On October 17, 1931, Catholic villagers from the town of Tlapacoyan, in Veracruz, marched toward the municipal building armed with pistols and machetes. They surrounded the structure and set fire to it, forcing the public officials that were inside to come out.Footnote 1 Most officials died in the incident, either as a result of the blaze or being shot by the group of rioters. The anger of the perpetrators was such that they decapitated some of the victims after killing them.Footnote 2 The national daily La Prensa described the incident as an expression of the “seditious activities of some fanatics” and reported that the attack had been organized in retaliation for the burning of saints that municipal authorities carried out days earlier inside the town church.Footnote 3
A couple of years later, another group of Catholic villagers participated in an equally violent event, this time in the neighboring state of Tlaxcala. The incident took place on May 10, 1933, when a group of neighbors from Tetla dragged a male prisoner out of the municipal jail, and tortured him for several hours. After ringing the church bells, they proceeded to hang him from a tree in the town's main plaza. The man had been imprisoned a few weeks earlier after neighbors accused him of stealing valuable religious ornaments from the local church. Distrustful of the willingness of local authorities to give the sacrilegious thief a proper punishment, villagers took justice into their own hands and killed him. According to the government's mouthpiece El Nacional the incident was perpetrated with “unheard-of cruelty” and reflected the “fanaticism” of Tetla villagers.Footnote 4
Newspapers and government officials were quick to refer to these and similar examples as proof of Catholics’ fanaticism, ignorance, and proclivity for violent and irrational conduct. This view, however, failed to capture the complex relationship between religion and violence in 1930s Mexico and obscured the fact that Catholics’ reactions to the postrevolutionary state were not merely a result of irrationality, misinformation, or misguidance. Despite the formal end of the Cristero War (1926-29), the relationship between the Mexican state and the Catholic Church was far from peaceful.Footnote 5 Catholics continued to experience assaults on the symbolic, communal, and spiritual dimensions of their faith. The arrest and expulsion of Catholic priests, the closing down of churches, and the stealing and burning of religious images were all part of an official campaign that sought to forge a rational and secular model of citizenry, free from the “backward” influence of Catholic religion.Footnote 6
President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) promoted a relatively moderate position in regard to religion compared to his predecessors, Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-28) and the three presidents that governed the country under the so-called Maximato (1928-34).Footnote 7 However, the uneven observance of this tempered anticlericalism at the regional and local levels, along with the implementation of a socialist model of education during the second half of the 1930s, contributed to antagonizing Catholic militants.Footnote 8 Through the use of more or less organized forms of violence—including lynching, rioting, and the targeted killing of rural teachers—religious militants fiercely resisted this federal public schooling program and the threat it posed to Catholics’ most valued “natural rights.”Footnote 9 More so, the de-Christianization campaigns promoted by the governors of Tabasco, Veracruz, Michoacán, Sonora, Chiapas, and Guanajuato openly supported anticlerical policies and iconoclastic practices, including the burning of saints, at the local level.Footnote 10 The animosity produced by the state's assault on the political, economic, and symbolic power of Catholicism prompted Catholic militants to take up arms once again during this decade. Although La Segunda, or the Second Cristiada (c. 1934-38), lacked the ecclesiastical support of the first rebellion, and was more localized and horizontally organized, this uprising signaled Catholic militants’ capacity and continued willingness to resist the state's socialist and anticlerical policies through violent means.Footnote 11
The aim of this article is to examine the cultural and political repertoire that contributed to Catholics’ understanding of violence as a legitimate means to resist the secular state in 1930s Mexico.Footnote 12 To do so, I analyze Catholics’ multivalent and contrasting understandings of martyrdom in relation to violence, as well as the uncompromising and radical political views that informed Catholic militants and their interactions with both state and ecclesiastical authorities during this decade. Rather than tracing the history of a particular organization or movement, I provide an overview of how Catholic militants and organizations invoked religious principles and symbols to justify violence.Footnote 13
Recourse to violence was certainly not the only strategy adopted by Catholics in the face of the state's anticlerical measures.Footnote 14 Although the press and public officials focused for the most part on violent forms of Catholic militancy, many priests and lay Catholics opposed violence and privileged peaceful and civil forms of resistance—from the organization of underground masses and private forms of worship to letters of petition to civil authorities and the civic mobilization of women and youth.Footnote 15 More so, after the 1929 accords that brought an end to the Cristero Rebellion, the Mexican episcopate openly decried the use of violence and sought to “tame” the belligerent organizations that had supported the uprising.Footnote 16
Despite the Church's official position in regard to violence and armed rebellion, during the 1930s many Catholic militants and organizations continued to support violence as a last but necessary means to fight what in their view constituted a tyrannical and illegitimate government. Informed by noncanonical understandings of martyrdom, sacrifice, and redemptive violence, as well as by a recalcitrant and uncompromising view of politics that celebrated the virility and bravery of religious militants, these Catholics regarded violence as a legitimate and moral means to defend religion against the injustices and dangers posed by an oppressive, anticlerical, and blasphemous state. Beyond this defensive impetus, Catholic militants regarded violence as an effective instrument to restore the moral and religious foundations of Mexico as a Catholic nation. The Cristero revolt remained an important reference point for Catholic militants, and provided a key source of inspiration for those who believed that the fight against the secular state was far from over. In contrast to the years of the armed rebellion, however, Catholic militants in the 1930s were confronted with a Church hierarchy that became increasingly critical of their unruly actions and the threat they posed to the increasingly pragmatic relationship the Church sought to forge with the government.Footnote 17 Whereas the Church hierarchy had kept an ambivalent position regarding the use of violence in the 1920s, in the 1930s it overtly opposed it, at least officially and from the viewpoint of its higher authorities.
I draw my analysis from several sources, including correspondence, propaganda, poems, and reports produced by Catholic individuals and organizations that reflect on the necessity and desirability of the use of violence. I also analyze government documents and newspaper articles, most of which echoed the government's position, in order to demonstrate how the Mexican state portrayed Catholic believers as inherently fanatic, irrational, and violent. Most of the events examined in the article are situated in central Mexico, most prominently Mexico City and Puebla, and in the states of Veracruz and Jalisco.Footnote 18 As the evidence discussed in the article makes clear, Mexican officials contested Catholics’ claims to martyrdom and sought to create a parallel narrative of secular martyrdom that contributed to concealing state-sponsored forms of violence against Catholics. The question of who constituted a “real martyr” not only created a confrontation between anticlericals and Catholics in 1930s Mexico; it also created divisions among Catholics who held dissimilar views regarding the legitimacy of violence. Reflecting the fact that the meanings of martyrdom were not entirely controlled by the Church, martyrdom emerged as a key battlefield where Catholics drew the lines between legitimate and illegitimate forms of religious activism.
