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The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3824272

1527-1900

Will Fowler,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Although the early republican and midcentury reform periods in Mexico have attracted increasing interest in recent years, they continue to be comparatively neglected by the historiography. This is obvious when it comes to the history of Mexico's nineteenth-century conservatives. Condemned by the triumphant liberal historians of the latter half of the nineteenth century for being traitors, they have remained an unpopular subject ever since. While Mexico's nineteenth-century liberals have come to be popularly depicted by Mexican officialdom as the direct predecessors of subsequent generations of progressive politicians, part of a patriotic genealogy of good Mexicans, their conservative enemies have been considered undeserving of serious study. Unlike their liberal antagonists, Mexico's midcentury conservative luminaries remain forgotten. It is remarkable that no major biography has been written of conservative generals such as Tomás Mejía or Miguel Miramón, or that there is no single history of the rebel conservative government based in Mexico City during the civil war of the Reforma (1858–1861). It is against this backdrop of historiographical neglect that Pablo Mijangos y González's biography of Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía (1810–1868) is such a welcome and important contribution.Although common wisdom would have us believe that Munguía was a bellicose intransigent reactionary bishop who fanned the flames of the civil war of the Reforma on the side of the conservatives, Mijangos's study goes on to prove that it would be a mistake to label him a conservative. In fact, by the end of his life, disappointed with the conservatives' constant demand for church funds and Emperor Maximilian's refusal to repeal the reform legislation of 1855–1860, Munguía came round to accepting Benito Juárez's 1859 decree to separate church and state, going as far as to write to the pope to acknowledge as much. This exemplifies why, if we are to understand the midcentury reform period in Mexico and the country's bloodiest and most devastating civil war after the War of Independence (1810–1821), we must look closely at the lives and ideas of those very individuals labeled in the historiography as reactionaries and try to understand their actual beliefs and motives. One of this book's greatest achievements is extrapolating from Munguía's ideas and actions as a scholar and bishop an interpretation of the Catholic Church's response to the midcentury liberal revolution that forces us to rethink a whole set of long-held assumptions about Mexico's liberal-conservative divide. Seen from the perspective of the time, Munguía's defiant call for the church and its members to resist the liberal reforms of the mid-1850s becomes the reasoned and desperate response of a whole generation of Mexicans profoundly disenchanted and dismayed by what they saw as the moral decline of their country following the three shambolic decades after independence, crowned by Mexico's humiliating defeat in the US-Mexican War (1846–1848).Mijangos's biography offers a detailed analysis of Munguía's philosophical ideas and how they evolved and became radicalized in reaction to Mexico's failure to establish a long-lasting stable political system or government. Mijangos traces the ideological twists and turns of Munguía's legal, constitutional, and moral beliefs from when he was a jurisprudence student and later a teacher at the Seminary of Morelia in the 1830s and 1840s to his years as bishop by focusing on his works, sermons, pastoral letters, and decrees, offering us in the process a complex, subtle, multilayered, and richly nuanced intellectual portrait of the man and the church and Catholic nation that he strove to defend and foster. Mijangos's Munguía was not a reactionary. He was not in favor of authoritarian measures. In fact, he openly supported representative republican government as long as the church was given the power and space to ensure that politics were subordinated to its principles of morals and religion. His defense of Catholic Church doctrine was thus framed as the only guarantee that Mexicans had against tyranny and decline. He was a passionate defender of the importance of education, seeing in a solid moral educational program like the one he developed at the Seminary of Morelia the ultimate antidote to dangerous and corrupting passions. In his mind, priests were the “guardians of morality and justice” and the “guarantors of patriotism” (p. 89). That his views hardened with time, like those of many of his contemporaries, was a reaction to Mexico's chronic instability. By the end of the 1840s Munguía had become convinced that Christian civilization was seriously threatened by the revolutionary passions unleashed by the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the context of moral decline of postwar Mexico. His stance of the 1850s was the result of four decades of upheaval, political violence, and aggressive anticlerical measures. It was his ardent defense of the rights and liberties of the Catholic Church that set him on a collision course with the Reforma liberals. However, as argued by Mijangos, Munguía was ultimately concerned with defending ecclesiastical autonomy and a Catholic form of republicanism and nationalism, not the political cause of the conservatives.There is no denying that Munguía inspired an entire generation of priests to oppose the liberal reforms of the 1850s. He refused to celebrate the ratification of the 1857 constitution, boycotted oath-taking ceremonies, and disobeyed the liberal authorities' orders, all of which contributed to the outbreak of the civil war. It was in great measure a result of Munguía's combative intransigence that the clergy was eventually expelled from the political system and lost most of its wealth. However, this does not necessarily translate into his having been a conservative. Paradoxically, Munguía's belief in the need to reinforce the authority and independence of the church would be validated by the liberals' reforms that separated church and state and granted the church its autonomy.Mijangos's biography of Munguía is without doubt a fascinating intellectual and political history that must be read by anybody concerned with Mexico's Reforma and church-state relations in nineteenth-century Latin America.