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No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of History, March 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis--Columbia University. / Bibliography: p. [325]-340.

Thesis--Columbia University. / Bibliography: p. [325]-340.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia university, 1926. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [325]-340.

This dissertation examines the Catholic Church’s response to the mid-nineteenth century Mexican liberal Reforma through a study of the life and work of Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía (1810-1868), one of the most influential yet least-known ecclesiastical intellectuals of the period. A lawyer by profession, Clemente Munguía was first professor and then rector of the Morelia diocesan seminary, where he undertook a major reform of the school’s curriculum and also composed several textbooks on a variety of subjects, including grammar, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, theology, and law. Appointed Bishop of Michoacán in October 1850, Munguía distinguished himself for his staunch opposition to the state’s encroachment on the Church, as well as for his insistence on the need for religious intolerance in what he imagined as an “exclusively Catholic” nation. His protests against the 1857 Constitution and the liberal legislation enacted by President Ignacio Comonfort were a key factor in the outbreak of the Civil War of the Reform (1858-1860) and the subsequent French intervention (1862-1867), which resulted in the separation of Church and state and the collapse of Mexican conservatism. Unlike previous studies, this dissertation argues that Bishop Munguía’s opposition to the Reforma derived not from a blind “reactionary” intransigence, but instead from his desire to emancipate the Church from the subordinate status it had under the colonial ancien régime. Far from the stereotype of a backward and parochial intellectual, Munguía was a sophisticated scholar who sought to reconcile Catholicism with the larger currents of thought of the Atlantic Republic of letters. Indeed, he believed that the liberal revolution should be countered “with its own weapons,” a conviction which first led him to frame the defense of ecclesiastical prerogatives in the language of modern natural law, and then to claim for the Church the very power of constitutional interpretation. Although Munguía’s ideal of a “Catholic republic” became unfeasible after the liberals’ final victory in 1867, his efforts at consolidating ecclesiastical independence paved the way for both the Romanization and the social activism that characterized the Mexican Church during the latter half of the nineteenth century. / text

This dissertation presents an overview of Church- State relations in Mexico from 1924 to 1938. It examines the actions and motives of prominent national leaders, the papacy, the episcopate, and the Mexican citizenry to determine justification and culpability. This dissertation presents several conclusions. When Calles enforced the anticlerical provisions of the Constitution of 1917, the clergy withdrew from the churches in protest. The episcopate as a body bore a moral responsibility for the Cristero rebellion that resulted, but avoided implication in the movement. Because the Church's supporters were in the minority, that institution in 1929 accepted a settlement requiring clerical obedience to the constitution. Churchmen consoled their parishioners with the thought that the Church would rise again.

In the one-hundred years between 1810 and 1926 there were many civil wars in Mexico. The last of these wars. La Cristiada, was not fought, as were the previous civil wars, by groups seeking political control of Mexico. Rather, the genesis of this war was a question of who would control the Church in Mexico. The war began when President Plutarco Elias Calles attempted to enforce rigorously certain articles of the Constitution of 1917 as well as two laws which he promulgated. If Calles had succeeded, he would, in fact, have created a church in Mexico controlled by the federal government. The material to support this thesis was taken largely from the Mexican legal documents, the writing of Calles, other sources contemporary with the events described and some secondary sources. This thesis stresses the religious reasons for the La Cristiada and discusses the war itself not at all.