Main Arguments
The article's main argument is two-fold. First, I argue that Catholic militants’ understanding of the legitimacy of violence was informed by flexible and popular interpretations of martyrdom and sacrifice, as opposed to those that were institutionally sanctioned. Second, I show that this understanding was shaped by radical and uncompromising political ideologies that construed the postrevolutionary state and its representatives to be a fundamental threat to Catholics’ spiritual, moral, and communal integrity. The Mexican government portrayed religious militants as fanatical individuals who were driven by religious frenzy and irrational impulses. Evidence suggests, however, that Catholics’ use of violence was full of political intent.Footnote 19 The political ambitions of Catholic militants included bringing a tyrannical and godless government to an end, as well as building an alternative social and political order that would recognize, as the Cristeros from the first uprising demanded, the kingship of Christ on earth.Footnote 20
Furthermore, contrary to official representations of Catholic religion as a top-down, monolithic, and unchanging set of institutions and practices that promoted recalcitrant and extremist forms of religious militancy, Catholics were in fact deeply divided on theological, moral, and practical grounds regarding the legitimacy and desirability of violence. These divisions were expressed not only in the bitter disagreements that surfaced between the clergy and lay organizations, but also in the tensions that existed among members of the Catholic hierarchy itself, including diocesan priests, bishops, and representatives of the Holy See.
Belligerent Catholicism in Revolutionary and Postrevolutionary Mexico
This article is built in dialogue with a growing body of literature that has tried to elucidate the reasons behind Catholics’ recourse to violence and armed resistance in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico. Based on regional, cross-regional, and transnational perspectives, this scholarship has acknowledged the centrality of religious motivations in Catholics’ belligerent actions, as well as the complex divisions and tensions that existed within the Catholic Church, and among the faithful, regarding armed rebellion.Footnote 21 In this sense, such literature has complicated a narrative that tended to explain Catholic militancy in terms of purely material or political interests, or simply as an expression of peasants’ “false consciousness.”Footnote 22 This article benefits from this literature and seeks to contribute to it by placing violence, rather than armed conflict (that is, the Cristero War or the Second Cristiada) at the center of analysis. Acknowledging that violence superseded the armed conflict and recognizing that religious violence continued well beyond the 1929 accords, my aim is to bring to the fore the contradictions between Catholics’ recourse to violence and their observance of core religious values such as the sanctity of human life and their pledged allegiance to the Catholic hierarchy.
The article is divided in two sections and a conclusion. The first section examines the cultural basis that contributed to shaping Catholics’ understanding of the legitimacy of violence through the lenses of martyrdom. Going against canonical views centered on piety, moderation, and restraint, Catholic militants blended the figure of the martyr with that of the hero and construed the violent and belligerent actions of religious radicals as acts of martyrdom.Footnote 23 I will next examine the uncompromising political ideologies of Catholic militants as articulated in the discourse of the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa (National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty), also known as “the Liga.” An analysis of the Liga's interactions with the Mexican episcopate will also illuminate the divisions that existed between the clergy and lay organizations, as well as within the clergy itself, regarding the role that violence ought to play in the defense of Catholicism during this period. In the conclusion, I reflect briefly on the need to expand our understanding of the relationship between violence and religious beliefs and practices in Mexico's post-Cristero decades.
Contentious Martyrdom
The year 1931 was marked by a series of violent events involving confrontations between Catholics and anticlerical officials in the state of Veracruz. One such event was the state-sponsored burning of saints, followed by Catholics’ aforementioned attack on the municipal building in Tlapacoyan. A few months before this incident, on July 25, a young former seminarian attempted to murder Veracruz governor Adalberto Tejeda. The governors’ bodyguards killed the perpetrator, Rafael Ramírez Frías, and Tejeda survived the attack with only a minor injury.Footnote 24 The same day, a group of Tejeda's supporters set fire to a number of churches, altars, and saints and attacked the Asunción Cathedral in Xalapa in retaliation for the attempted murder, even though there was no evidence that Ramírez Frías had acted with the support of the Church.Footnote 25 The assailants wounded two priests and killed another—in front of hundreds of children who were receiving catechism lessons.Footnote 26 The murdered priest, Darío Acosta, who had been ordained by the bishop of Veracruz, Rafael Guízar y Valencia, became a martyr in the eyes of Catholics. The Holy See canonized him in 2005.
