Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing a few journal articles, mostly about the Church in Mexico. Regular readers know that I browse academic journals, reading what’s available in subjects that interest me. It’s all very random. But someone out there might find and interesting nugget.
I don’t remember how this theme came to dominate over the past few days – we’re going to Honduras, not Mexico – but here we are. It’s all very interesting to me, because once again, I’m having my assumptions upended – my knowledge of the 20th century Mexican Church being not much more than Fr. Miguel Pro and The Power and the Glory.
Seems that there’s a bit more to it than that.
So, for example, this article by Matthew Butler of UT Austin – this won’t be the last from him, either.
Perhaps those of you attentive to issues of maintaining faith in a hostile culture will be interested, as well as those who like to think about relations between clergy and laity – and perhaps some of this might give a broader context to the current Synod….
This article analyses the character of local religious practice in the archdiocese of Michoacán during Mexico’s cristero rebellion, and explores the relationship between ‘official’and ‘popular ’religion under persecution. In particular, it shows how the Catholic clergy and laity reconstructed the religious life at parish level in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the revolutionary state’s campaigns against the Church. For a variety of reasons, the significance of such passive resistance to the state, and the complexity of the interaction between the ecclesiastical elite and the Catholic laity, tend to be downplayed in many existing accounts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many historians see cristero violence as the most important response to religious persecution, and therefore study it to the exclusion of alternative, less visible, modes of resistance. As for the Church, the hierarchy’s wranglings with the regime similarly tend to overshadow the labours of priests and their parishioners under persecution. But the full range of popular experiences has also been deliberately compressed for ideological reasons. Many Catholic writers, for instance, seek to exalt the Church by describing a persecution of mythical ferocity. While Calles is likened to Herod, Nero, or Diocletian, the clergy and laity comprise a uniform Church of martyrs designate in revolt against a godless state. To achieve this instructive vision, however, a few exemplary martyrs—such as Father Pro and Anacleto González Flores—are allowed to stand for the whole mass of priests and believers, in the same way that Edmund Campion is revered as the protomartyr of the Elizabethan persecution in England.
Butler focuses on one bishop and diocese in particular, and examines the adaptations made in religious practice in the wake of government repression of religious practice. Just for reference – Greene’s The Power and the Glory is set in a different part of Mexico a few years later, during another stage of Church-state relations.
Basically: priests were forbidden to say Mass publicly, but the level of repression of other public religious expressions varied, according to the strength of support of government in a specific area.
This bishop was not supportive of the violent cristero resistance (and was later criticized for his stance) and issued new regulations for the new circumstance:
On 18 September 1926, Ruiz y Flores made his first public pronounce-ment since the suspension of public worship. The archbishop made no allusion to outbreaks of cristero violence. He did, however, order the clergy to calm the laity and channel lay energies towards private acts of worship. The letter was effectively an order to the clergy to transfer the religious life from the altar and confessional to protected ‘offstage’sites in the homes and hearts of believers. With the faith secure in these interior realms, the public domain could temporarily be abandoned to the secular authorities and violent resistance avoided. Ruiz y Flores described this resistance in striking architectonic terms, and demanded a conscious displacement of the sacred to an unbreachable inner Church of the soul:
“Deprived as we are, priests and faithful, of public worship in the churches, we must learn to bear it, and teach the faithful to bear it, converting our homes into true dwellings of God, where He is worshipped, glorified, and adored. We must convert our souls into real churches of God, whose altars are our hearts;with divine grace this will be easy, for it is not a question of metaphors or imaginings, but of a reality which requires little reflection. “
An interior renewal of the faith depended on practical accomplishments,nevertheless. Priests were ordered to ensure that the viaticum reached the dying, even at the risk of their own lives, and to attach great importance to education, continuing all catechetical classes and establishing others. Priests were also to maintain as much contact as possible with parishioners through pastoral visits; parishioners must be kept informed as to the time and placeof the next secret Eucharist, and even be made responsible for the provision of ‘a little altar’and other liturgical objects. The priest must insist, above all,on a meaningful continuation of the Christian life through prayer andpenance, ‘because this is the road by which we shall come before God’s merciful throne and receive deliverance from evil.’
