Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 - Softcover

Wright-Rios, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822343797 ISBN 13: 9780822343790

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2009

Synopsis

In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three “visions” of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop’s ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman’s remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s.

Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican’s blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca’s indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Wright-Rios is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

From the Back Cover

""Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism" is an important and much-needed exploration of the evolution of religion, both popular and ecclesiastical, from the late nineteenth century to the coming of Lazaro Cardenas in 1934. Shrewdly avoiding stark dichotomies in favor of understanding how popular needs and practices interacted with church projects, Edward Wright-Rios offers multifaceted insight into the religious experience of turn-of-the-century Oaxacans."--Terry Rugeley, author of "Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800-1876"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

REVOLUTIONS IN MEXICAN CATHOLICISM

REFORM AND REVELATION IN OAXACA, 1887-1934By Edward Wright-Rios

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4379-0

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................ixAcknowledgements...............................................................xiMoving the Faithful............................................................11 An Enterprising Archbishop...................................................432 Crowning Images..............................................................733 The Spirit of Association....................................................984 Catholics in Their Own Way...................................................1415 Christ Comes to Tlacoxcalco..................................................1646 The Second Juan Diego........................................................2067 The Gender Dynamics of Devotion..............................................242Picturing Mexican Catholicism..................................................271Notes..........................................................................291Bibliography...................................................................335Index..........................................................................355

Chapter One

An Enterprising Archbishop

Catholic clergymen have long been crucial sources for historians of Latin American. For the entire colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, friars and priests served as society's educated elite and fancied themselves its moral compass. Diverse postings and the cleric's role as the eyes, ears, voice, and scribe of religious institutions, and sometimes even the state, made them irreplaceable historical witnesses for present-day scholars. Here was a sector of society that nurtured a culture of investigation, commentary, and documentation.

For the most part, the priests who engaged local practitioners of Catholicism in Oaxaca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerged from the region's newly reformed archdiocesan seminary. This institution owed its expansion and restored reputation to the efforts of one of the most important figures in the Mexican Catholic hierarchy during this period, Oaxaca's Archbishop Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza. Indeed, this man, and his supporters, sought to recast the experience of Oaxacan Catholicism in a broad, ambitious program that would mark the Mexican church well into the mid-twentieth century. His impact is still very much in evidence on the region's historical landmarks. Hence, it is fitting that this energetic modernizer, devotee of Indian martyrs, and polemical point man of Mexico's Catholic resurgence attract our scrutiny.

Gillow presided over the Oaxacan archdiocese from 1887 until 1922, although from 1914 until 1921 he lived in exile in the United States. Before his seven-year hiatus, he forwarded a reform program that sought to bring order to Oaxacan Catholicism while infusing it with the sensibilities and ideological themes in vogue in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Rome. He endeavored to transplant modernized European Catholicism in Oaxaca, and by his own estimation, he succeeded. Gaining a proper perspective on Oaxacan religious practice during this period requires a flashback to over two decades of concerted reform that began with Gillow's consecration in 1887. As the next three chapters demonstrate, the prelate and his lieutenants revamped urban piety and Catholic institutional culture within Oaxaca City, bringing it in line with prevailing European modes of practice and organizational structure. They experienced only mixed results, though, in their efforts to extend the model throughout the archdiocese. This prelate-conceived vision of Catholic religiosity and social order appeared in its most complete public expression during the 1909 coronation of Oaxaca's Marian patroness, La Virgen de la Soledad. As with all climactic events, a history of personal experiences and coeval projects offers the key to decoding the deeper levels of significance in what appears, at a century's remove, as merely an extravagant, well-attended festival. A close analysis of the Gillow program requires an examination of the man, the hierarch, and his mission.

As symbolically rendered on the souvenirs distributed at the coronation, it is impossible to separate the celebration of the Virgin of Solitude from Gillow's remarkable career. One such keepsake, an approximately five-by-seven-inch card, partners a portrait of Oaxaca's archbishop with a bejeweled but forlorn depiction of the Virgin Mother. On the most basic level, this document speaks of patronage, declaring Gillow the force behind the international recognition bestowed upon a cherished local devotion. But the imposing close-up of the resolute prelate, staring at the viewer, in the robes and ornate pectoral cross of his office, stands in stark contrast to the distant sacred image of a Virgin who appears frail and lost beneath her pearl-encrusted vestments and outsized crown. Of course, doctrine holds that Mary's potency as an intercessor before God is second to none, but this memento depicts Gillow as a formidable, flesh-and-blood image of earthly ecclesiastical power, status, and competence. In short, the archbishop's picture represents the local patriarchal countenance of the newly resurgent Catholic Church.