The attempted murder of Tejeda and the incidents that followed took place in the context of the implementation of Law 197, which limited the number of priests to one per 10,000 inhabitants in Veracruz. Tejeda, who was twice governor of the state (1920-24; 1928-32), enacted some of the most stringent anticlerical policies during his second term, in clear defiance of the more moderate position promoted by the federal government after the 1929 accords.Footnote 27 Along with limiting the number of priests, Tejeda fostered the “de-fanatization” of the masses through socialist education and the desacralization and defilement of churches and places of religious worship, as well as the appropriation of references to the sacred for use in public festivals and civil ceremonies that were overtly socialist or secular—including “socialist baptisms” or “socialist sacraments” for workers.Footnote 28
The anticlerical and iconoclastic actions promoted by Tejeda prompted the animosity of Catholics and created a climate of political instability in the state. More so, they added to Catholics’ perception that nothing had changed after the 1929 accords and that, therefore, the faithful's right to challenge the legitimacy of state authorities remained unshaken. Governor Tejeda, however, downplayed the significance of Catholic believers in Veracruz. In a letter sent to President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, he presented Catholics as a minority of agitators and fanatics who did not represent the true “Veracruzano people, liberal by ancestry.”Footnote 29 In the same letter, he justified the implementation of Law 197 as a necessary response to Catholics’ multiple violations of the laws of religious worship. Such violations included the building of temples and chapels that were “useless to society,” as well as the mobilization of a form of “agrarian Catholicism” that undermined the actions of what Tejeda and other Mexican officials regarded as authentic revolutionary peasants.Footnote 30 He added that surely a dozen priests would be enough to “satisfy the needs of the tiny minority of fanatics in the state.”Footnote 31
Religious Martyrs, Revolutionary Martyrs
Both the attempted murder of the governor and the attack against Catholic priests that followed were the subject of a heated debate between Tejeda and Bishop Guízar y Valencia. At the heart of the debate were claims, articulated on each side of the conflict, regarding who should be considered a martyr. The debate reflected the centrality of martyrdom as a cultural and symbolic reference that allowed different actors to either question or justify the legitimacy of violence and its political significance. In a letter to the governor, Guízar y Valencia stated that he had recently received the news of the tragic events caused by “the iniquitous and tyrannical law, which you are applying against the Church.”Footnote 32 He then characterized victims of Tejeda's religious persecution as martyrs who would serve to redeem and strengthen the cause of the Church:
It would not have been possible to choose a more propitious moment to extol the Church founded by Christ by spilling the blood of two martyrs, due to the hatred you and your partisans have for God and his Church. At this moment, when I weep, wounded by the sword of grief as a result of these enormous crimes, the angels in heaven are receiving the souls of the martyrs with joy and placing them in the midst of the heroes of Christianity. . . . Señor Tejeda, Veracruz is bathed in the blood of martyrs, but it will result in the discovery that truth and justice and religion, instead of being extinguished in the diocese, will attain greater vigor, despite your tyrannical forces, which will collapse when confronted with the rock of the infinite power of God.Footnote 33
As reflected by this quote, Guízar y Valencia saw martyrdom as a powerful symbol that could inspire and mobilize Catholics by invigorating their beliefs and exposing the injustices of the secular state. In tune with the Church's rejection of violent forms of religious activism, he referred to the assaulted priests (but not to Ramírez Frías, Tejeda's assailant) as martyrs. The priests had been targets of violence while practicing their faith and had full awareness of the dangers they faced, making their condition as martyrs irrefutable in canonical terms.Footnote 34 For the anticlerical Tejeda, however, Guízar y Valencia's celebration of these priests as martyrs was duplicitous, as it ignored the fact that many religious individuals—laity and clergy—had used violence to advance their cause, making them nothing but common criminals in the eyes of the state.
In his response to the bishop, Tejeda stated:
I am not surprised by the cynicism and hypocrisy you display in your protest regarding the deed provoked by you and other representatives of that vast organization known as the Catholic Church, the enemy of all work tending toward human redemption. . . . Your labors have resulted in a fanatic's attempt to murder me. . . . As for the two priests in question, you call them martyrs and heroes, as you style José de León Toral, who murdered former president Obregón. Indeed, you went further in León Toral's case and called him a saint, although he was nothing but a common murderer. Doubtless, had the attempt on my life been successful, as you hoped, I should also have been a martyr—such as Obregón and many other revolutionaries and true liberals, the pride of our history, whom the clergy have assassinated.Footnote 35
Tejeda's letter reflected his scorn toward the Catholic Church, as well as his reductionist view of Catholics, including violent actors and nonbelligerent religious activists, as fanatics. The letter also exposed the governor's effort to appropriate the notion of martyrdom for the cause advanced by the postrevolutionary state, a cause centered on the secularization, defanatization, and modernization of the Mexican people.Footnote 36
Although Tejeda's attempt to present Obregón and even himself as martyrs may come across as crude, it did not differ greatly from the attempts made by the federal government and by sympathetic organizations to memorialize the revolutionaries who had died at the hands of so-called religious fanatics. The federal government's adoption of a more moderate approach toward the religious question raised the importance of the realm of the symbolic as an arena wherein the legitimacy of the postrevolutionary project ought to be reasserted. No longer fought primarily through the use of coercion, during the 1930s, battles involving the religious question and the legitimacy of the postrevolutionary state in relation to it were defined increasingly in the realms of education, art, and visual culture.Footnote 37
Socialist teachers, in particular, were repeatedly presented by state officials as committed citizens who had bravely and innocently died, at the hands of fanatics, to defend the ideals of the revolution.Footnote 38 For instance, at the end of the 1930s, the Secretaría de Educación Pública commissioned a collection of lithographs from artist Leopoldo Méndez, which vividly represented the sacrifice of teachers at the hands of Catholic mobs and groups of vigilantes.Footnote 39 While teachers were consistently presented as young and suffering citizens who died while performing their duties, Catholics were depicted as faceless mobs or wicked individuals with coarse features.Footnote 40 In one of these lithographs, titled “Professor Juan Martínez Escobar,” the spirit of a young teacher is shown pointing at his murderer. The teacher is accompanied by hundreds of peasants whose eyes, wide open, offer testimony to the crime. The assassin, in turn, is shown with a malicious expression, holding a knife in his hand, and wearing the mask of a suffering Jesus Christ.Footnote 41 The underlying message could not be clearer: the teacher was the real martyr, while the deceitful Catholic assassin used the image of Christ to justify his actions.
The conflict and disagreement regarding who should be considered a martyr surfaced also in the case of the killings that took place in Mexico City on December 30, 1934. On that day, dozens of Red Shirts (Camisas Rojas) gathered in front of the San Juan Bautista church, located in the Coyoacán neighborhood.Footnote 42 The Red Shirts organization was created by Tomás Garrido Canabal, former governor of Tabasco (1919-34), while he was Secretary of Agriculture (1934-35) under President Cárdenas. Garrido Canabal shared the fervent anticlericalism of Tejeda and envisioned the Red Shirts as part of his strategy to de-Christianize Mexican society.Footnote 43 Comprised of young male anticlericals, the Red Shirts were known for their acts of religious defilement and provocation. On the day of the incident, the young men stood outside the church in their black and red uniforms shouting anti-religious harangues, while the faithful listened to their morning mass. When Catholics came out of mass, a clash between the anticlerical agitators and the churchgoers seemed inevitable. The Red Shirts were armed with pistols, while Catholics were reportedly carrying stones and daggers.Footnote 44 After the Red Shirts shot into the group of churchgoers, killing five and wounding many more, a mob of infuriated Catholics lynched Ernesto Malda, a young member of the group who arrived late to the Red Shirts’ gathering.