Similar pleas followed the first cristero revolts in Michoacán in February 1927, when Ruiz y Flores again urged Christian humility and mortification,not violence. The laity must obey the commandments and practice forgiveness; as penance, the creed and rosary must be recited daily, with more prayers offered to the Holy Spirit. Besides a greater sense of urgency, there was nothing new in these measures. The next day, however, Ruiz y Flores issued a pamphlet, Practical Norms for the Faithful , which temporarily altered the character of lay worship. The pamphlet gave lay persons extraor-dinary faculties to perform sacramental functions should a priest be unavailable due to the circumstances of persecution. Printed within were abbreviated liturgies for baptism, marriage, and extreme unction, and conditions for their use. When no priest could be found, any person could baptise a dying child by taking water, making a cross, and invoking the Trinity. The laity could celebrate marriages in case of grave illness, if no priest had been available for 30 days, or if one could only be reached at mortal risk. For the marriage to be canonically legal, the novios need only swear an oath before wit-nesses and sign a declaration, which a priest must later certify. Finally, there were instructions for ministering the last rites. Recognising the transcendental importance of this sacrament, Ruiz y Flores authorised lay people to act as spiritual auxiliaries to the dying. A simple formula was then inserted,which moribund penitents must recite before confession.
These emergency measures were all permitted by canon law, as codified in the 1917
Codex Iuris Canonici. There were precedents, too, for granting such faculties under persecution. In 1917, Rome allowed the archbishop of Guadalajara to grant his clergy numerous faculties not within his purview as Ordinary Even so, the granting of lay faculties marked a significant shift in attitudes because it showed that clergymen were unable to accomplish the task of ministering the faith alone. Rather, the laity would have to be made self-reliant and equipped with sacerdotal prerogatives if the Church were to survive as a living community in Michoacán. Circumstances demanded this empowerment, but the blurring of priestly and lay demarcations, once begun, was real enough. Indeed provision was soon made for the singing of non-sacerdotal masses, so that the faithful were not deprived of Sunday worship. At the customary hours, a respected layperson would address the faithful. The lay priest would recite a greeting and lead the congregation through the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Creed. The Eucharistic liturgy was never to be sung by lay preachers, but special emphasis must be placed on the Word.Gospels must be chosen according to season and followed by a lesson. Toensure the lesson’s orthodoxy, and that the Gospel followed the religious calendar, a lay missal and lesson book were also published.
What is very interesting to me is Butler’s unpacking of the data – which paints a much different picture of priestly activity and sacramental life than the starkness of The Power and the Glory – which, as I mentioned, is not about this specific time or area of Mexico, but still, provides so much of the framework for how many of us envision this part of history:
When parish archives are consulted, in fact, it is the story of priestly neglect which unravels. In our region, it holds true only for the parish of Tuzantla, which recorded the fewest acts of sacerdotal worship for those parishes examined from 31 July 1926 to 21 June 1929. 50 During this time,only 12 marriages and 104 baptisms were celebrated, the last in February 1927. Then none was recorded for two years, because the priest was driven away by federal troops. But elsewhere the religious life continued with such vitality that thousands of sacramental acts were recorded. In nearby Tuxpan,three priests and the resident cura de almas celebrated 358 marriages and 1,526 baptisms, sometimes as many as 30 a day, in the same period. There was almost as much activity in Maravatío further north, where 534 marriages and 3,165 baptisms were performed during the cristero revolt by three priests. In Ciudad Hidalgo, seven clergymen celebrated 2,726 baptisms and 487 marriages. And even in ‘liberal’ Zitácuaro, five priests celebrated 4,272 baptisms and 130 marriages. In total, in the 35 months of the cristero rebel-lion, 15 priests performed 11,793 baptisms and 1,521 marriages in just these five parishes, an average of 337 baptisms and 43 marriages a month, or one marriage and 11 baptisms every day. For most people, furthermore, marriage and baptism were ‘one off’rites of passage: had we figures for the sacraments of communion and penance, we would see that the level of inter-action between priests and parishioners was almost certainly far higher than the written records allow.
