Mexico’s Church-State Ties Step Out From the Shadows

Father Carlos Bravo, a Jesuit theologian who works out of a discreet office in a colonial neighborhood of Mexico City, tells of an exchange he had with a Venezuelan colleague who boasted that the church-state relationship in his country was the most stable marriage in the world.

In Mexico, the soft-spoken Bravo responded, the church and state are not married but are participants in “the most stable concubinage there is.”

For more than half a century, the Mexican government has had what Bravo calls “a backdoor relationship” with the Roman Catholic Church. Mexico is overwhelmingly Catholic, at least nominally, yet the church has no legal standing under the constitution. Mexico is the only country in Latin America that does not have diplomatic ties with the Vatican. Dialogue between government and religious leaders is largely clandestine.

But President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has moved to bring the church-state relationship out of the dark. Salinas, who took office Dec. 1, 1988, invited Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada and several bishops to his inauguration in the Chamber of Deputies and vowed to “modernize” relations with the church.

That ignited anti-clerical sentiment within the ruling party and brought a cry from opposition politicians that the new president had violated the separation of church and state.

In January, Salinas issued a rare, if not unprecedented, invitation to the president of the Mexican Bishops Conference, Archbishop Adolfo Suarez Rivera, and other prelates to dine at Los Pinos, his official residence.

A thrilled Suarez told the newspaper El Universal, “We entered through the front door.”

Then, in February, the government announced that “a personal representative of the president of the republic” would be sent to the Vatican. That decision provoked a new wave of criticism, but church officials viewed the naming of a presidential envoy as a major advance.

The visit of Pope John Paul II--he is to arrive Sunday and spend 10 days in Mexico--is providing new fuel for the church-state debate. At issue is whether the government should establish full diplomatic relations with the Vatican and amend the constitution to grant full rights of citizenship to the clergy and church institutions.

It is a complicated debate, in a once-conquered country with a revolutionary past that sees no contradiction between Catholicism and anti-clericalism. A Los Angeles Times poll last year found that 80% of those interviewed considered themselves Catholic, but 74% said the church should have “no voice” in the nation’s politics.

Catholic leaders say the opponents of change are “medieval” and “Jacobins.” The response is that the church is hungry for power.

In an attempt to lower expectations about the Pope’s visit, Cardinal Corripio announced at a Palm Sunday Mass that diplomatic relations with the Vatican and constitutional amendments are not the church’s immediate priorities. Many church observers took the announcement to mean just the opposite.

“As the Pope’s trip nears, the hierarchy wanted to lessen the pressure,” said Roberto Blancarte, an authority on church-state relations at the Colegio Mexiquense in the state of Mexico. “They do not want any problems around the visit.”

But Blancarte said the church is steadfastly pursuing constitutional changes that will allow it to play a larger role in Mexican society and politics. At the same time, he said, President Salinas, in his push to modernize Mexico, has decided to reduce the size and role of the Mexican state. Salinas announced last year that the big, paternalistic governments of the Mexican Revolution had failed to meet the country’s social needs.

“The Mexican state has been undergoing a transformation,” Blancarte said, “but the Catholic hierarchy has been consolidating its project. It is a very clear project to reclaim their rights as a church institution.”

He said the history of the Catholic Church in Mexico is one of avarice, “of siding with the losers.”

With the Spanish conquest in 1521 came well-intentioned missionaries who tried to protect the Indians from slavery and other abuses. But the church grew increasingly wealthy, and in time brought the Inquisition to the New World. By the 19th Century, the Catholic Church owned half the land in Mexico and actively opposed its independence from Spain.

In the 1850s, the liberal, reformist President Benito Juarez decided to break the church’s power. His government stripped the church of its property, except for church buildings, closed monasteries and convents, nationalized cemeteries and made marriage a strictly civil act.

The church regained some of its power under the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and thus allied itself with the rich in opposing the Mexican Revolution in 1910. After Diaz fell, the church supported another would-be dictator, Victoriano Huerta. And when Huerta gave way to Venustiano Carranza, the new president’s followers drafted a constitution that was even more anti-clerical than Juarez’s reforms.

The 1917 constitution, still in effect, gave the state possession of all clerical property, including the churches, and the power to limit the number of priests. Nuns and priests were forbidden to join political parties, to vote or even to wear clerical garb in public. The constitution banned parochial schools and outlawed religious ceremonies outside the churches. Foreigners were forbidden to serve as priests.