Reporting on the incident, El Nacional barely mentioned the names of the Catholic victims, while it described at length the torment and suffering that Ernesto Malda had endured at the hands of a “fanaticized mob” (muchedumbre fanatizada). Footnote 45 It described how Malda's skull had pieces of scalp and hair missing, which had been ripped off by his assailants. The report also made note of two wounds of 20 cm, one on each side of his skull, and more than 80 cuts found on his chest, arms, and back. Other articles also emphasized the irrational conduct of the Catholic mob, and reported that the priest had incited the churchgoers to assail the young anticlericals.Footnote 46 The same newspapers acknowledged that the Red Shirts had fired at the churchgoers, but did not qualify their violent actions or their anti-religious speeches as fanatical or senseless. Even when the press reported the imprisonment of 40 Red Shirts, the emphasis was on Malda's death. A representative article reproduced the telegram that Governor Garrido Canabal sent to Malda's father, wherein he expressed his condolences, stating “when life is lost in the struggle for superior ideals, when blood is nobly spilled for the redemption of those who suffer, a virile consolation, a yearning for triumph, should suffice to fill the void left by our children.”Footnote 47
As suggested by this quote, Garrido Canabal's telegram reveals an understanding of violence as redemptive, in a way that resembles the narrative of sacrificial and emancipatory violence that Tejeda and other postrevolutionary leaders qualified as “irrational” when articulated by Catholics. More so, Garrido Canabal's allusion to the so-called “virile consolation” produced by Malda's death resonates with Catholic militants’ continuous reference to the manliness and bravery that the faithful were expected to observe when defending their religious beliefs.Footnote 48 For instance, in a letter from 1933 a group of “Cristero survivors” harshly criticized Reinaldo Manero, president of the Catholic organization Adoración Nocturna Mexicana (ANM), for encouraging Catholics not to confront their oppressors and focusing instead on prayer and forgiveness. They questioned men like Manero who dreamed about the glory of martyrdom but actively sought to avoid death. They further condemned his poor interpretation of the Fifth Commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”) for lacking virility and Christianity, and asserted “not always nor in all circumstances is it bad to kill; [killing] is an act of virtue, of abnegation, and those who have had the braveness, courage, and determination to kill deserve the good of the motherland, of the Church, and of humanity.”Footnote 49
Beyond this shared notion of redemptive violence centered on virility and bravado, Catholics and revolutionaries had little in common when it came to whose deaths could or should be honored by designating them martyrs. During the days following the Coyoacán clashes, supporters of the Red Shirts on one hand, and Catholic activists on the other, organized public funerals for their victims and articulated a narrative of martyrdom in connection to their death. The group of young anticlericals organized a funeral for Malda in which they carried his coffin wrapped in the red and black flag, and compared his death to that of Obregón, who had been “sacrificed by the clergy.”Footnote 50 They also dropped pamphlets from an airplane—Garrido Canabal's private plane—accusing Archbishop Pascual Díaz of the murder of Malda.Footnote 51
Catholics, for their part, formed the “Club of the Assassinated of Coyoacán” and announced their plans to organize a nationwide campaign to demand the resignation of Garrido Canabal, the dismissal of the Coyoacán police delegate, and the vigorous prosecution of the Red Shirts.Footnote 52 Thousands of people attended both the funeral of Malda and those of the five Catholic victims. For anticlericals and supporters of the Red Shirts, Malda was a martyr of the revolution, a victim of religious fanaticism.Footnote 53 Catholics, in turn, honored the death of the five Catholics who had died at the hands of the anticlerical and impious Red Shirts, and considered them martyrs.Footnote 54
Catholics were particularly keen on the story of María de la Luz Camacho, a young female member of Acción Católica Mexicana (Mexican Catholic Action, ACM) and a nun of the Third Order of Saint Francis, whose last words, as she was shot, were “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King). Camacho became the first martyr of the ACM and Catholics saw in the story of her killing a testament of the state's continuous war against Catholicism. Founded after the 1929 accords, the ACM had the explicit aim of fostering the mobilization and disciplining of Catholics through Catholic education and indoctrination, as well as through civic and religious forms of engagement in the public sphere.Footnote 55 To pursue this aim, the Church tried to incorporate belligerent organizations such as the Liga and the Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (Catholic Association of Mexican Youth, ACJM), both of which had played an active role in the Cristero uprising, into the structure of the ACM. The fact that Camacho was part of the ACM, which embodied the Church's strategy to promote civil and nonviolent forms of resistance, made her martyrdom indisputable in the eyes of both laity and clergy.Footnote 56 Today, Camacho is considered a Cristero martyr with the status of “Servant of God,” and the Church is considering her beatification.Footnote 57
Camacho's death embodied an understanding of martyrdom that, in accordance to canonical Catholic principles, privileged nonviolence and forbearance. She died while defending her religion, without recourse to violence, and in the context of an anticlerical assault perpetrated by an organization that acted with the complicity of state authorities.Footnote 58 Even more, according to some accounts, she attended mass that day knowing that she could encounter the Red Shirts, and thus be exposed to a violent confrontation with the group of radicals.Footnote 59 In sum, she was willing to die for her faith.
María de la Luz was certainly not the first Cristero martyr. Perhaps the most documented and publicized case of martyrdom in twentieth-century Mexico is that of Miguel Agustín Pro, the Jesuit priest who was executed by order of President Calles on November 23, 1927, in the context of the Cristero War.Footnote 60 Detained and executed without trial due to his alleged participation in a failed attempt to assassinate former president and then presidential candidate Álvaro Obregón, Pro immediately became a martyr in the view of Catholics. Not only was the evidence against him weak and biased, but Miguel Pro was widely known for his piety and his engagement in civil forms of religious activism, despite his sympathies for the Cristero uprising.Footnote 61 More so, the image of his execution, with his arms stretching in the shape of a cross, further contributed to Miguel Pro's standing as a symbol of both Catholic peaceful resistance and the immorality and unjust violence unleashed by the Mexican government. The Vatican beatified Miguel Pro in September 1988, as a martyr who had been killed in hatred of the faith.
