mexico’s War of the Reform.4

The centrality of Reform Catholicism to Mexican liberalism of the mid-century is brought into high relief by the 1859 establishment of a schismatic Catholic Church under state protection—the opposite of state-driven secularization. Prominent liberals cast their newly

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