If you woke up in Mexico this week one hundred years ago and wanted to go to Mass, or have your confession heard, you would find yourself out of luck—thanks to your bishops.
On July 31, 1926, the Catholic bishops of Mexico suspended all public worship and shuttered the churches. The Mexican faithful would suffer two years, ten months, and eleven days before they were reopened.
Were Mexico’s bishops yielding control of their churches to insidious and onerous demands issued by the state in the name of public health? In fact, no. They were courageously telling the state, “You may not have control of our churches.”
For the century prior to July 1926, Mexico found herself in one form of revolution after another. The first one was fomented by a (married!) Jesuit-trained priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, working off a script derived from his extensive reading in the French philosophers whose bad ideas spawned the Revolution in France. The tradition continued into the twentieth century during the presidency of Venustiano Carranza, who oversaw the forging of Mexico’s 1917 constitution packed with anticlerical articles, the aim of which was to marginalize the Church’s influence in Mexican life, if not to drive it from Mexico altogether.
The Mexican government confiscated Church property: episcopal residences, hospitals, monasteries, convents, and schools. Clerical attire in public was outlawed. Priests could not express their political views, even privately. And they had no legal identity: a priest could not seek justice in the Mexican courts. To take a religious vow became a criminal act. All foreign clergy were deported.
The persecution of the Church picked up steam in 1926 under the presidency of Plutarco Calles, who added teeth to the persecution in the Mexican Penal Code. The “Calles Law,” as it came to be known, called for uniform enforcement throughout the country of the 1917 Constitution’s anticlerical articles and threatened severe punishment for those in violation and for government officials who failed to enforce them. For Calles, the Church represented the past—“a past,” he said, “that I strongly wish to see liquidated.”
Mexican priests faced two choices: cooperation with the anti-Christian government or a life on the run. Those who chose the former were forced to abandon their parishes, to move to urban areas, and to register with their state governments, which now had the power to set clerical quotas. In the State of Tobasco, Governor Tomás Canabal restricted the number of priests in his state to six—one for every 30,000 citizens. He demanded that these six take wives. In Marxist tradition, he renamed his capital city, San Juan Bautista, to Villa Hermosa and named his children Lenin, Lucifer, and Satan. His business card identified him as “The Personal Enemy of God.”
A courageous minority of priests refused to register. They ranged the countryside by night and in disguise, doing their best to bring the sacraments to the faithful.
Enforcement of the Calles Law drove the bishops to suspend public worship. The suspension of public worship drove the Mexican peasant class to take up arms. Was this the effect that the bishops had desired? In the case of a few, the answer seems to be “yes.” Bishop Leopoldo Lara y Torres of Tacambaro had written to Calles telling him that the bishops were prepared to seal their protest “in blood.” The fiery tactics of Bishop Francisco Orozco y Jiménez of Guadalajara made Rome nervous; he had already endured three exiles for his public opposition to the government. Bishop José de Jesus Manríquez y Zárate of Huejutla circulated tracts condemning Calles and denounced him from the pulpit of his cathedral. He financed and supplied the Cristeros, and he even considered taking the field with them. For most of the bishops, however, the suspension of public worship was a nonviolent protest designed to bring popular pressure on the government.
The nonviolent approach was shared by José Anacleto Gonzáles Flores, the heroic scholar and founder of the Catholic-action organization the Unión Popular. As street demonstrations grew into street violence, however, Flores sounded a nationwide call to arms:
If one of you should ask me what sacrifice I am asking of you in order to seal the pact we are going to celebrate, I will tell you in two words: your blood. If you want to proceed, stop dreaming of places of honor, military triumphs, braid, luster, victories, and authority over others. Mexico needs a tradition of blood in order to cement its free life of tomorrow. For that work my life is available and for that tradition, I ask yours.
Flores would eventually give his life, after an ordeal of brutal torture during which he was hung by his thumbs while federal soldiers skinned the soles of his feet. His call was heard, and in January of 1927, the Cristeros, as they came to be called, took up their battle cry: ¡Viva Cristo Rey! Rising almost simultaneously in small towns and villages in a dozen western states including Zacatecas, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Durango, Michoacán, and Colima, hundreds of small and not well-organized bands of sharecroppers and rancheros, bearing machetes and hunting rifles, took over local municipalities by disarming federal and local militia garrisons.
Taking over one rural village at a time, the Cristeros began not only better to organize their army, but also to set up Cristero-led governments in the villages and towns they had liberated. They controlled wide portions of the state of Zacatecas. The region of Coalcomán in western Michoacán sent President Calles formal, written notification of its secession from Mexico.
Cristero governments collected taxes for the war effort but also discharged the ordinary functions of civil government, including school administration, imposing heavy penalties for truancy. Cristero lawmakers took a hard line on immoral behavior. Cohabitating couples were required to marry or separate. Prostitution, gambling, and public drunkenness were severely punished, and rape could draw a sentence of death. Catholic social justice, expressed so eloquently just three decades prior in the papal encyclical of Leo XIII Rerum Novarum, informed Cristero economic policy, which forbade speculation in corn and in other crops afflicted by shortages resulting from the war.
The war raged for thirty months. The Mexican government attempted to deny Cristero victories, but the reality was that the Catholic soldiers had defeated federal units in operations ranging from large-scale cavalry engagements on the plains of Jalisco to guerrilla operations in the mountains of Durango, and always in spite of severe shortages of ammunition. The American military attaché, in his correspondence with Washington, described the “remarkable tenacity” of the Cristeros and the indiscipline of the Federal Army.
Although the Federal Army was badly led and plagued by high rates of desertion, it was never short of arms and ammunition, willingly supplied by the United States government, including aircraft. In at least one battle, American pilots provided air support for the Mexican federal army against the Catholic soldiers. Stalemate seemed to be the best for which the Cristeros could hope.