Catholics’ Disagreements over Martyrdom
Catholics agreed on the martyrdom of Miguel Agustín Pro and María de la Luz Camacho, just as they did in the case of the murdered priest of Tlapacoyan, Darío Acosta. While anticlerical voices may have challenged their martyrdom, there were no visible expressions of divisiveness among the clergy and lay members of the Church regarding the significance of their deaths or the suffering these individuals had endured, stoically and without recourse to violence, at the hands of what they considered a tyrannical government. However, Catholics were not always in agreement regarding whose deaths merited being honored as martyrs, nor did they consider all who died at the hands of the government to be martyrs. The deaths of certain religious militants, in particular, antagonized Catholics and revealed the ways in which martyrdom constituted a key arena where Catholics themselves drew the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of religious activism.
One of the more controversial cases of martyrdom involved Luis Segura Vilchis, the engineer who confessed being the sole author and mastermind behind an attempt on Álvaro Obregón's life in 1927. An active member of the ACJM and of the armed struggle organized by the Liga, Segura was executed by firing squad together with Miguel Pro. Church authorities, however, did not recognize Segura as a martyr and remained for the most part silent about his death. Segura's direct involvement in a violent act disqualified him as a martyr in canonical terms and, equally important, went against the episcopate's efforts to distance itself from violent forms of religious militancy.Footnote 62
Despite the Church authorities’ position, militant Catholics did regard Segura's actions and death as evidence of his martyrdom. An undated poem written by Cristero poet Jorge Téllez, for instance, reflects an alternative understanding of martyrdom articulated by Catholic militants. The poem makes direct reference to Luis Segura as well as to Juan Tirado, also executed in connection to the attempt against Obregón.Footnote 63 The poem reads, in part:
Infused with religious metaphors and Christian references, the poem invokes an understanding of martyrdom that celebrates the profusion of blood and the notion of sacrificial violence in the name of Christ. Toward the end of the poem, the poet refers to the “cross of the father, symbol of the sky” as “an august banner for combat,” an allegory that captures the author's celebration of Catholic belligerence. Such a view of martyrdom, which celebrated the virility and courage of young men as well as their willingness to use violence, was shared by several members of the ACJM but was not welcomed by those Catholics who believed that violent forms of militancy could undermine the legitimacy of their cause.Footnote 65
Equally controversial and divisive was the martyrdom of José de León Toral, the young militant of the ACJM who actually succeeded in his attempt to murder Obregón on July 17, 1928. Obregón, who was by then president-elect of Mexico, was celebrating his recent electoral success in a restaurant in San Ángel, Mexico City, when Toral, camouflaged as a portraitist, shot him twice in front of dozens of witnesses. Toral was not executed right away, following President Calles’ attempt to avoid accusations (as was the case after Miguel Pro's execution) of being undemocratic, tyrannical, or unconcerned with the rule of law.Footnote 66 Instead, Calles decided Toral would be prosecuted and tried before a popular jury, as was customary at the time. In the mind of Calles and other postrevolutionary leaders, a trial based on due process would assert the image of the Mexican state as rational and modern, an image that could then be set against the backwardness and violent fanaticism of the defendants.Footnote 67
Despite the “modern” character of the trial, once he was found guilty, Toral was executed by firing squad on February 9, 1929. While in prison, Toral endured torture at the hands of his interrogators, which he documented through his writings and drawings. It was the torment and the suffering he endured that constituted the basis for his martyrdom in the view of contemporary militant Catholics, particularly members of the ACJM and the Liga.Footnote 68 More so, for Toral and other members of the ACJM, the idea of an individual not only dying but also killing for Christ while exposing the tyranny of the government was a genuine manifestation of religious martyrdom.Footnote 69 This view clearly contrasted with the notion of martyrdom sanctioned by the Church's hierarchy. León Toral, like Luis Segura before him, was not recognized as a martyr by Church authorities. Instead, his actions were immediately condemned by the Mexican episcopate.Footnote 70
The ambivalent and contested meanings of martyrdom in relation to violence would continue to surface in the following months and well into the 1930s. Noteworthy correspondence between the Jesuit priest Césareo Alba and Andrés Barquín y Ruíz, a Catholic militant and co-founder of the ACJM, contains clear references to the tensions and contradictions between violent forms of religious militancy and orthodox interpretations of martyrdom. In one of these letters, Alba expressed to Barquín his doubts about the possibility that members of the ACJM who had supported and participated in the armed rebellion could be considered martyrs, and even less so be considered for canonization.Footnote 71 Alba and Barquín referred specifically to Joaquín Silva y Carrasco and Anacleto González Flores, members of the ACJM executed by the government in 1926 and 1927.Footnote 72
In subsequent correspondence, Alba explained that he did not mean to deny that martyrdom consisted of defending the faith of Jesus Christ. He wished, however, to point to the theological arguments (which he did not necessarily agree with) that “say expressly that those who die with a weapon in their hand while defending the faith are not martyrs” or that “it is not decorous to call a saint he who resists with the same ferocity as the oppressor.Footnote 73 At the same time, Alba acknowledged that Barquín's reference to St. Joan of Arc, the famous Catholic warrior who was canonized by the Church, had made him “hopeful.” As this exchange makes clear, the meanings of martyrdom were not constrained by theological interpretations sanctioned by the Church. Rather, militant Catholics and those who supported their use of violence reinterpreted the notion of martyrdom to accommodate and honor the actions and sacrifice of Cristeros, members of the Liga, and of the ACJM.
Similar to the Church's inability to control the meanings of martyrdom, the Mexican episcopate lacked the means to fully discipline and pacify the hundreds of Catholics who continued to resort to violence and armed resistance during the 1930s. The next section will examine Catholic militants’ recalcitrant political ideology and the clashes their discourses and actions generated between Church authorities and religious militants—including some local priests—as reflected in the controversies that emerged between the Mexican episcopate and the Liga in this period.
(De)Legitimizing Violence
At the end of the Cristero War, the Mexican episcopate tried to tame the activities of recalcitrant and militant Catholics by incorporating existing lay organizations under the newly created Acción Católica Mexicana.Footnote 74 Because of their ongoing support for belligerent forms of religious militancy, members of the Liga were of particular concern to the Mexican episcopate, which was trying to secure the fragile peace reached between Church and state. The thorny relationship between the Liga and the episcopate illustrates the disagreements and tensions that existed between and among clergy and Catholic militants regarding the legitimacy of violence. More so, these disagreements allow a critical examination of government representations of the Catholic Church as a top-down and monolithic entity inherently prone to supporting violent religious militancy.
