Protecting or Undermining the Constitution? Discussiones on the role of religion and the catholic church in Guaranting Constitutional Order during Mexico's First Federal Republic (1824-1835)
| Autor | Catherine Andrews |
| Páginas | 281-295 |
Page 281
During Mexico?s early Independence period (1821-1835) the issue of Church-State relations was a source of frequent conflict amongst the political elites. Until fairly recently, Mexican historical scholarship had interpreted the division of opinion on the subject as an example of the confrontation between classical liberal ideas, preaching the necessity of disestablishing the Catholic Church and setting up a secular state, and traditional conservative opinions that sought to protect the Church and preserve the powers, privileges and influence it had enjoyed in government during the years of Spanish rule.1However, in the last few years, political historians such as Will Fowler,2specialists in legal history, like María Refugio González,3along with those who study ecclesiastical history, like Brian F. Connaughton and Alicia Tecuanhuey Sandoval,4have shown that this interpretation can no longer be accepted.5
Page 282
Instead, it is now clear that the conflict between secularists and traditional thinkers did not properly emerge until the Reform era (1855-1867).6During the Independence period, very few people actually suggested the separation of Church and State or supported the idea of religious tolerance; and, even those who ventured to suggest such things did not propose that Mexico should embrace secularism. As Charles Hale noted in his study of the most famous liberal of the time, José María Luis Mora, those who thought like Mora might have wanted the separation of Church and State, but they also recommended that the State continue to officially protect and promote Catholicism.7The former historiographical misconceptions on the subject are probably due to the fact that conflict between secular liberals and religious conservatives dominated Mexican political life, and therefore also the interpretations of Mexican historiography, throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century and a good part of the twentieth.
If this is the case, the question must surely be: why was the subject of the Church such a controversial one for Independent Mexico?s political élites? In this paper I propose to undertake some preliminary steps towards answering this query through a study of the Mexican political and ecclesiastical classes? debates on the matter of what the proper nature of Church-State relations in liberal republic should be. In the first part, I will examine the general attitudes to religion present in their discourse and will argue that, they, in common with many of their contemporaries in Spain and the rest of Spanish America, educated Mexicans believed that the Catholic faith was an indispensable element of stability in any liberal republic and should be promoted and protected by the State. The paper will then move on to analyse the consequences and implications of this point of view for the discussions which took place during Mexico?s first Federal Republic on the patronage issue. It will suggest that the differences of opinion boiled down to a fundamental disagreement, inherited from the ecclesiastical and political dispute in eighteenth-century Spain, over the nature of the Catholic Church?s relation to religion itself.
Mexico?s political elites, including the most fervid promoters of religious tolerance, the suppression of ecclesiastic privileges and the separation of Church and State, were all practising Catholics. Unlike in Revolutionary France or in the United States, Atheism and Deism were practically unknown; even in the 1856 Constituent Congress, whose constitution was the first not to specify Catholicism as the state religion, and which finally permitted religious toleration, only two deputies claimed not to be Christian. José Mora Luis Mora, perhaps the most famous liberal of the period, was a priest; Vicente Rocafuerte, who was prosecuted in 1831 for proposing that other faiths be tolerated in the Mexican Republic, attended mass assiduously; and, as Will Fowler has amply demonstrated, Valentín Gómez Farías, leader of the puro (or radical) liberal faction, and commonly considered by traditional historiography to be the worst comecuras (priest-eater) of his generation, expressly forbade his son from marrying a Protestant and obliged
Page 283
his daughter?s fiancé, also a Protestant, to convert to Catholicism before he would give the union his blessing.8
As a consequence of their faith, Mexico?s politicians were convinced of the supreme importance of the Christian religion as the foundation stone of civilised society. They followed the Catholic teaching which emphasises the idea that an orderly society requires that its members live in harmony, and as a result, it needs the guiding and coercive nature of religion to ensure that all live according to a common moral code. This idea is present in nearly all writing about the role of religion in Independent Mexico, from those who favoured some kind of separation between Church and State, like José María Luis Mora, and from those who wished to preserve the Catholic Church?s traditional role in, and powerful influence over, the government. For example, Mora asserted in 1832, “without religion […] neither society nor public morals can exist”;9a sentiment shared by an anonymous pamphleteer of 1833, who objected to government attempts to suppress ecclesiastic immunities with the argument that without religion or public morality, “there can be no society, nor laws, nor honour, nor mutual bonds between men. Once these ties are broken, man will return to his savage state; the weak will become the slaves of the strong”.10
For the same reason, another generalised opinion amongst Mexico?s politicians and clergy was that Christianity –or more precisely, Catholicism– was the best guarantee of liberal republicanism, since its teachings encouraged the community to obey civil laws and respect the rights of others. In other words, it promoted “civil virtues, ennoble[d] their ends and aid[ed] their observation”,11and without its good influence, “good citizens [are transformed] into rebellious and seditious subjects”, leaving constitutional law endangered, and the nation at risk of suffering the fate of Jacobin France.12As Alfredo Ávila has shown in a recent article on the sermons of Manuel de la Bárcena, an important member of Michoacán?s Cathedral Chapter during the late colony and early Independence period, this idea led Bárcena and many of his secular contemporaries to believe that Catholicism –in association with “just and wise laws”– provided the perfect defence against despotism.13
The first Mexican constitutions demonstrate this thinking in action. The first constitution to be written in Mexico, the Constitutional Decree of Apatzingán, which was drawn up by the insurgents in 1814, established Catholicism as one of the key “Constitutional Elements or Principals” upon which the new republic should be established. It decreed Catholicism to be the “only religion” permitted by the state (article 1); and, despite establishing that all those born in the American continent were entitled to citizenship (article 13), nevertheless indicated that this right would be forfeited by those guilty of “heresy, apostasy or high treason” (article 15).14
Similarly, the 1824 Constitution stipulated that Catholicism was the Republic?s only permitted religion and added that the State should protect it “with wise and just laws” (article 3).15As Erika Pani has shown, all the state constitutions drawn up in this period reiterated that Catholicism was the only religion to be followed by its inhabitants, and used their prerogative to establish the qualifications for citizenship
Page 284
to bar from the exercise of political rights those who –according to their Catholic mindset– lived immorally.16All states excluded those with no “house, job, profession or [any] honest means of living”, for example.17Other states went even further; the constitution of Chiapas decreed that those whose of “notoriously bad habits” should be also be excluded from the body of citizens (article 12);18and for its part, Chihuahua?s constitution disqualified those who were guilty of “habitual drunkenness” or “ingratitude towards their parents” (article 13).19A good citizen was, according to this way of thinking, “a good Catholic”, a good husband and father and an upstanding member of the community. Those who did not fit this description should not be welcomed into the new Republic?s political community.
In other words, in the first Federal Republic, Mexican citizenship was conditioned –not in relation to property or income, as in the majority of nineteenth-century French and North American states? constitutions– but predominantly in terms of morality. This suggests that those who wrote the constitutions interpreted the republican idea of civic virtue, or the correct behaviour to be expected from good citizens, from a very Catholic perspective; that is to say, they assumed that virtue equated broadly with morality. As a result, and despite their enthusiasm for the constitutional liberalism, they did not really believe that orderly government could be guaranteed simply through adopting a legislative code which set out the rights and duties of the governors and the governed and provided suitable punishments for those who did not observe it. Rather they were convinced that humanity also needed the guiding hand of religion to ensure it could be relied upon to obey the law.
However, it is important to make clear that these conclusions are probably valid not only for Mexico, but also for the most part the Hispanic world at that time. The constitution of Bayona, that of Cádiz and those of all the...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu prueba