Priests and Peasants in Central Mexico: Social Conflict During “La Reforma”

“La Reforma,” the principal political development in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, was the culmination of a struggle between liberals and the Mexican Catholic Church. The liberals hoped to secularize and modernize the country so that it could achieve “progress” through economic development. Capitalism would be the major instrument of this progress, and the liberals themselves, essentially a bourgeois group, expected to profit from the transformation. To achieve economic modernization, the liberals believed that they would first have to establish the rule of law (as opposed to internecine strife and personalistic dictatorship) and to concentrate political authority within the structure of a true nationstate. This would end a situation in which such authority was divided among various social institutions, one of these, of course, being the Church. Radical liberals, in contrast to moderates in the party, favored an all-out attack on the Church’s wealth and privileges, for they feared that without the destruction of ecclesiastical power no meaningful changes could be made. Despite the moderate nature of liberal reforms from 1855 to 1857, however, the Church remained intransigent. Late in 1857 the clergy and its allies rebelled, thus precipitating a long, bitter fight with the forces of modernization.¹

Conflict between liberals and the Church took place in a preindustrial, agrarian society of eight million people, about half of whom were Indians. Prior to 1855 a small, white upper class, in alliance with the Church, dominated the government. Its vehicle was the Conservative Party. Conservatives drew their political strength from land ownership and control of the army.² Their opponents, the liberals, came from all social levels, but tended to be predominantly from the middle sectors.³ The middle sectors were quite small in relation to the total population, and the Liberal Party, lacking a mass base, was small too. Many liberal leaders were mestizos, but most of the mixed population, being lower class, lacked political influence. Mexico’s Indians were culturally rather than racially defined. They resided in the countryside, dressed and lived in a “traditional,” non-Western manner, and, for the most part, worked as farmers or artisans. Many of them were landless peons who labored for wages or sharecropped on large estates. Others, peasants, lived in villages where they owned the land communally. Whatever their occupation or status, however, almost all Mexican Indians lived in poverty. As a group, they experienced continual oppression and squalor, a misfortune that dated from the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Dysentery and other horrible diseases killed many of the children in their first year; alcoholism and malnutrition brought most adults to an early death. Indians took virtually no part in politics and showed scant enthusiasm for either side in the liberal-Church controversy.⁴ Although exploited and abused by the Church as well as the state, they were more inclined to accept the authority of the clergy as legitimate rather than that of civil officials and politicians. This attitude was another Spanish legacy, for during the colonial centuries the Church had pre-empted by default the defense of most Indian causes. Almost all peasants regarded themselves as Catholics, but few seem to have felt any sense of identity with the Republic of Mexico or with the Mexican government. Some Indian villagers in the 1850s still referred to the country as “New Spain,” its old colonial name.⁵

Given such social and political realities, La Reforma had to be primarily a battle between two minority factions. Ultimately the conflict erupted into warfare that convulsed the country for a decade (1857-1867).⁶ The liberals won the wars of their Reforma in part because they attracted slightly more popular support than did the Church and its conservative allies, but neither party was really popular in the Mexican countryside. Some liberals, for example, argued candidly that the Reform had alienated most of Mexico’s Indians.⁷ The peasants of central Mexico resented liberal attacks on communal land-holding and other menacing aspects of modernization. Many of them believed that liberal legislation, such as the Lerdo Law (1856) and President Ignacio Comonfort’s Vagrancy Law (1857), was designed to force them into peonage on large estates.⁸ In Oaxaca, where liberal agrarian policy aroused only modest protest among rural people, Indians nevertheless usually resisted liberal efforts to draw them into the war.⁹ Even in the north, a region where the liberals had considerable strength, rural people generally had an indifferent attitude toward the struggle.¹⁰ This study examines some of the reasons for the Church’s unpopularity in rural areas of central Mexico and suggests that lack of mass support in a place where, logically, it should have materialized—among the traditional, “religious” peasants—was in part a result of grievous shortcomings within the Church itself. The explanation helps to elucidate the failure of ecclesiastical opposition to the liberal program.

