Catholics and Anticlericals

Abstract

Catholic partisans and revolutionary anticlericalists alike traced their struggle to La Reforma, a series of laws enacted by the governing liberals in the mid-1800s that restricted the scope of the Catholic Church. Conservatives responded with a war that they lost. Half a century later, La Reforma remained Mexico’s “original sin” that attacked the nation’s bond with God. 1 The failure to rescind the laws weighed on Catholic partisans after the revolution. Decades of complacency toward the La Reforma, they argued, had opened the way for the revolution’s more forceful attack on religion. For revolutionaries, in contrast, enforcement of the Reforma laws had not gone far enough. The expansion of religious activities and the clergy’s interference in politics proved that the state needed to restrict the church further to its proper, spiritual domain. Of course, decades had passed; new ideals and grievances animated both sides. Still, many revolutionaries considered themselves successors to the liberals just as many Catholics identified with the vanquished conservatives. For both, the clash in the 1920s was the result of unresolved historical battles.