But the constitution was not enforced until 1926. President Plutarco Elias Calles closed church schools and monasteries, deported foreign clergy and ordered Mexican clergy to register with the government.

The reaction was violent. The church shut its doors in protest for three years, and conservative peasants took up arms against the government, with the blessing if not the direct leadership of priests. The religious rebels, the so-called Cristeros, burned government buildings and killed officials. The army burned churches, hanged priests, shot Cristeros or locked them in concentration camps.

In the 1940s, the two sides learned to live with each other. Over the last 50 years, the church has managed to acquire property by setting up private corporations. Parochial schools are tolerated, as are foreign priests and open-air Masses.

Increasingly, clergy are seen wearing vestments in public, though they still risk public rebuke. Soledad Loaeza, an authority on the church at the Colegio de Mexico and an adamant opponent of constitutional change, tells of coming upon two nuns in habits in the produce section of a supermarket. To the nuns’ shock, Loaeza took the liberty of reminding them that they were violating the law.

When Pope John Paul II visited Mexico in 1979, he was received at the airport by President Jose Lopez Portillo, at the time a bold step for a Mexican president. This time, the Pope not only will be received by Salinas, like any other head of state, but he will sit down to dinner with three former presidents of Mexico.

The Mexican Bishops Conference wrote a letter to Salinas in June, 1989, outlining its proposed constitutional changes. The bishops argued that the historical circumstances that produced the 1917 constitution have changed.

The Mexican people, the bishops said, “are obligated to live a double life, one that is reality and one that is the law.” They said this “causes a disorientation of consciences and is the source of grave moral corruption, because of the lack of regard for the law in which it originates.”

The bishops asked the government to recognize the “fundamental right to freedom of religion or belief, not only of individuals but also and especially of churches and religious communities. . . .” They would give churches the right to own property and have parochial schools.

But Father Bravo says there are splits within the church over the importances of these constitutional changes. Some say the church’s energy should be focused on pastoral work.

“We ask ourselves how we would work better, in a legality that will tie our hands or in an illegality that allows us to do as we want,” Bravo said.

Many political observers, in and out of the church, argue that Salinas’ overtures to the church hierarchy stem from a need to bolster his personal standing with the people. Salinas was elected with the lowest vote ever for a presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); the opposition charges that the election was stolen.

But while Salinas may acquire a measure of legitimacy from the church, by publicly acknowledging its existence he allows it more room to act politically, as does the church in such countries as El Salvador, Chile and Brazil. And that could prove to be a double-edged sword.

In February, the Jesuits issued a scathing report on the Mexican government’s human rights record for 1989, citing scores of killings, kidnapings and incidents of torture by the police, the armed forces and PRI loyalists. The report accused the government of widespread fraud in state elections and criticized economic austerity measures that are hurting the poor. It was the third time that the Miguel A. Pro Human Rights Center had issued a report on the government but the first time that it had released the study to the news media.

“Whether because of the evolution of the Mexican state, or the weakness of the Mexican state, there was room to publicize this,” Bravo said.

After the report’s publication in the magazine Proceso, Jesuit officials were called in by Interior Secretary Fernando Gutierrez Barrios for a subtle warning.

“He let us know the president was upset,” Bravo said.

The church hierarchy, meanwhile, has kept a low profile on political issues, apparently preferring to demonstrate that they are not a threat to the government. Church officials have not embraced the Jesuits’ report, and they have said relatively little about the violence that has taken dozens of lives in Guerrero and Michoacan states following elections that the opposition says were fraudulent.

But despite the church’s conciliatory stance, few people are predicting rapid or radical change in the church-state relationship.

“The relationship between the church and state in Mexico is a process,” said Msgr. Genaro Alamilla, a spokesman for the Bishops Conference. “It is a process that has not reached its goal . . . a process that can be accelerated sometimes and slow sometimes.”

Blancarte, who would like to see priests granted individual rights but wants no recognition of the church as an institution, argues that the constitution is the “modern” approach to the church.

“Since the 16th Century,” he said, “religion has increasingly become a private affair. Secularization, the separation of the social and political on one hand and religion on the other, is modern.”