The Liga's Recalcitrant Politics
The relation between the Liga and the episcopate had been strained from the moment the Church's hierarchy opened channels of dialogue and negotiation with the government during the late 1920s.Footnote 75 The Liga openly condemned the episcopate's strategy of negotiating with authorities who had consistently attacked their faith. In their view, Mexican Catholics could not expect a government that had declared itself an enemy of religion to behave in any way that would guarantee religious freedom or even a minimal respect for Catholics’ most cherished values and traditions. The strategy was, according to Liga activists, not only ineffective but also immoral.
In a long and bitter letter sent by members of the Liga to the archbishop of Mexico, Pascual Díaz, on September 12, 1931, they expressed their disappointment with the episcopate's condemnation of the Liga.Footnote 76 The authors reminded Díaz that when Catholics decided to take up arms in the face of religious persecution, the “Catholic people” (el pueblo católico) asked the Liga to lead the armed movement. Before the Liga accepted this role, however, it called a meeting at which the apostolic delegate Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores and Pascual Díaz (then secretary of the Mexican episcopate) had “committed to not condemn the armed movement, to lend moral support to carry out our program, and to allow those priests who requested it to serve as chaplains of the liberation army.” In their view, it was only after this support was secured that “the battle to death between oppressors and oppressed” began. Next, they mentioned the outcry that the episcopate's negotiations with former president Calles had generated among faithful Catholics, and decried the episcopate's unfair condemnation and hostility toward the Liga.Footnote 77 In particular, they referred to an occasion on which Díaz had “mortally attacked the Executive Committee of the Liga . . . [stating] that we were rebels to the authority of the Pope. . . . This inexplicable hostility was a declaration of war that put us, genuine Catholics, in a very difficult and embarrassing position.”Footnote 78
This letter is revealing in many ways. It shows the Liga's inconformity with the highest religious authority in Mexico and the fact that its members’ convictions did not depend on the hierarchy's approval. Surely, this type of disagreement between the Church and Catholic militants was not new, and might even be seen as an extension of the tensions that existed between ecclesiastical authorities and lay organizations during the Cristero uprising.Footnote 79 Nonetheless, what is distinctive about the divisions that emerged in this decade is the fact that they were being articulated during the so-called new modus vivendi between Church and state, in a period wherein ecclesiastical authorities (at least at the higher levels) rapidly abandoned their traditional ambivalence regarding the use of violence and embraced, instead, a more consistent discourse oriented toward disciplined, law-abiding, and civic forms of religious activism.Footnote 80 In this context, the actions and ideologies promoted by Catholic militants were no longer a reflection of the state-Church conflict, and their strategies to defend religious freedom became increasingly at odds with ecclesiastical authorities.
Whereas during the 1920s the main enemy of Catholic militants was the so-called tyrannical and godless revolutionary government, during the 1930s these recalcitrant believers increasingly saw ecclesiastical authorities as yet another source of danger for religious liberties. In a piece of propaganda published by members of the Liga, they not only condemned the episcopate but also challenged the authority of the Vatican (thus seemingly substantiating Pascual Díaz's identification of Liga members as “rebels”). The Liga produced this document in response to a series of declarations made by Leopoldo Ruíz y Flores in 1932, which were meant to convey to the Mexican faithful that the Vatican rejected the use of armed defense and instead endorsed nonviolent forms of resistance.Footnote 81 In the document, the authors criticized Ruíz y Flores's lenient attitude toward federal authorities who had regularly failed to redress Catholics’ demands for justice.Footnote 82 Then, in reference to Ruíz y Flores's message on armed defense, which reflected the position of both the Mexican episcopate and the Vatican, the Liga document stated: “It is not enough for the Pope and the Bishops to prohibit this recourse [to armed defense]: because being evident, as it is before the world, that religion and the motherland are in an imminent state of ruin due to adhering to such a system of pacifism at all costs, Catholics can and should appeal to arms, despite that prohibition, since discipline is not the end of the church, but it is rather the salvation of souls.”Footnote 83
These militant Catholics from the Liga also claimed that the pope could not have condemned a natural right, such as people's right to defend themselves from an unjust and evident aggression. For them, it would be a contradiction for the Holy Father to condemn Catholics’ recourse to arms in a moment when religion was being seriously threatened and when Acción Católica had done nothing to save the Church. Lastly, stating that they were neither unruly, nor schismatic, nor heretic, the Liga members articulated their final position, which reflected both their intransigence and their overt confrontation of the Church's highest authorities:
[I]t seems that the Pope and the Mexican bishops are mistaken this time. . . . Now, if this time the Pope and the Mexican Pastors have lost the path of truth and justice, are we Catholics bound to follow them? No, no way, because we would then make ourselves accomplices in this error and this injustice. Then what should we do? We should turn to God and Our Holy Mother in search of light, so we do not ourselves miss the true path. Next, in light of our holy doctrine, we shall study what shall be done in this case, putting our passions aside, and letting ourselves be guided only by reason illuminated by faith. . . . Mexican Catholics . . . have always been obedient to our Holy Mother the Church. . . . But in this case we cannot obey, because we would be failing God and our conscience.Footnote 84
Expressive of their discontent with the Church's position, the document reveals that members of the Liga were willing to question the authority of the episcopate and to challenge the judgment of the Holy See itself. Their appeals to religious doctrine and to prayer as a source of knowledge to elucidate the path they needed to follow, reveal an understanding of religious faith and action that relied on individual judgment rather than established rules or hierarchical orders. In contrast to the government's portrayal of Catholics as blindly manipulated by the Church's hierarchy and as having no agency in their actions, this statement suggests religious militants exercised a significant degree of autonomy vis-à-vis Church authorities. It further shows that religious militants were indeed political actors and not, as government officials and mainstream newspapers claimed, mere instruments of the clergy, blinded by their so-called fanaticism. More so, this type of discourse makes it clear that Catholic militants considered the defense of religious freedom, not the defense of the institution of the Church, as essential to their struggle. Hence, if necessary, they were willing to fight ecclesiastical authorities to protect what they regarded as their sacred rights.Footnote 85
A Church Divided
Certainly, not all Catholics agreed with the Liga's intransigent position regarding the legitimacy of violence and rebellion, and less so with the organization's overt defiance of Church authorities. For instance, on March 13, 1933, Alfonso Sánchez de la Peña sent a letter to the priest Manuel J. Martínez to inform him about a meeting organized by members of the Liga in the Portales neighborhood in Mexico City.Footnote 86 As a Catholic, he explained, he had accepted the invitation to attend but was immediately offended by what he saw and heard. In his account, members of the Liga read poems of “belligerent character” and next staged a play in which they dramatized the recent religious persecution by “openly inciting an armed rebellion against the current government, under the pretext of tyranny.” Even more outrageous were the Liga members’ attacks against “our bishops and priests, . . . saying that the Mexican episcopate and all priests were schismatic since they opposed the wishes of Your Holiness the Pope.”Footnote 87 The meeting, he explained, was attended by 600 people, a fact that in his view pointed to the dangerous influence the Liga's ideas could have among the faithful.
