University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2003 Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age: The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation, 1788-1853 Connaughton Hanley, Brian F. University of Calgary Press Connaughton Hanley, Brian F. "Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age: The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation, 1788-1853". Transl. Mark Alan Healey. Series: Latin American and Caribbean series, No. 3. University of Calgary Press, Calgary Alberta, Canada and University of Colorado Press, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49339 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com CLERICAL IDEOLOGY IN A REVOLUTIONARY AGE: THE GUADALAJARA CHURCH AND THE IDEA OF THE MEXICAN NATION (1788–1853) by Brian F. Connaughton ISBN 978-1-55238-608-8 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ Conclusion uring half a century of Bourbon Reforms, indepen- dence struggles, and nation-building, the Guadalajara D Church had sought to find a way to positively and cre- atively address the modernization of Mexico. As new social goals and values came to the fore, creeping secularization threat- ened to dislodge the Church from its privileged role in Mexican society and to diminish its status relative to the state. The Guadalajara Church responded energetically and enthusiastically to the demand for regional economic development and account- able governance and sensitively to the cry for renewal in intel- lectual life and education. Yet the clergy were hampered in their adjustments once the independence struggle made clear that the changes might mark a potentially absolute dividing line between the past and the present. Once the clergy had reconciled with Independence, after 1821, the major stumbling block was persistent and growing anti-cleri- calism under the federal republic, between 1824 and 1834. While fighting to maintain a constitutionalist and progressive stance during those years, clerics evinced a growing sense of defensiveness and even embitterment. As they became convinced that Jacobin politicians would not listen to their arguments, they increasingly resorted to the Mexican public at large as the audience for their ideas and the aim of their political actions. In so doing, they elabo- rated the idea of a Mexican nation with a divine calling. Still espousing the need for economic development and respon- sible government, the clergy appealed to a holistic concept of the 307 308 Conclusion nation which might counter a narrowed notion of "the people" manipulated by Jacobin political actors. This propelled the clergy toward the ideological justification of the ouster ofVice-president Valentin Gomez Farias in 1834, and a deep commitment to the governments which followed. Significantly, this political mobili- zation did not resolve pending issues between the Church and the state in Mexico, nor did it eliminate those movements in Mexican society and values which were pushing toward secular- ization. Churchmen were forced to defend the traditional links between the Church and the state, and between the Church and the Mexican people. Not surprisingly, the Church was prepared for the challenge. Already during the independence struggles, and especially in the discourse welcoming the achievement of Independence in 1821, the clergy had worked out key aspects of a vision of the Mexican people with a providential destiny. This discourse would consoli- date in the 1830s, as the Church witnessed the liberal program of 1833—34 and the unstoppable secularizing drift of society and the state thereafter. In fact, this holistic idea was the basis for clerical traditionalism, which was broad enough to accommodate a wide spectrum of political ideas and modernizing notions. During the first ten years after independence, Church thinkers increasingly pointed to the need to resolve the patronage issue in order to settle outstanding problems between Church and state. In 1833, these traditionalists shifted from the multi-faceted theme of patronage to a single, key concept: now they spoke of "religiosity." The idea of "religiosity" was the clerical response to patronage claimed by the state on the basis of popular sovereignty. If the state could subsume the will of the people by way of popular sovereignty, then the Church could absorb the people into the "religious" people, the faithful people. There are clear paral- lels between sermons from 1821-23 consecrating Independence before the rise of the republic and those made after the Gomez Farias-Mora government, when clerical orators once again raised up the Mexican people as standard-bearers of a divine mission.1 Between 1824 and 1826, in keeping with the agitated first phase of the republic, anonymous clerical spokesmen had dis- puted radical liberals' supposed representation of the people. Yet even while trying to check the liberal advance and its ascendance over the state, the Church also insinuated its willingness to con- firm a state power of such dubious popular lineage. The believing people, the numerical majority of the people, clerical spokesmen Conclusion 309 suggested, had no quarrel with the Church or Catholicism, so long as changes made to the state respected this, no problems were foreseen. In this sense, while clerical spokesmen may have under- estimated the extent of the real change in the sovereignty exercised by the state, they can hardly be thought to have been funda- mentally wrong. They can be called skeptics about this Mexican political transition, but one must admit they were also realists.2 The reorganization of the Mexican state was successful within very limited parameters. Its true reach remained to be defined, but it definitely did not extend so far as liberals came to assert. Out of realism and skepticism, the Church supported the new transi- tion. The new citizenry with a voice, a category which did not clearly include all Mexicans, should include the Church itself. If the extension of civil rights encompassed the Church, then just like other beneficiaries, the Church could defend itself against potentially arbitrary power exercised by the state. In general, cleri- cal spokesmen saw an unassailable and popular — although hardly universal — benefit in this change. What they feared was that liber- als would appeal to the "people," arbitrarily and demagogically, to seize control of the state. Thus was born the specter of a new statism even more absolut- ist and more threatening than the one that was dying.This process had to be stopped, and the changes orchestrated by the state had to be limited, by questioning what the popular will truly was.The Church basically applied this astute judgment to matters affecting Catholicism and the Church. In so doing, it defended its interests in the way preached by the liberalism then in vogue. Only with great difficulty could the Church reach agreement with other privileged groups in society since, given the grave economic and social crisis of the nation, no individual group wished to bear the cost of healing national ills.