Plutarco Calles felt threatened nonetheless. The war was costing his government 96 million pesos a year—more than a third of its annual budget. This figure did not include the harm to his economy in reduced agricultural production, for which Calles’s scorched earth policy was to blame. Worse, perhaps, his policy of relocating some 30 percent of the rural population of Mexico to urban areas in an effort to eliminate the Cristeros’ support network was only provoking emigration. Half a million Mexicans fled the country and became California’s first wave of Mexican immigrants. By the end of the fighting, military deaths approached 100,000. Most were federal troops.
What the Cristeros were no match for was the Coolidge administration, represented by one of history’s great meddlers, Ambassador Dwight Morrow, who wanted one thing: stability in America’s southern neighbor, where American corporations were accustomed to making enormous sums of money. In other words, internecine strife in Mexico was bad for American business. Consequently, the same president that refused to recognize the communist government of Russia backed the revolutionary government in Mexico.
On June 21, 1929, Mexico City’s Archbishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flóres and Bishop Pascual Díaz y Barreto, along with Calles’s successor, Emilio Portes Gil, issued statements to the press. The bishops’ statement expressed a vague hope that the restoration of public worship would “lead the Mexican people, animated by a spirit of good will, to cooperate in all moral efforts undertaken for the welfare of all the people of the country.”
Portes assured the people of Mexico that the Constitution did not intend “to destroy the identity of the Catholic Church” nor “to interfere with its spiritual functions.” He added that religious instruction could take place within churches, but not in schools, and that any law of Mexico was subject to appeal by one of its citizens. On these two thin statements, a fragile peace—the arreglos—was brokered.
After their meeting with the president, the two Bishops drove to the Basilica of Our Lady of Gaudalupe and prayed at the high altar. Public worship was restored. The faithful packed the churches. Pope Pius XI sent word to the Cristeros asking them to lay down their arms. Over the next three months, in obedience to the Holy Father, this is exactly what they did.
Alas, the story does not end well.
Three years later, in an encyclical, Acerba Animi, Pius XI explained why he had asked Catholic soldiers who had knocked the anti-Christian government of Mexico back on its heels to lay down their arms. He had to restore the sacraments to Mexico’s faithful even if the conditions under which the Church could operate were not ideal. But he now admitted that “the favorable settlement for which we had hoped” has not been forthcoming. On the contrary, within only a few months of the arreglos, signs that all was not well were abundant. Many churches, schools, and rectories remained in government hands. Ruiz y Flóres and Díaz attempted to meet with the president but were ignored, and Portes’s successor, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, told the bishops that Portes had promised them nothing.
Meanwhile, the surrender of the Cristeros was not proceeding as hoped. Soldiers not willing to move out of their states were taken prisoner and executed. Executions of Cristero soldiers lasted for several years. There were mass executions in Jalisco, and Cristero veterans were hunted down and killed until the 1950s. It is not known how many thousands of them lost their lives long after the war had been declared over.
The worst years for the Church in Mexico were 1934-35. This time, most state governments closed the churches themselves. Priests were again on the run, and it is in this period that Graham Greene’s “Whiskey Priest” fights persecution and his own weaknesses in The Power and the Glory. Priests had practically vanished. In 1934, there were 334 registered priests to minster to 15 million Mexicans.
Schoolteachers in Michoacán were forced to take a public oath of atheism and to promise to teach against the Catholic religion. Bishop Díaz’s episcopal palace was never returned. He was thrown in a jail cell for a time and then forced to rent rooms where he could find them. Few were willing to rent to the aged bishop, fearing they would lose their property. He died, despised by the Mexican government and not altogether loved by Catholic militants who felt he had betrayed their cause.
The political nuances of the Cristero war and its aftermath notwithstanding, it is good for us to contemplate the ferocity with which the Church was persecuted not long ago in our own neighborhood. Apart from a diabolical madness, what else can explain a fourteen-year-old boy, Blessed José Sánchez del Rio, whose only crimes were love of God and a burning desire to defend Holy Mother Church, losing his life to torture and a firing squad at the hands of his own government? And what kind of fervor so fired the hearts of José and his fellow Cristeros that they rose up against all practical hope to defend the kingship of Jesus Christ?
Both are outside the realm of the American Catholic experience, where even among the devout, the Church plays, at best, a peripheral role in daily political and social life. How many American Catholics today, for example, attempt to put into effect, through their shopping habits, the Church’s teaching on questions of economic justice? How many American Catholics have made a serious effort to understand the Church’s teaching on just war and to understand the mind of the Holy See on questions of international affairs? However history may judge the Cristeros, there is no doubt they put their faith into action in defense of Jesus Christ against his enemies.
The Mexican Church’s climb out of the hell of the Revolution has been slow, and it is far from finished. Mexican schoolchildren, to the extent that they even hear the story of the Cristeros, are likely to get the socialist spin. Well into the 1970s, Catholic schools received regular inspections to ensure use of government textbooks. Religion could not be taught—only “values.” Not until the 1980s were the anticlerical articles repealed. Not until the late 1990s, with the beatifications and canonizations of the martyrs of the Mexican Revolution by John Paul II and, in 2005, Benedict XVI, did a sympathetic public awareness of the Cristeros resurface. Even so, a thick anticlerical sentiment remains, especially in the media, which fumed about “opening old wounds” when Miss Mexico in 2007 wore a dress honoring the Cristeros.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” After Tertullian wrote those words, a century would pass before the Edict of Milan. How and when God will perfect the sacrifices of the Mexican martyrs is up to him. For our part, we can contemplate the ferocity with which the Church was persecuted not long ago just next door, and the zeal of the faithful who defended it with Catholic hearts, forged in centuries of fighting the enemies of Jesus Christ.