From the tone of the letter, we can infer that the author believed his addressee, priest Manuel J. Martínez, shared his rejection of the Liga's position and of the belligerent forms of activism more generally. However, the following statement written by a priest shows that the clergy was divided regarding the strategy of dialogue and reconciliation adopted by the Mexican episcopate. On January 24, 1934, the priest José Adolfo Arroyo wrote a statement wherein he openly criticized the arreglos and the work of Acción Católica, which he deemed unworthy of the respect of those Catholics who ardently defended their religion. Conversely, he praised the work of the Liga, an organization that, in his view, had been unfairly attacked by “our enemies, but also by some of our own.”Footnote 88 He declared that when the arreglos came into effect, morality disappeared from the areas formally controlled by Cristeros, “the dances and the drinking came back, and women went back to dressing and cutting their hair according to fashion. . . . And what is our situation? We are entirely under the power of our enemies.”
Next, Arroyo condemned bishops and priests who showed no morality or respect for natural rights, and who, when addressing wealthy Catholics, referred to Cristeros as bandits, calling them “machete Catholics,” with sarcasm and contempt. No wonder, the priest reckoned, that many believed that “a dark crime of ingratitude and, even more so, of national injustice is being committed, and this claims revenge from the heavens.” The letter concluded that the clergy was responsible for the ongoing hostilities experienced by Catholics on behalf of Mexican authorities.
Aware of the fact that many priests, such as the abovementioned Arroyo, favored the continuation of armed resistance, the higher ranks of the Church made a continuous effort to assure the government that no priests were involved in acts of political agitation. A good example of such efforts was the letter sent by Alberto María Carreño, who served as mediator in the arreglos, to General Juan C. Cabral of the Ministry of Interior on November 14, 1934.Footnote 89 In that letter, Carreño summarized the position of the Mexican clergy and expressed that it was not the intention of Archbishop Ruiz y Flores “to provoke sedition or rebellion among Catholics against the government of the republic.” The letter was accompanied by a report sent to the Ministry of Interior a few days prior, wherein Carreño documented the many instances in which the episcopate had urged members of the Liga to distance themselves from the Church and to change its name so that its involvement in the armed struggle would not tarnish the name of the Church. He further explained that even after Ruiz y Flores was forced into exile in 1932, he had demonstrated his commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict by urging Mexican Catholics “to caution priests and faithful against the biased and disconcerting versions . . . that argue that we must take up arms, a matter in which we cannot nor should mix ourselves” Footnote 90
In addition to informing the government about the Church's commitment to nonviolence, the Mexican episcopate monitored priests’ potential involvement in armed resistance. On September 4, 1935, for instance, in the context of the Second Cristiada, the secretary of the Executive Episcopal Committee issued a summary of the points that had been agreed upon in the committee's last meeting. Following the orders of the Apostolic Delegate, the committee had investigated the possible involvement of priests in the armed movement, but was pleased to report that they had “found out that no priest is currently involved in such movement.”Footnote 91 Nonetheless, at the time that this document was issued, priests were indeed involved in seditious activities. Between 1934 and 1938, in particular, several priests condoned and provided moral and religious support to Catholics who decided to oppose, through violent means, the implementation of socialist education.Footnote 92 Catholics’ actions against teachers included the rape, mutilation, hanging, burning, and torture of dozens of male and female teachers, either at the hands of vigilantes or more spontaneous mobs.Footnote 93
Letters of complaint sent by teachers and teachers’ associations to state and federal authorities described in detail the moral and political role that priests had in guiding parents and neighbors’ efforts to resist socialist education. In June 1935, for instance, Francisco Ramírez Villarreal addressed the governor of Guanajuato to denounce the actions of priest Flaviano de la Vega who, in complicity with the municipal authorities of San Luis de la Paz, had threatened teacher Manuel Pérez.Footnote 94 After being summoned by the town's mayor to discuss the situation of the local school, the teacher arrived at the municipal offices, where the priest, accompanied by a “chusma de fanáticos” (a rabble of fanatics), threatened Pérez, and warned him to stop imparting socialist education or else face retaliation.
A few months later, in November 1935, and in reference to the assassination of several teachers in Teziutlán, Puebla, the Union of Federal Rural Teachers of Puebla addressed President Cárdenas to denounce the activities of the “fanatic clergy” in the state, who jeopardized socialist education and were responsible for the violence against teachers.Footnote 95 The teachers claimed it was unjust that “while the enemies of the Revolution and in particular the fanatical clerics are armed to the teeth, we the rural teachers, lack arms for our personal defense.”Footnote 96 Similarly, a teacher from Tonalá, Jalisco, wrote to the Minister of Interior in May 1938 and accused priests of threatening parents with excommunication if they sent their children to school, adding: “Here the priests have organized absolutely all the people in the society called ‘Acción Católica.’ Children have their association, as do young ladies, young men, fathers, mothers . . . and, what is worst, priests have made parents believe that it is better for children to enter heaven as donkeys than to enter hell in wisdom.”Footnote 97
Similar to government representations of religious militants and activists, the authors of these letters presented Catholics as monolithic, as easily manipulated by the clergy, and as having no agency in their decision to oppose public schooling.Footnote 98 Despite the bias in the teachers’ accounts, it remains true that the status of priests in Catholic communities was central in shaping the sentiments of Catholics toward socialist teachers. As both spiritual leaders and influential political actors who formed alliances with local economic and political elites, parish priests could and did sway people's perceptions about the immorality of socialist education. Furthermore, in their communications and statements, Church authorities clearly conveyed to the faithful that they had the obligation to resist socialist education due to its atheistic, corrupt, and anti-Catholic nature.Footnote 99
For instance, in his pastoral letter of April 12, 1936, the archbishop of Guadalajara, José Garibi Rivera, condemned socialist education as immoral and dangerous and a source of slander against the teachings of the Church. He encouraged laity and clergy to mobilize to make sure children would receive the proper religious education.Footnote 100 Although the official position of Garibi Rivera, and the Catholic hierarchy more generally, was to resist socialist education through nonviolent means, many priests at the local level embraced a less conciliatory and more explosive approach.Footnote 101 Surely, the hierarchy's message regarding the great danger socialist education posed for Catholics, together with the animosity of parish priests and Catholic communities toward socialist teachers, provided the necessary grounds to instigate violence against teachers.