Since abuse and neglect of peasants by the clergy had been a widespread and regular occurrence during the colonial period, clerical misconduct in the 1840s and 1850s constituted nothing new in rural Mexico. But liberalism’s immediate threat to the Church’s vital interests was an innovation. Never before, not even during the presidency of Valentín Gómez Farías, had the Church’s privileged position in society, its wealth and power, come under such a comprehensive attack. This was especially true after fighting started in 1857. The Church needed help, but it was not very likely to get it from villagers who had been scorned, robbed, or assaulted by their priests. Some of the region’s Indian communities, of course, enthusiastically, even fanatically, fought for or indirectly supported “religion” throughout the entire Reform era. Often their loyalty to the Church stemmed from a desire to defend customary religious practices, such as outdoor processions; sometimes it was prompted by the influence of an especially respected or feared pastor. More frequently, however, villagers who served in the conservative (1858-1860) or Imperial (1862-1867) armies had to be conscripted forcibly. The liberals, too, received some important military support from the Indians. In various instances this voluntary participation originated in outrages or extortions visited upon villagers by the conservatives. Like their opponents, liberals also “drafted” Indians as well as other rural Mexicans. Many of these conscripts, whatever the army into which they had been impressed, deserted at the first opportunity. Passivity and evasion, rather than active participation, were the typical peasant responses to the wars of the Reforma, and this circumstance often frustrated the military designs of both sides. For the Church, however, such peasant indifference can be interpreted as a mortal blow. But had the hierarchy and pastors shown more interest in the country people and their problems, the indifference may not have been so pervasive.¹¹

At mid-century, prior to the Revolution of Ayutla which brought the liberals to power, the Church’s position appeared to be invulnerable. Much of the ecclesiastical wealth accumulated during the colonial era had been preserved after independence, so the Church continued in its role as a large landlord and creditor. Clergymen enjoyed enormous influence at all political levels, and the Church itself was protected and supported by the national and state governments.¹² Members of the clergy enjoyed special privileges, the most important of which was probably immunity from criminal prosecution and civil litigation in regular Mexican courts.¹³ Clerics maintained close, friendly relations with conservative politicians and army officers, but they were often present in the councils of moderate liberals as well. Clearly, the Church and its clergy dominated Mexican society.¹⁴

Even if confronted with a serious attack by radical liberals, the Church seemed strong enough to defend its interests successfully. Help would come from conservative army officers, and presumably the rural masses, who were known to be devoted to the faith, could also be mobilized if needed.¹⁵ In rural Mexico, however, the Church looked stronger than it actually was. Power had bred corruption and arrogance among a clergy that, in the absence of any internal ecclesiastical reform, often showed signs of its old colonial decadence.¹⁶ The Mexican clergy, then, was a nuisance to all sorts of rural people—to Indian peasants especially, but also to affluent laymen, civil officials, and merchants. Indeed, the clergy’s irresponsibility appears to explain in part the very severity of the liberals’ attack on the Church.¹⁷ By its insensitivity to the problem, the Mexican hierarchy intensified the anger of many laymen. Church authorities, in fact, were so lax that priests often did not even pretend to be living in accordance with prescribed moral standards. One pastor, for example, wrote to the Archbishop of Mexico seeking financial assistance for the raising of his illegitimate children.¹⁸ Lack of celibacy, however, was far from being a major grievance against the clergy. Many Mexicans (like the Spaniards before them) expected priests to have mistresses and children, for only in that way could they demonstrate their virility, a characteristic demanded of all men, their profession notwithstanding. The more serious problem for the Church was its failure to check the abuse of power and privilege by so many clergymen which included nonpayment of debts, refusal to obey civil officials, political meddling in non-ecclesiastical matters, neglect of religious duties, and the exploitation and mistreatment of parishioners.

Critics directed most of their fire at the regular clergy, for the religious orders were notoriously and blatantly corrupt. During the 1850s Pope Pius IX had even named the Bishop of Michoacán as his special agent to effect their reform throughout the country.¹⁹ Yet despite publicity given to the many misadventures of the friars, the abysmally low condition of the secular clergy (parish priests and vicars) constituted an even greater danger to the Church’s position. The misdeeds of these men aroused much more disaffection because they often resulted in extensive suffering. An errant friar might not alienate more than a few laymen, but serious misconduct by pastors in central Mexico, where parishes contained an average of about 5,000 people, could produce massive antagonism.²⁰ Oblivious to the potential danger of this situation, the hierarchy thus served the Church very badly in a time of crisis.

