History of the Catholic Church in Mexico

In a sweeping program of reform to "modernize Mexico" that he outlined in his 1988 inaugural address, his government pushed through revisions in the Mexican Constitution, explicitly including a new legal framework that restored the Catholic Church's juridical personality.

[citation needed] In Texcoco, however, a member of the native nobility, Don Carlos, was accused and convicted of sedition by the apostolic inquisition (which gives inquisitorial powers to a bishop) headed by Juan de Zumárraga in 1536 and was executed.

Early testaments in Nahuatl have been invaluable for the information they provide about Nahua men and women's property holding, but the religious formulas at the beginning of wills were largely that and did not represent individual statements of belief.

Confraternities functioned as burial societies for their members, celebrated their patron saint, and conducted other religious activities, nominally under the supervision of a priest, but like their European counterparts there was considerable power in the hands of the lay leadership.

In general, a member of a mendicant order was not appointed to a high position in the episcopal hierarchy, so Zumárraga and his successor Dominican Alonso de Montúfar (r. 1551–1572) as bishops of Mexico should be seen as atypical figures.

With these competitions, the winners became holders of benefices (beneficiados) and priests who did not come out on top were curates who served on an interim basis by appointment by the bishop; those who failed entirely did not even hold a temporary assignment.

[46] The immense Jesuit hacienda of Santa Lucía produced pulque, the fermented juice of the agave cactus whose main consumers were the lower classes and Indians in Spanish cities.

Historians have in recent decades utilized Inquisition records to find information on a broad range of those in the Hispanic sector and discern social and cultural patterns and colonial ideas of deviance.

[62] Madre María de Ágreda (1602–1665), named Venerable in 1675, was a Spanish nun who, while cloistered in Spain, is said to have experienced bilocation between 1620 and 1623 and is believed to have helped evangelize the Jumano Indians of west Texas and New Mexico.

[66] The Patronato Real ceding the crown power in the ecclesiastical sphere continued in force, but the centralizing tendencies of the Bourbon state meant that policies were implemented that directly affected clerics.

Another eighteenth-century example of private philanthropy that then became a crown institution was the Hospicio de Pobres, the Mexico City Poor House, founded in 1774 with funds of a single ecclesiastical donor, Choirmaster of the Cathedral, Fernando Ortiz Cortés, who became its first director.

The parish priest had often dealt with regulation of public morals, but changes in their powers meant they no longer could mete out punishment for drunkenness, gambling, adultery, or consensual unions without benefit of marriage.

The emergence of royalist military officer Agustín de Iturbide as a champion of Mexican independence, his alliance with insurgent Vicente Guerrero, and the promulgation of the Plan of Iguala in 1821 marked a turning point for the Catholic Church.

Demonstrating the importance of the Catholic Church in the new order, before the assembly convened for the business of creating the governing document of the new state, all went to the cathedral to hear Mass and they took an oath to uphold the exclusivity of Catholicism in Mexico.

[80] Vicente Riva Palacio, an important, late nineteenth-century historian of Mexico and political liberal, assessed the significance, contending that "This religious ceremony indicates the supremacy of the clergy, without whose intervention in matters of policy, acts would have been illegal and all authority would have been insecure and weak.

This was a sharp contrast to the political discord that had led to outright warfare between Mexican liberals, who implemented anti-clerical laws during La Reforma (1855–1861), and conservatives, who sought continuing privileges for the Catholic Church.

Ambassador to Mexico wrote his superiors in Washington that "[t]he Roman Catholic Church and the party that takes its name have become violently antagonistic to Madero, and are busily engaged through the Republic in criticizing his motives, decrying his policies, and censuring the weakness and vacillation which is supposed to characterize his direction of affairs.

As one scholar assessed the Constitutionalists’ position, "there seems to be no reason to reject the protestations of Mexican officials that the reform was not aimed at the Church in its spiritual sphere, but at the clergy in their temporal activities.

"[109] The Constitutionalists’ best general, Alvaro Obregón, took anticlerical measures when he entered Mexico City in triumph, imposing a fine of 500,000 pesos on the Church to be paid to the Revolutionary Council for Aid to the People.

For the first two presidents, Venustiano Carranza (1915–1920) and Álvaro Obregón (1920–24), the State could have rigorously enforced anticlerical provisions, but there were many pressing issues to deal with in consolidating power and likely they were unwilling to provoke conflict with the Church at this juncture.

Calles was a known anticlerical, more fanatical in his ideology than many other Constitutionalists, perhaps because he felt the sting of his status as a natural son of parents who had not married in the Church, nor had they bothered to baptize him; his father had abandoned him and his mother died when he was three.

For the Catholic laity, the restrictions on their ability to exercise freedom of worship in public settings and the closure of churches in their communities may have had greater resonance than the matter of State regulation of the clergy.

The absence of a priest to baptize children, prepare Catholics for confirmation, hear confession, perform marriages, and administer the last rites of Extreme Unction before death, meant that the rhythm of the sacramental life cycle for individuals and their families as well as their larger community was being suppressed.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari announced in his December 1988 inaugural address that he would "modernize" Mexico and led the process to change the Mexican constitution, including most of its anticlerical provisions, that was passed in 1992.

[156] The top echelons of the hierarchy sought to continue the modus vivendi in Mexico, but as the Catholic Church underwent changes as a result of the Second Vatican Council, so too did a number of Mexican bishops and laypeople.

[168] Even the Bishop of Torreon, Fernando Romo declared that “We have to understand that, in case of doubt, Christians should always act on behalf of those in need because that was the position of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[168] Along with Política Popular, Sacerdotes para el Pueblo (Priest for the People, SPP) was also another prominent radical clerical movement in Mexico.

"[177] Immediately after the election, Archbishop Almeida preached a powerful sermon, cast as the parable of the Good Samaritan, but its meaning was clear, that the voters of Chihuahua had been mugged and brutalized by the PRI's actions.

"[189] The government proposed changes to the constitution to "respect freedom of religion," but affirmed the separation of Church and State and kept in place secular public education as well as restrictions on clerics’ political participation in civic life and accumulating wealth.

[193] In 1993, Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara was shot 14 times at point blank range at the international city's airport, as he waited in his car for the arrival of the apostolic nuncio.

Father Maciel was accused of abusing dozens of boys over a period of fifty years; although he was never convicted of a crime and always maintained his innocense, both the Legion of Christ and the Catholic Church apologized for his actions and the coverup after his death.