Beyond combating socialist education, priests supported the activities of the Liga, which, against the dictates of the Catholic hierarchy, openly promoted armed resistance and opposition to the Mexican state. The following account of a meeting organized by the Liga on February 16, 1936, in Mexico City, exemplifies both the Liga's ongoing support of belligerent and violent actions, as well as priests’ involvement in this organization. In the document, the author narrates in great detail what he describes as an “extraordinary event” filled with sentiments of “sublime joy” and shared by men who wanted to “know what it feels to be free, at least for a few hours, in a nation of slaves.”Footnote 102 The meeting involved around 1,200 attendees, including peasants and members of the Liga from the Estado de México, Puebla, Hidalgo, Morelos, and Mexico City, whom the author described as soldiers “prepared to offer their blood for the Cristero cause.”
The meeting was held in an open space, among prayers and religious songs, facing an improvised altar where participants placed the Cristero banner and the flags of regional chapters of the Liga. The unnamed priest who inaugurated the event was described by the author as a “sacerdote cristero de corazón,” (a Cristero priest at heart) and was accompanied by four other priests who blessed the flags and read passages from the Bible “in which it was made evident [to us] the ineludible obligation that as Christians we have to defend our rights.” The author described next how a representative of the Liga from Mexico City, on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of José de León Toral's execution, referred to the latter's heroic sacrifice, courage, and patriotism. Illustrating the endurance of Toral's image as a martyr as well as the conflation of martyrdom with heroism promoted by Catholic militants, the speaker, in the words of the author, “put before our eyes the living example of this hero so that all of us, conscious of the responsibility that weighs upon us, resolve to follow the path left by the steps of his generous blood.” At the close of the event, the officiating priest blessed participants, wishing them the “willpower to fulfill them, arriving if necessary to the point of sacrificing our lives.”
As this vivid description makes clear, the priests’ presence and words, together with their references to heroic and sacrificial violence, infused the activities of the Liga with religious significance. The priests pointed to Catholics’ obligation to defend their faith against a government that had deprived them of their religious freedom. They further contributed to a notion of martyrdom that incorporated elements of figure of the hero or the warrior as someone who is not only willing to die but also to kill for his faith. The combination of religious symbols and rituals performed by the Liga attendees, including the use of an altar, the blending of prayers, and calls for belligerent action, illustrate how Catholics used ritualistic elements of their faith to infuse their political goals (resistance toward a tyrannical state) with sacred meaning (to fulfill their mission before God).
Condemned by the Catholic hierarchy and persecuted by the Mexican government, the Liga began to lose presence and strength by the end of the 1930s.Footnote 103 The practices and ideology of this organization, however, shed light on the manifold contradictions and divisions that informed the relationship between violence and religion in 1930s Mexico. Catholics’ support of violence was not rooted in a “fanatical” obedience to the Church, but in noncanonical interpretations of religious principles and an uncompromising understanding of politics that placed the state and its representatives as a threat to Catholics’ moral and religious integrity.
Conclusion
Violence was at the center of the religious experience in both revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico. Be it as an expression of religious persecution or a belligerent form of religious militancy, the study of violence is central to understanding how religion has been lived and experienced by Mexican citizens, and communities more broadly. Scholarly literature has, for the most part, failed to provide a systematic analysis of the contentious and complex relationship between religion and violence in Mexico. Although there exists a rich and vast historiography dealing with the Cristero War, such literature is centered on the armed conflict and on the reasons that prompted Catholics to take up arms against the postrevolutionary state.Footnote 104 In most analyses, however, violence appears as a byproduct of the armed conflict but is not studied in its own right, or in terms of its more spontaneous manifestations such as rioting and lynching. This has precluded a deeper analysis of the tensions between Catholics’ recourse to violence and their observance of core values such as the sanctity of human life and their pledged allegiance to the Catholic Church's hierarchy.
This article has offered an examination of the cultural and political repertoire that served to justify the use of violence in the eyes of belligerent Catholics. My analysis of martyrdom, based on both widely accepted and contentious martyrs, speaks to the ways in which religious militants infused politics and their recourse to violence with sacred meanings. The so-called modus vivendi between state and Church did not defuse militant Catholicism, but instead, made the contrast between Church and intransigent lay Catholics more salient. Martyrdom served as a central battlefield where the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate forms of religious activism were drawn and redefined in the aftermath of the Cristero War. The question of who deserved to be considered a martyr concerned not only competing interpretations articulated by revolutionaries and Catholics—as would be expected—but also involved crucial disagreements among Catholics. The examination of the Liga's continuing support and justification of violent forms of religious militancy offers a window into the recalcitrant political ideologies that characterized militant organizations and individuals. The Liga's open defiance of the Mexican episcopate and even the Holy See reveals that, for these Catholic militants, the defense of their faith went well beyond the defense of the Church as an institution —it was the vindication of a religious and political project that asserted Mexico as a Catholic nation.
As has been persuasively argued by scholars such as R. Scott Appleby and William T. Cavanaugh, defenders of the modern liberal state have commonly equated religion with violent and irrational conduct.Footnote 105 Mexico's government officials reproduced a discourse centered on the so-called fanaticism, ignorance, and violent proclivities of Catholics. Nonetheless, as examined in this article, Catholics’ understanding of violence was far from homogeneous. Instead, it was traversed by tensions, contradictions, and bitter disagreements among clergy, lay members, and Catholic groups and organizations regarding the legitimacy of violent forms of religious activism. The violent actions of Catholic militants, grounded as they were in noncanonical and popular interpretations of martyrdom and sacrifice, were as much religious as they were political.