The following paragraphs explore relations between priests and rural parishioners during the 1840s and 1850s in the Archbishopric of Mexico. The Archbishopric extended over a large part of central Mexico; within its boundaries were the Federal District, the present states of México, Morelos, and Hidalgo, the northern half of Veracruz state, and virtually all of Guerrero state. It comprised 237 parishes and counted well over one million people.²¹ Attention focuses on clerical behavior that obviously hurt the Church. In most instances, the Mexican hierarchy’s handling of the case is also noted. Although discussion chiefly involves relations between priests and peasants, examples of problems with other people in the countryside are also offered.²²

Ironically, at the very time when the Archbishopric’s Secretariat (a key bureaucratic department) failed so completely, and with such disastrous consequences for the Church, the Archbishop of Mexico was Lázaro de la Garza y Ballesteros (1850-1862), a man widely respected for his rectitude, strong sense of justice, and austere life-style. The Archbishop, however, “knew little of the practical side of life,” and this circumstance sheds some light on his failure to reform the rural clergy. Only dimly aware of conditions in country parishes, the Archbishop usually left rural problems to be handled by his subordinates in the Secretariat, most of whom apparently lacked his concern for high standards within the Church.²³ Conditions in rural Mexico tended to be utterly demoralizing for many priests, and this factor partially explains their exceptional delinquency rate. Residence in a Mexican village often subjected a pastor to a life of unrelieved boredom, physical and cultural deprivation, and grave hazards to his health. One of the commonest complaints made to the Archbishop by rural priests was that they had become chronically ill while residing in the countryside.²⁴ In spite of the dispiriting atmosphere, however, some rural priests maintained their morale and served their parishes in a saintly manner. One pastor in a peasant community, for example, sold his personal possessions to obtain funds to buy things for his indigent parishioners despite their indifference toward him. Another charged no fees whatever for religious services because the Indians in his parish were so poor.²⁵ Unfortunately for the peasantry and the Church, such outstanding priests appear to have been outnumbered by venal clerics.

As the Mexican Church had grown more and more wealthy during the colonial era, its clergy had become increasingly concerned with the management of money and property. After independence in 1821, and prior to the liberal Reforma of the 1850s, financial matters continued to preoccupy the members of Mexico’s richest institution.²⁶ Not only in the ecclesiastical countinghouses of the capital and other major cities, but also in small rural communities, clergymen devoted much of their time and energy to the “business” aspects of religion. Many parish priests, for example, never even took up residence in their parishes, but instead hired substitute priests to do their jobs. These arrangements necessitated a split of the parish fees, which were payments made by the faithful for such services as masses, baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Pastors and their substitutes often disagreed about the division, and resolution of complicated fee disputes perennially occupied the Archbishop’s Secretariat.²⁷ In addition to protecting their interests on the issue of parish fees, rural priests also frequently increased their incomes by making investments. This was often, but by no means always, necessary.²⁸ Many parishes in central Mexico were too poor to support a priest, and the Archbishop rarely provided adequate supplemental funds.²⁹

The more affluent priests owned farms, ranches, expensive herds of cattle and horses, and country stores.³⁰ In the late 1840s, the pastor of Tlaltizapám owned and operated the largest property in the parish. Eleven hundred people, approximately one-fifth of the residents in the parish, lived and worked on their pastor’s estate.³¹ Unhappily for the Mexican peasantry, these financial concerns in many instances led the rural clergy to neglect almost totally their religious duties. The pastor of Otumba in the early 1850s spent so much time managing his two farms that he had few moments left for ministering to the spiritual needs of his parishioners, a circumstance that they greatly resented. The abandonment of the delapidated church building itself by the priest at Otumba was so complete that animals from the community wandered in to drink from the basins of holy water.³² Many priests refused to perform any services at all until the demanded fees had been paid. Church records demonstrate clearly that clerical evasion of religious duties constituted a major source of friction between rural people and the Chinch. Grievances unredressed by the hierarchy in this area thus produced hostility to and alienation from the Church in peasant communities all over central Mexico.³³

The villagers of Tescaltitlán expressed a common peasant attitude in correspondence with the Archbishop in the late 1840s. The case involved a pastor who refused them religious services of any kind because they could not pay the fees he required. In the course of the Chinch’s investigation, the priest had written an explanation of his conduct to the Archbishop. To this the villagers replied that the pastor’s position “reduces the problem to a mere question of pecuniary interests, without at all taking into account the spiritual interest of his parishioners, which should be his principal concern.” Although they concluded by asking the Archbishop to send them a pastor who “instead of bills will give us spiritual counsel and help,” nothing in the record indicates that the hierarchy responded to the request or even exhorted the pastor to improve his relations with the community.³⁴

