Political catholicism in revolutionary Mexico, 1900-1926

This paper argues that the Mexican revolution played a formative role in the construction of modern Mexican Catholicism, while Catholic politics fundamentally shaped the outcome of the 1910 revolution. The argument analyzes several distinct but related moments and their constitutive movements. Cathohc social and political movements sought to 1) restore religion to secular society, 2) govern 3) protest revolutionary, flat 4) confront anticlericalism, 5) mobilize emerging civil society in an era of mass politics through organized labor, and 6) ultimately channel this legacy of religious-based identity through defense leagues that opted for armed conflict over political negotiation. Catholic lay associations included the Guadalupan Workers, a vanguard movement of provincial intellectuals that operated between 1909 and 1914; the National Catholic Party, vhich competed electorally and governed in western Mexico between 1911 and 1914; sustained parish-based movements of protest, boycott, and civil disobedience in the western Mexican state of Jalisco between 1917 and 1919; a Catholic labor confederation, which organized urban and rural working people in competition with pro-government unions between 1920 and 1925; the Popular Union, a decentralized religious defense league that operated between 1924 d 1927; and the National League in Defense of Religious Liberty, which attempted to provide leadership for Catholic armed rebellion as of 1925 and beyond. The main conclusions concern the political grounding of religiosity, the weight of state-Church conflict, and the broader historical process of secularization as main organizing concept for interpreting the Mexican revolution. In the end, I demonstrate how Catholic militants were central to the construction of a modern state in Mexico, a state that, ironical1y, would be defined by their exclusion as a political group