Sotanas Rojinegras: Catholic Anticlericalism and Mexico's Revolutionary Schism

Abstract

As the recent clashes in Mexico City's metropolitan cathedral show, it is not just clericalism that is making an apparent comeback in post-priístaMexico: clericalism's faithful alter ego, anticlericalism—provoked to violence when clanking church bells disturbed a political rally in thezócaloin November 2007—is also stirring anew. This dialectical affinity between rival ideological traditions goes back a long way, as historic clashes over church bells—auditory symbols of institutional jurisdiction and influence—remind us: and yet, as Alan Knight points out, neither the terrain, nor the terms, of the dispute between clericalism/anticlericalism have been mapped out with enough clarity by Mexicanist historians. The 1910-40 revolution, for instance, is associated with various anticlericalisms— be it the protestant variety studied by Jean-Pierre Bastian; the constitutionalists' liberal clerophobia, irrupting circa 1914; masonic, spiritist, or popular anticlericalisms; or the “socialist” god-burning of the 1930s which climaxed in the iconoclasm studied by Adrian Bantjes. This trajectory— from priest-baiting to dechristianization within a generation—makes it tempting to posit an irreligious revolution, whose anticlericalism was a precursory form of mature godlessness. Some revolutionaries, like Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, encouraged such a conflation by using anticlerical restrictions—especially state licensing of priests, enshrined in constitutional Article 130—in a vindictive and secularizing way: squeezing the clergy so hard that priests were eradicated, not just rubber-stamped by the state. Such figures clearly hoped that persecuting priests would fatally minebelief: the day would come, Adalberto Tejeda hoped in 1926, when religion would expire and churches become places of recreation for apostate Indians. The Roman Catholic clergy, meanwhile, was fond of denouncing anticlericals as deicides, if not devils, and reinforced its own position by encouraging the association of anticlericalism with anti-Catholicism in the minds of the faithful.