Parish fees unquestionably constituted one of the heaviest burdens imposed by the Mexican Church on the Indian peasantry. Even had most rural clergymen limited themselves to collecting the amounts prescribed by the hierarchy, these payments would have been beyond the means of many villagers. Tragically, however, priests in the countryside commonly demanded more money than was authorized by the Church, and many clerics heartlessly refused even to bury the dead unless the bereaved relatives could meet their demands for payment.³⁵ Liberal politicians, of course, regularly used attacks on parish fees as a weapon in their struggle with the Church, for it was an issue on which the clergy was vulnerable and which in no way threatened the liberals’ own interests. It cost them nothing to support the rural masses on the parish fees question, and the hierarchy was hard pressed to defend the ruthless squeezing of pesos from poverty-stricken peasants. Even conservative laymen who supported the Church on most questions often expressed indignation about the scandal of parish fees.³⁶

Benito Juárez, acting as a lawyer for some villagers in Oaxaca in the 1830s, had seen his clients and even several witnesses jailed by the civil authority at a pastor’s request following the collapse of a parish fees case in an ecclesiastical court. When Juárez tried to get his clients out of jail, the pastor managed to have him jailed for nine days for “inciting the people against the authorities.”³⁷ In the early 1850s, Melchor Ocampo used a particularly outrageous incident involving clerical arrogance to spearhead a campaign in Michoacán’s state legislature for reform of the fee system. A rural pastor had refused to bury a man’s body because his widow could not pay for the service. When asked by the woman what she was to do with the body, the pastor replied that she should salt and eat it. Despite the provocative nature of this act, however, Ocampo’s proposals got nowhere in the legislature.³⁸ As late as 1856, with the momentous conflict of the Reforma already in progress, rural clerics, who might better have been seeking popular support in the countryside, were still abusing the civil authority in order to stifle protest against exorbitant parish fees. The pastor at Jocotitlán, for example, refused to bury a dead child because the father could not pay the fees; when the man complained about this treatment, the pastor had a local judge put him in jail.³⁹

Indian peasants were by no means the only rural people to suffer from the failure of ecclesiastical justice. Merchants, landowners, and professionals also had trouble with priests, and they, too, experienced considerable frustration when appealing to the Mexican hierarchy for redress of grievances. The most common source of woe for the more affluent rural people was nonpayment of debts by clergymen. Rural pastors and vicars made a wide variety of purchases during the 1840s and 1850s, often on credit. They bought clothing, buggies, musical instruments, horses, herds of cattle, real estate; frequently they enjoyed these possessions without ever paying for them. In several cases large sums of money were involved. Since prior to the issuance of the Juárez Law by the liberals in 1855 civil suits could not be brought against clergymen in civil courts, creditors had to ask the hierarchy to take action in ecclesiastical courts. Records of such cases originating in rural Mexico reveal that few complaints ever resulted in prosecution by the hierarchy and that quite a few of the debts were never paid.⁴⁰ A typical debt case, which remained active in the Archbishop’s Secretariat for three years in the 1850s, illustrates the futility of such proceedings. A merchant turned to the Archbishop for help in collecting a debt of forty-five pesos, owed to him for clothing purchased by the then vicar of San Mateo Atenco. After three years of sporadic correspondence between the merchant and the Secretariat, the latter closed the case, without payment of the debt, observing that the delinquent vicar could not even be located.⁴¹

Occasionally, in response to complaints about breaches of ecclesiastical discipline from villagers, municipal councils, and officials of state governments the Archbishop would send out a special investigator, perhaps a cleric living near the parish where the problem had developed. But most of these investigations were biased in favor of the accused clergyman, since investigators commonly interviewed only a few people in the parish, usually the more prosperous residents known as the principales. Rural pastors tended to maintain very friendly relations with the principales, thus forging an alliance that was often turned against other people in the parish, poor peasants for the most part. By reporting that the parishioners were pleased with resident clergy, on the basis of a few interviews with principales, investigators often prevented any further development of a case.⁴²

In 1853, for example, the governor of Mexico department accused a vicar in the Hueyjutla area of fomenting political unrest and asked the Archbishop to take care of the problem. The investigator questioned only three people, all of them well-to-do. Not unexpectedly, they supported the vicar, and the hierarchy took no further action to satisfy the governor.⁴³ During the 1850s, the pastor of Temamatla, Juan de Dios Valdós, handled several cases for the Archbishop. In each instance, villagers had protested that their pastors charged them excessive fees and neglected their religious needs. The reports sent to the Archbishop by Dios Valdós indicated that those few people he interviewed, again principales, backed the pastors, and concluded that there had been no clerical wrongdoing. Satisfied with the reports, the hierarchy closed the cases.⁴⁴ During 1854, the year that the Revolution of Ayutla began to put the liberals on the road to power, some villagers in Actopan sought relief from the abuse of an especially corrupt vicar. Bewildered, they asked the Archbishop: “From what race of panthers or hyenas can this man [the vicar] have descended?” An investigator sent out by the hierachy talked to only three landowners in the parish, and the Secretariat absolved the vicar.⁴⁵