The pairing of the prelate and the Virgin also reveals a Oaxacan expression of the two faces of modern Catholicism during this period. Gillow's stern likeness represents the church's zealous, masculine clergy, who appropriated modernity's cachet and authority in depicting themselves as a disciplined hierarchy of professionals armed with a revitalized social mission and rigorous methods governed by faith. Soledad symbolizes the feminine refusal to accept Christianity's alienation from public life and embrace of the church's adamant assertion that miraculous intercession in human affairs remained crucial if Christian civilization was to be salvaged from the modern era's fundamental rebellion against God. Here we can perceive the emotive, rationality-be-damned style of Marian piety in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The faithful did not see the presentation of these different Catholic modalities as conflictive. Dogma and faith bound them together, and among believers their twinning made sense: Christians should employ the latest means in working for the common good, but bear witness to God's enduring power to shape human destiny. The Virgin stood for unshakable devotion, doctrinal purity, and submission to divine authority. She also served as the object of intimate supplication. Men like Gillow served as models of an informed, coordinated Catholic action and pious fortitude in the face of faith-threatening adversity. Nonetheless, in the context of the times, it is significant that the church, both in Europe and Mexico, communicated in two registers: one measured, intellectual, nearly rationalist, and gendered male; the other effusive, usually gendered female, and fused to the era's allegedly miraculous apparitions.

Gillow's career encapsulates the Mexican church's efforts to convey this message to its heterogeneous flock. It also gives us a platform from which to comment on how emergent social Catholicism, and the performative modes of European practice emulated in Mexico by Romanizing clergymen, influenced local religion. Both the church's retooled social ideology and new pious style had roots in Catholic tradition. In fact, the local clergy did not attempt to uproot existing Catholic practices so much as to graft new meanings and institutions on existing religious customs. Gillow, the Oaxacan Curia, and their supporters sought to implement practical programs rooted in new teachings, as well as to heighten and harness popular devotion. To put it another way, they attempted to redirect local practices, rather than radically alter them. Borrowing the vinicultural metaphors that these men were fond of invoking, they viewed themselves as caretakers of God's Oaxacan grapes, entrusted with their maintenance and fruitful production. As such, they had to undertake the determined extirpation of weeds and the careful pruning of wayward sprouts, without damaging rootstocks, the mother vine, or shoots deserving of nurtured growth.

Archdiocesan efforts to reform belief and practice centered on the promotion of an idealized hierarchical network of new lay institutions and devotions. Theoretically, these organizations would incorporate the entire population in fervent, orderly aggregations under the direct supervision of the parish clergy, who in turn, answered to the archdiocesan Curia following Vatican directives. The new asociaciones cannicamente erguidas (canonically structured associations) stood at the center of their plan. Ideally composed of committed individuals of impeccably pious reputations, and segregated by class and gender, these groups discouraged the time-honored, frenetic celebration of titular feasts. Instead they emphasized scheduled group spiritual exercises, frequent sacramental practice, and special liturgies purged of profane revelries and uninhibited fiesta piety. These new institutions were branches of established international Catholic associations governed by charters written by European hierarchs, administered by prelate-appointed regional directors, and always under the guidance of parish priests. But the plan was more ambitious than simply turning Oaxacans into diligent congregants at daily or weekly Mass and select feasts. These new organizations cultivated fervent dedication to devotions imbued with conservative religious and political positions associated with the primacy of Rome. They were also designed to function as the church's agents in every community, organizing locals to support ecclesiastical initiatives, countering adversaries, and setting an example of proper social and religious conduct. Furthermore, they were to be the devout masses at demonstrations of Catholic political identity when called upon to gather for events showcasing the depth and intensity of popular support for the church. In sum, they represented the imagined grassroots of a modern, conservative Catholic mass politics and the new social foundations of the beleaguered church.

This system also served as both chain of command and watershed of devotion. Vatican directives could be transmitted and implemented at the distinct levels of Catholic society, from the Archdiocese of Mexico and its elite and working-class associations, to the outlying ecclesiastical provinces and their local associations, and from hence to Oaxaca's rural parishes. Priests hypothetically manned each node to ensure that content and meaning remained unadulterated. Conversely, loyalty and devotion, as symbolically enacted in coordinated pilgrimages, flowed in the opposite direction. For example, in Oaxaca during this period, parishes led by their priests began to travel to the archdiocesan seat on a prescribed rotating schedule to "prostrate themselves" before the Virgin of Solitude in Oaxaca City and experience the full sounds and splendors of urban ritual. In turn, from the mid-1890s, representatives of the archdiocese and the local Curia took their place in nationally organized pilgrimages to Mexico City's Virgin of Guadalupe, and groups of Mexicans of sufficient means joined pilgrimages to Rome and Europe's famous shrines.