In most cases, persecution did not restrict the frequency of lay and priestly encounters so much as it changed their character by driving them underground. In periods of persecution, irregularity became the norm. The temporal rhythms of the liturgy were also interrupted, as were some sec-ondary cultic practices; it became difficult to confess lay persons before communion, just as priests had to dispense with marriage banns. But these conditions were not uniform. In a few cases, indeed, municipal agents allowed priests to minister publicly in complete defiance of the law. In Tzitzíngareo, for instance, the priest walked the streets in his vestments and brazenly led public acts of worship. A visitor at Christmas 1927 was aston-ished to find that the cura ‘enjoys such liberty that he sings Mass in church. These dates mark the suspension of public worship and the official end of the Church-state conflict.
If the cura increasingly resembled a mere spiritual practitioner, the role of the laity expanded. First and foremost, lay people protected the physical person of the priest and provided safe locations for acts of collective worship. In Morelia, bishop Martínez was taken from the episcopal palace and hidden in a deserted house, where he devoted himself to spiritual exercises. In Ciudad Hidalgo, Father Garibay was hidden in a priest’s hole dug into the adobe walls of a private home and smuggled out to celebrate open air masses in isolated ranchos. At this level, the laity acted as facilitators for sacerdotal worship; but if the priest was absent, lay people assumed effective leadership of the religious life. This happened in Irimbo, where customary religious processions were still held during Holy Week, albeit with some notable alterations. Spatially, these devotions were now restricted to the church atrium, and were sealed from public view by a screen hung across the entrance. Inside, penitents formed a circle, donned scapularies and crowns of thorns, and beat the bounds of an imagined community sanctum.
There were more significant changes in terms of hierarchy and gender,for the faithful were led on these occasions by a pious laywoman, María Esquivel, instead of the priest. Esquivel seems to have gained solid acceptance as temporary spiritual director of the parish, and also led Sunday prayers in the church. The Eucharist aside, Esquivel ‘did everything else that the priest did,’according to one witness, while the congregation attended willingly, ‘as if there was a priest present.’ In Huajúmbaro, too, a prosperous farmer’s wife, Sarah Rábago, read non-sacramental masses on Sundays,and recited the Rosary and other prayers every afternoon. If the feminisation of de facto religious authority during persecution was common—a similar phenomenon has been noted elsewhere, both in Mexico and in France —we may only guess at the reasons for it. It may be that women were simply more committed Catholics, and hence were ‘natural’leaders of the parish; or, more likely, it may be that women were drawn to positions of religious authority because most secular offices were denied them. What-ever the reason, it bears repeating that lay preachers maintained the rhythms of the religious calendar in lieu of the priest, without permanently inverting relations between priests and parishioners. Indeed the authority of many lay leaders derived, in part, from the approbation of the priest, who remained influential. In Huajúmbaro, for instance, the laity also attended sacerdotal masses in forest clearings and cornfields; in Ciudad Hidalgo, the lay minister was appointed by the priest. But though they were subordinate, these lay figures were essential. It was entirely due to lay efforts, the cura of this parish wrote in August 1928, that ‘acts of public worship have not stopped for a single day.”
Related: In looking for a photo for this post, I ran across this book, which looks very interesting:
In Mexican Exodus, Julia Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico’s Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora–a network of Mexicans across the United States who supported the Catholic uprising from beyond the border. These Cristero supporters participated in the conflict in a variety of ways: they took part in religious ceremonies and spectacles, organized political demonstrations and marches, formed associations and organizations, and collaborated with religious and political leaders on both sides of the border. Some of them even launched militant efforts that included arms smuggling, military recruitment, espionage, and armed border revolts. Ultimately, the Cristero diaspora aimed to overturn Mexico’s anticlerical government and reform the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Although the group was unable to achieve its political goals, Young argues that these emigrants–and the war itself–would have a profound and enduring resonance for Mexican emigrants, impacting community formation, political affiliations, and religious devotion throughout subsequent decades and up to the present day.