In addition to the problem of hierarchical insensitivity to complaints from laymen, other factors contributed to the poor record of ecclesiastical justice. The Mexican hierarchy’s bureaucratic inefficiency, for example, had an impact upon the Church’s failure to police its clergy. Even had there been a serious interest in reform, rigorous enforcement of discipline was unlikely when the bishops and their secretariats at times did not even know how many priests were residing in the various parishes of their dioceses.⁴⁶ Another impediment to the correction of abuses was the ability of rural pastors either to intimidate local officials (alcaldes and judges, for example) or to conspire with them for immoral or illegal purposes. With the help of a corrupt or intimidated official, the pastor could usually take care of his critics or ward off an ecclesiastical investigation. An investigator sent out by the Archbishop might be prevented from entering the community or angry, protesting laymen might be jailed on spurious charges.⁴⁷ In 1858, when the Church needed friends rather than enemies in the countryside because of the raging civil war, the pastor of Tlahuac parish had five peasants arrested, charged with conspiracy against the conservative government, and sent as prisoners to Mexico City. In the capital an inquiry determined that the only “crime” committed by the luckless villagers was to have written to the Archbishop to complain about their pastor’s misconduct.⁴⁸

The Mexican hierarchy permitted greedy priests to prey on rural communities for year after year, even with evidence of overwhelming corruption. Francisco Sánchez, for example, a pastor in central Mexico who exacted tremendously inflated fees from his parishioners, was able to pursue his lucrative career throughout the 1850s despite various complaints to the Archbishop. Although documentation in the case indicated that Sánchez demanded twenty-five pesos in payment for saying a mass (about eight times the amount authorized by the hierarchy), the Archbishop merely reassigned him when criticism became intense.⁴⁹ In another contemporary case, both the local alcalde and the governor of the state of Mexico wrote to the Archbishop requesting relief for the parish of Huasca, where pastor and vicar were forcing Indian villagers to pay excessive fees. “What should I do,” the alcalde had asked the governor, “when the pastor denies sacraments to the people simply because they cannot pay double the customary fees?” Replying to the civil authorities, the Secretariat offered neither relief nor sympathy. According to the Church official who handled the case, trouble in Huasca stemmed from the “restless and turbulent spirit” of certain parishioners, and no action was taken against the resident clerics.⁵⁰ In 1853 the peasant villagers of San Buenaventura in Tepejí del Río parish asked the Archbishop to do something about their pastor, Manuel Escobar, whom they accused of demanding excessive parish fees and of neglecting his religious duties. The hierarchy ignored the complaint. Two years later the villagers notified local civil authorities that Escobar, having stolen silver ornaments from their church, had disappeared. Since the case involved a priest with immunity from prosecution in civil courts, the local officials passed this information on to the Archbishop, but again the hierarchy did nothing.⁵¹

One of the most scandalous instances of the failure of the Church to punish clerical troublemakers during the early 1850s involved a drunken vicar, Julián Miranda. In his alcoholic delirium, Miranda came to believe that he was the pastor of Tequisquiapán parish. When the newly appointed pastor arrived to take over his parish, Miranda tried to drive him away. In his frenzy he beat some of the villagers, obtained a rifle and began firing at the pastor’s house, in which the assaulted peasants had sought refuge. His gunfire not producing the desired exit of the pastor, Miranda mobilized some of his friends, got them drunk, and incited them to make additional threats against the pastor’s life. Facing mob action, the pastor left Tequisquiapán and later told the Archbishop of his plight. Although Church authorities tried and convicted Miranda, his sentence was merely three months of “seclusion.” After ninety days, the hierarchy once again turned him loose on the peasants of central Mexico. Somewhat later, the officials in another village, Tlayacapán, asked the Archbishop to remove Miranda, their vicar, because his drunken, disorderly behavior was scandalizing the community. When reproached by these officials, Miranda replied that he did not recognize any local authority superior to himself. In this instance, the hierarchy did not even investigate the charges against Miranda. The Secretariat asked the pastor at Xochimilco to look into the matter, but when he replied that Tlayacapán was too far away for him to visit, the Secretariat simply closed the case.⁵²

