The Cristero War (Spanish: La guerra cristera), also known as the Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada [la kɾisˈtjaða], was a widespread struggle in central and western Mexico from 3 August 1926 to 21 June 1929 in response to the implementation of secularist and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution. The rebellion was instigated as a response to an executive decree by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles to strictly enforce Article 130 of the Constitution, an implementing act known as the Calles Law. Calles sought to limit the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico and its affiliated organizations and to suppress popular religiosity.
The rural uprising in north-central Mexico was tacitly supported by the Church hierarchy and was aided by urban Catholic supporters. The Mexican Army received support from the United States. American Ambassador Dwight Morrow brokered negotiations between the Calles government and the Church. The government made some concessions, the Church withdrew its support for the Cristero fighters, and the conflict ended in 1929. The rebellion has been variously interpreted as a major event in the struggle between church and state that dates back to the 19th century with the War of Reform, and as the last major peasant uprising in Mexico after the end of the military phase of the Mexican Revolution in 1920. The end of the first conflict did not bring an immediate end to armed resistance. In the latter half of the 1930s a second wave of armed resistance emerged, partly in response to socialist education reforms implemented by the Mexican government. The period of conflict became known as the Second Cristero War (La Segunda). Although smaller in scale than the first Cristero War, the conflict continued in the late 1930s and in some regions persisted into the early 1940s.
Background
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution started in 1910 against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and for the masses' demand of land for the peasantry. Francisco I. Madero was the first revolutionary leader. He was elected president in November 1911 but was overthrown and executed in 1913 by conservative General Victoriano Huerta in a series of events now known as the Ten Tragic Days. After Huerta seized power, Archbishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flóres from Morelia published a letter condemning the coup and distancing the Church from Huerta. The newspaper of the National Catholic Party, representing the views of the bishops, severely attacked Huerta and so the new regime jailed the party's president and halted the publication of the newspaper. Nevertheless, some members of the party participated in Huerta's regime, such as Eduardo Tamariz. The revolutionary generals Venustiano Carranza, Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata, who won against Huerta's Federal Army under the Plan of Guadalupe, had friends among Catholics and the local parish priests who aided them but also blamed high-ranking Catholic clergy for supporting Huerta.
1917 Mexican Constitution
The 1917 Constitution was drafted by the Constituent Congress, convened by Venustiano Carranza in September 1916, and it was approved on 5 February 1917. It was based on the previous 1857 Constitution, which had been instituted by Benito Juárez. Articles 3, 27, and 130 of the 1917 Constitution contained articles that restricted the power and the influence of the Catholic Church.
The first two sections of Article 3 stated: "I. According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. II. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance's effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice." The second section of Article 27 stated: "All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be authorized to acquire, possess or manage only the necessary assets to achieve their objectives."
The first paragraph of Article 130 stated: "The rules established at this article are guided by the historical principle according to which the State and the churches are separated entities from each other. Churches and religious congregations shall be organized under the law."
The Constitution also provided for mandatory registration of all churches and religious congregations and forbade priests to involve themselves in politics or inherit from anyone other than close relatives. It also allowed each state to control the number of priests in its territory (some reduced it to zero), forbade the wearing of religious garb outside of church premises, and excluded offenders from a trial by jury. Carranza declared himself opposed to the final draft of Articles 3, 5, 24, 27, 123 and 130, but the Constitutional Congress contained only 85 conservatives and centrists who were close to Carranza's moderate liberalism. Against them were 132 delegates of a more radical and anticlerical mindset.
Article 24 stated: "Every man shall be free to choose and profess any religious belief as long as it is lawful and it cannot be punished under criminal law. The Congress shall not be authorized to enact laws either establishing or prohibiting a particular religion. Religious ceremonies of public nature shall be ordinarily performed at the temples. Those performed outdoors shall be regulated under the law."
Conflict between church and state
The Mexican Revolution was the costliest conflict in the history of Mexico. The overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz caused political instability, with many contending factions and regions. The Mexican Catholic Church and the Díaz government had come to an informal modus vivendi in which the state formally maintained the anticlerical articles of the liberal Constitution of 1857 but failed to enforce them. A change of leadership and a wholesale overturning of the previous order were potential sources of danger to the Church's position. In the democratizing wave of political activity, the National Catholic Party (Partido Católico Nacional) was formed.
After President Francisco I. Madero was overthrown and assassinated in the February 1913 military coup, which was led by General Victoriano Huerta, supporters of the Porfirian regime were returned to their posts. After the ouster of Huerta in 1914, members of the National Catholic Party and high-ranking Church figures were accused of collaborating with the Huerta regime, and the Catholic Church was subjected to revolutionary hostilities and fierce anticlericalism by many northern revolutionaries. The Constitutionalist faction won the revolution and its leader, Venustiano Carranza, had a new constitution drawn up, the Constitution of 1917. It strengthened the anticlerical provisions of the previous document, but President Carranza and his successor, General Alvaro Obregón, were preoccupied by their struggles against their enemies in Mexico and so they were lenient in their enforcement of the Constitution's anticlerical articles, especially in areas in which the Church was powerful.