It was relatively easy to invoke this vision of corporatist social engineering, but entirely another matter to bring it into being. Catholicism has a history of lofty plans abridged by practical accommodation. Gillow's career provides a crucial component of the larger argument in this study: that is, modern, militant revivalism promoted by the Oaxacan Curia influenced popular apparition movements by modeling certain organizational structures, forms of expression, and modes of devotion. In addition, this movement also shaped the ideological foundations of the priests engaging local Catholicism during the period. The evidence presented here suggests that new devotions and modern forms of pious expression had a broader impact than the ideas and programs published by Catholic intellectuals contemplating Mexico's "social question" and "Indian problem." Gillow's biography and the institutional history of the Oaxacan church provide a road map of sorts, but a straightforward narration of top-down reform is not my intention. The point is to rescue the prelate's legacy from both triumphant portrayals of him as a great patriarch and negative interpretations of his career as a cautionary tale of reactionary ecclesiastical power. Gillow and his lieutenants were the interpreters and promoters of a particular conception of Catholicism, and they were key participants in Oaxacan reworkings of the faith.

GETTING AT GILLOW

Historical analysis of Archbishop Gillow's life and career began before the ambitious churchman set his sights on Oaxaca's vacant see in the late 1880s. A biographical text composed for Gillow's ill-fated candidacy for the Diocese of Puebla in 1877 argued that Gillow was a uniquely qualified confidant of Vatican hierarchs. On the very day of his consecration as Bishop of Oaxaca, July 31, 1887, this first official history was published in the form of a poster affixed to the walls of churches throughout the state capital.

Signed simply "Various Catholics" and asserting that its mission was to introduce Oaxacans to their new prelate, this document enumerated a carefully framed set of qualifications: aristocratic Mexican lineage, European Jesuit training, profound vocation and personal piety, facility with the languages and high cultures of western Europe, a sterling reputation in Rome, business acumen, and a network of personal relationships spanning Vatican luminaries, President Porfirio Daz, and Mexico's economic elite. This initial salvo in the Gillow historiography depicts its subject as a new Catholic renaissance man, combining the finest upbringing, education, and bedrock religious conviction with intimate knowledge of the modern world and mastery within the halls of power. Conspicuously absent from this glowing portrayal of Oaxaca's new bishop was any mention of pastoral experience. Indeed, Gillow had none.

Two years later Gillow authored Apuntes histricos (1889). On the surface, this text is a hagiography of two Zapotec Indians who died defending the faith in 1700. It also represents the inauguration of a lengthy canonization campaign. But at a deeper level, this book reveals Gillow's efforts to shape the historical backdrop and define the themes of his episcopal career far from the papal court where it began. In Apuntes Gillow frames the coming-of-age of a heathen mission province, emerging first from the hell of paganism thanks to the heroic Dominican missionaries, and second from demonically inspired idolatrous backsliding, thanks to the unshakable faith of select Indian Catholics. Finally, under a new bishop's zealous guidance, Oaxaca sat poised to attain its rightful glorious place in Christendom as Gillow unearthed the physical remains and history of native martyrs. This text also allowed Gillow to depict his posting to a remote Mexican province in the best possible light. Prelates in the Vatican and within Mexico viewed indigenous practice with suspicion, and Apuntes addressed this unease. It ratified fears of crypto-paganism in the Oaxacan countryside, but defended church claims that colonial missionaries implanted the foundations of pristine belief and practice, and proclaimed that a core of devout natives embraced the faith wholeheartedly, despite idolatrous social pressures. Gillow thus preempted notions that he was the titular head of a pagan province and depicted his pastoral mission as one of protecting and nurturing a simple orthodoxy implanted in colonial times and still unsullied by modern error.

As his career progressed, Archbishop Gillow elaborated on this liberation-from-darkness narrative with an interpretation of local history in three basic phases: colonial evangelical glory, characterized by a successful missionary campaign; nineteenth-century, state-sponsored persecution, occasioning a cooling of religiosity and the near collapse of church infrastructure; and finally, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century return to grandeur and fervor thanks to Gillow's pastoral wisdom and inspired reforms. This triumphant narrative pervades many articles and editorials in the region's Catholic press of the period, but it appears in its most distilled fashion in a serialized history of Gillow's tenure in the Boletn Oficial y Revista Ecclesistica de Antequera, and in the prelate's official biography, Reminicencias, written during his exile in the United States (1914-21). These texts remain the foundation of scholarly analyses of Gillow's legacy.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822343797
• ISBN 13: 9780822343790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376