Church records reveal that the hierarchy’s failure to discipline Miranda in no way represented an exceptional handling of serious disorder. Many of the clergy in rural Mexico had depraved, violent characters, caused trouble, suffering, and scandal, and although exposed as vicious men, escaped punishment. A few examples from central Mexico illustrate the scope and magnitude of hierarchical irresponsibility. In the late 1840s and early 1850s the pastors of Otumba and Cacayotla parishes were accused of stealing property belonging to the communities and of either using or selling this property for their own personal profit. The Archbishop did nothing about these priests, even though the alleged crime of the pastor at Cacayotla (theft and sale of the church’s iron cross) approached sacrilege.⁵³ In the late 1840s, peasants at Tlayacapán denounced their pastor to the Archbishop for scandalous, even criminal behavior. They said that he was living with a mistress, seducing young girls in the parish, gambling, and had stolen gold and silver ornaments from the church. Despite convincing evidence presented by the villagers, the hierarchy made no move to restrain the pastor beyond a gently written order to him to “abstain from [his] excesses.”⁵⁴ (Not long after these events, the Church appointed drunken Father Miranda as vicar in this hapless community.)

In the early 1850s, civil officials and laymen notified the Archbishop that the pastors of Milpa Alta and Hueyxotla parishes had savagely beaten one or more of their parishioners. At Milpa Alta the principal victim was an old woman who had obstructed the priest’s progress across a narrow bridge. The civil official who heard her complaint ten days later noted that she was still badly bruised.⁵⁵ Various people had been assaulted regularly over a period of time by the pastor of Hueyxotla. One of his victims was so thoroughly beaten that he could not walk for three months.⁵⁶ Since the hierarchy neither tried nor reprimanded either priest, it appears that even the Church bureaucrats specifically assigned to handle disciplinary problems viewed clerical misconduct, including criminal behavior, with utter indifference.

Given this dismal situation, it is not surprising that relatively few of those Mexicans reputed to be most religious, Indian peasants, ever willingly fought for the Church during the Reforma. Rural pastors frequently complained to the Archbishop in the 1840s and 1850s that their Indian parishioners regarded them with disdainful hostility. Often this peasant attitude merely took the form of nonsupport of the priest by withholding fees and tithes.⁵⁷ But in some places it was expressed by active opposition and harassment. Peasants of certain communities refused even to sell food to their pastor; others rebelled against his authority. One pastor, a man of charity and integrity, lamented that the only offer of housing to him in the community was a contemptuous invitation to share a shed with pigs and donkeys. Others reported threats against their lives.⁵⁸

Whatever peasant attitudes in any given rural location, villagers in central Mexico generally viewed the Church’s plight during the wars of 1857 to 1867 with apathy. Only a minority of them actually helped the beleaguered Church. This is obvious from the size of conservative armies. Even with extensive use of conscription, troop strength constituted a tiny fraction of the adult male population. (Liberal forces were about twice as large as those of the conservatives.)⁵⁹ Priests in the countryside periodically caused trouble for the liberals by fomenting Indian riots in the name of religion, some of the biggest riots occurring as late as the 1870s.⁶⁰ But often the rioters were drunk, and usually they already had a deep hatred of the liberal regime’s agrarian policy prior to the disturbances. Under prevailing conditions, almost any skillful agitator, if he chose an opportune moment, could provoke villagers to riot against the government. Lawyers and army officers did it frequently for self-serving political reasons. Incidents touched off by parish priests had little effect on the outcome of the larger struggle, and they did not add up to any significant peasant support for the Church. For every Indian community whose men voluntarily took up arms for the Faith, there appear to have been dozens whose residents consistently refused any role whatever in the conflict. Anti-liberal Indian villagers obviously could have been valuable allies of the clergy during the Reforma. That most of them shunned involvement when-ever possible was certainly due to more than one factor. Relatively few peasants, for example, could stand to be taken far away from their fields, since absence brought economic ruin as well as homesickness. Such a circumstance illuminates the villagers’ reluctance to serve in a campaigning army, but it does not in itself explain their general failure, so often lamented by conservative and Imperial military commanders, even to protect their communities from liberal attack and occupation.⁶¹ Here, as we have seen, much of the blame for the peasantry’s refusal to defend the Church’s cause can be placed upon Mexican clergymen themselves. Their delinquency and irresponsibility had left them with comparatively few friends in central Mexico’s countryside.

Author notes