Carranza was the first president under the 1917 Constitution but he was overthrown by his former ally Álvaro Obregón in 1919. Obregón took over the presidency in late 1920 and effectively applied the Constitution's anticlerical laws in areas in which the Church was fragile. The uneasy truce with the Church ended with Obregón's 1924 handpicked succession of the atheist Plutarco Elías Calles. Mexican "Jacobins", supported by Calles's central government, engaged in secularization campaigns to eradicate what they called superstition and fanaticism, which included the desecration of religious objects as well as the persecution and the murder of members of the clergy.
When Calles and his Labor Party came to power in 1924, the administration believed that the Church was challenging its revolutionary initiatives and legal basis. The administration thus resolved for strict enforcement of the Constitution's secularist articles. To confront the Church's influence, laws were brought into force to execute on the constitutional provisions, which triggered a ten-year-long religious conflict in which thousands of armed civilians were killed by the Mexican Army. Some have characterized Calles as the leader of an atheist state and his program as being one to eradicate religion in Mexico, but Calles also supported the creation of the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church in 1925, a national church independent from the Vatican and accepting of the secularist Constitution.
Calles applied the anticlerical laws stringently throughout the country and added his own anticlerical legislation. In June 1926, he signed the "Law for Reforming the Penal Code," which was popularly called the Calles Law. It provided specific penalties for priests and individuals who violated the provisions of the 1917 Constitution. For instance, wearing clerical garb in public, outside church buildings, earned a fine of 500 pesos (then the equivalent of US$250), and priests who criticized the government could be imprisoned for five years. Some states enacted their own anticlerical measures. Chihuahua enacted a law permitting only one priest to serve all Catholics in the state. To help enforce the law, Calles expropriated church property, expelled all foreign priests and closed monasteries, convents and religious schools.
Protests and radicalization
In response to the measures, Catholic organizations began to intensify their resistance. The most important Catholic group was the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty, founded in 1924, which was joined by the Mexican Association of Catholic Youth, founded in 1913, and the Popular Union, a Catholic political party founded the previous year.
Later in 1926, Calles intensified tensions against the clergy by ordering all local churches in and around Jalisco to be bolted shut. The places of worship remained shut for two years. On 14 July, Catholic bishops endorsed plans for an economic boycott against the government, which was particularly effective in west-central Mexico (the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, and Zacatecas). Other states that saw minor uprising were Oaxaca, Colima, Sonora, and Nayarit. Catholics in those areas stopped attending movies and plays and using public transportation, and Catholic teachers stopped teaching in secular schools.
The fomenting conflict attracted the attention of Pope Pius XI, who issued a series of papal encyclicals from 1925 to 1937. On 18 November 1926, he issued Iniquis afflictisque ("On the Persecution of the Church in Mexico") to denounce the violent anticlerical persecution in Mexico. Despite the government's promises, the persecution of the Church continued. In response, Pius issued Acerba animi on 29 September 1932.
The bishops asked to have the offending articles of the Constitution amended. Pope Pius XI explicitly approved the plan. The Calles government considered the bishops' activism to be sedition and had many more churches closed. In September 1926, the episcopate submitted a proposal to amend the Constitution, but the Mexican Congress rejected it on 22 September.
Rebellion
The government called the rebels Cristeros since they invoked the name of Jesus Christ under the title of "Cristo Rey" or Christ the King, and the rebels soon took to using the name themselves. The rebellion is known for the Feminine Brigades of St. Joan of Arc, a brigade of women that assisted the rebels in smuggling guns and ammunition, and for certain priests, who were tortured and murdered in public and later canonized by Pope John Paul II. The rebellion eventually came to an end following a settlement brokered by the Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow with financial relief and logistical assistance provided by the Knights of Columbus.
Beginning of violence
On 3 August, four days after the Calles Law came into force, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, some 400 armed Catholics shut themselves in the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe ("Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe"). They exchanged gunfire with federal troops and surrendered when they ran out of ammunition. According to American consular sources, the battle resulted in 18 dead and 40 wounded. The following day, in Sahuayo, Michoacán, 240 government soldiers stormed the parish church. The priest and his vicar were killed in the ensuing violence.
On 14 August, government agents staged a purge of the Chalchihuites, Zacatecas, chapter of the Association of Catholic Youth and executed its spiritual adviser, Father Luis Bátiz Sainz. The execution caused a band of ranchers, led by Pedro Quintanar, to seize the local treasury and to declare themselves in rebellion. At the height of the rebellion, they held a region including the entire northern part of Jalisco. Luis Navarro Origel, mayor of Pénjamo, Guanajuato, led another uprising on 28 September. His men were defeated by federal troops in the open land around the town but retreated into the mountains, where they engaged in guerrilla warfare. In support of the two guerrilla Apache clans, the Chavez and Trujillos helped smuggle arms, munitions, and supplies from the US state of New Mexico.
That was followed by a 29 September uprising in Durango, led by Trinidad Mora, and a 4 October rebellion in southern Guanajuato, led by former General Rodolfo Gallegos. Both rebel leaders adopted guerrilla tactics since their forces were no match for federal troops. Meanwhile, rebels in Jalisco, particularly the region northeast of Guadalajara, quietly began assembling forces. Led by 27-year-old René Capistrán Garza, the leader of the Mexican Association of Catholic Youth, the region would become the main focal point of the rebellion.