A Preview To The Culture War Of Today . . . Revolutionary Mexico’s 1930s Culture War Against The Catholic Church

By JAMES MONTI

Most of us are to a greater or lesser extent familiar with the stories of twentieth-century Mexico’s martyrs, the beatified victims of a bloody persecution under the country’s militantly secularist regime that reached its height during the 1920s, and particularly the martyrdom of Blessed Miguel Pro, who went about secretly administering the sacraments until his capture and execution in 1927.
What is perhaps somewhat less known is the ideological war that the revolutionary Mexican regime unleashed against the Catholic Church, a war that even after the worst phase of the bloodshed had ended in 1929 not only continued but in certain major respects intensified. Leafing through firsthand accounts of this “de-Christianization program” of the leftists that scholars studying the period have amassed, we can recognize a prequel to the culture war that we are experiencing right now in 2020 America.
The secularist takeover in early twentieth-century Mexico was the intellectual heir of many decades and even centuries of anticlericalism, an ideology of contempt for the “institutional” Catholic Church aimed particularly at its ordained ministers, a mentality traceable ultimately to the attack upon the Catholic priesthood instigated by the Protestant Reformation and fomented further by the rationalist talking heads of the self-proclaimed “Enlightenment” of eighteenth-century Europe.
It was in these intellectually stagnant waters that contempt for the Catholic Church took a new form with the institution of the secret society known as the Freemasons. In the nineteenth century, there arose the anti-religion of Marxism, atheism in the guise of a false humanitarianism that aped Christianity’s concern for the underprivileged to impose, even by violence, a Godless society. All these intellectual undercurrents fed into the rise of the secularist state in Mexico.
The Socialist Mexican government was faced with the “problem” of trying to convert a deeply Catholic people into a nation of atheists. In a speech prior to his 1934 election as president of Mexico, General Lazaro Cardenas declared, “Every moment spent on one’s knees is a moment stolen from humanity” (quoted in Albert Michaels, “The Modification of the Anti-Clerical Nationalism of the Mexican Revolution by General Cardenas and Its Relationship to the Church-State Détente in Mexico,” The Americas, volume 26, n. 1, July 1969, p. 37).
The revolutionary regime realized that in order to eradicate Catholicism it was going to need a carefully constructed enterprise, all-embracing in its scope and drawing upon the playbook of centuries-older anti-Catholic propaganda.
The secularists’ campaign was all about desecration, defamation, ridicule, and outright destruction of the sacred. Much of what was done took the form of iconoclasm, both physical and verbal, from the massive incineration of religious statues and the burning of confessionals to spoken, sung, and written defamations of what Catholics held to be most sacred.
The Holy Eucharist was savagely targeted in every conceivable way: The Blessed Sacrament was trampled upon, shot with gunfire, burnt, or fed to horses. One revolutionary general showed his contempt by consuming consecrated Hosts with a dish of pork in a public market.
Another core strategy of the secularists was the formulation of an anti-Catholic narrative of history. Whatever historical incidents could be used to cast the Church in a negative light were carefully harvested and collated. In two January 1935 editorials, the government-run newspaper El Nacional accused the Church of all sorts of colonist crimes, even claiming the Church had tortured native Indians.
Journalism, entertainment, and most especially education were weaponized to deliver an unstinting message of hostility to God, to His saints, and to His Church. On July 20, 1934, Mexico’s leftist strongman General Plutarco Elias Calles provocatively chose the staunchly Catholic stronghold of Guadalajara, one of the cities of Mexico’s “Rosary Belt,” to demand a total seizure of education from the hands of the Church and Catholic parents.
In a radio address (“El grito de Guadalajara”) given from the balcony of the governor’s mansion before a crowd of ten thousand partisans, the general called for a new “psychological” phase of the revolution to fight “the eternal enemies,” i.e., the clergy and conservatives, in order to make children the ideological property of the Revolution:
“We must now enter and take possession of the consciences of the young…the reactionaries and the clericals are saying that the children belong to the home and the youth to the family. This is selfish doctrine, because the children and youth belong to the community” (quoted in James Wallace Wilkie, Ideological Conflict in the Time of Lazaro Cardenas, MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1959, p. 46).
In December 1934, Article 3 of the country’s Constitution was amended to mandate a Socialist and militantly anti-religious educational system. A new elite core of “re-educated” teachers was developed. Teachers who refused to betray their Catholic faith were purged, and those who remained were trained with such Socialist manifestos as the Antidogmatic Doctrinary Propaganda, an atheists’ catechism as it were, which required teachers to profess that religion, the family, personal property, and even the distinction of man as a being higher than other animals were mere inventions unknown to man in his original, pristine state.
Most telling of all was the declaration that for a time many teachers were compelled to sign, a pledge that included the following promise: “I declare that I am an atheist, an irreconcilable enemy of the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman religion, that I will endeavor to destroy it, detaching consciences from the bonds of any religious worship” (quoted in Adrian Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Mexico: The De-Christianization Campaigns, 1929-1940,” Mexican Studies, volume 13, n. 1, Winter 1997, p. 108).
In many schools, children were required to recite daily the “patriotic” pledge, promising to “combat the three mighty enemies that our Nation faces; namely, the Clergy, Ignorance, and Capital” (Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review, volume 74, n. 3, August 1994, p. 411).
In one mountain village a woman teacher taught the children to greet her upon arriving for school by saying, “There is no God,” to which she would reply, “Nor was there ever one” (Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm,” p. 116). Another teacher instructed the children to mock God the Father, coaching them to deny His existence by saying that since this “old man with whiskers” could not stay in the sky because gravity would pull Him down, therefore He could not exist (Adrian Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution, Wilmington, Del., Scholarly Resources, 1998, p. 20).
Similarly children were made to write anti-Catholic compositions professing that the saints did not exist, and that their images were good for nothing but fuel for the fire (Knight, “Popular Culture,” p. 414).
School teachers became leading agents and propagandists of anti-Catholic iconoclasm, and indoctrinated children by having them perform iconoclastic rituals. In January 1935, the newly appointed director of education for Sonora State, Lamberto Moreno, wrote with breathless delight of what one teacher had accomplished in this war against “fetishes” (i.e., Catholic religious images) in the village of Macoyahui:
“. . . 35 children of both sexes came to meet me, declaring that they were waiting for me to burn the fetishes that were in the village church and in their houses, fetishes that had been valiantly extracted by their teacher, Miss Antonia Montes. . . . Once the pyre had been lit, the little Indians started dancing a pascola, and to the gay sound of their autochthonous music, they started flinging the fetishes into the fire, one by one, until the pyre was converted into an enormous bonfire, which consumed those symbols of fanaticism and exploitation” (quoted in Adrian Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth, p. 14).
Undoubtedly buoyed by such “successes” as this, Moreno composed an “Iconoclast Hymn” that on May Day of 1935 was sung by 1,300 public school children in Hermosillo. Elsewhere, in the state of Tabasco, it became the practice to place an image of a saint on the school patio, where the children, supplied with knives, clubs, and machetes, would take turns striking, kicking, and spitting upon the image, an exercise designed to make pupils believe that saints are nothing but powerless fictions.
Science education was seen as a major instrument for persuading children that everything in the universe and in their lives could be explained by natural forces to the exclusion of any underlying action by a Supreme Being. Having the children perform classroom laboratory experiments in science class was promulgated as a key means of persuading them that they rather than God were the masters of nature (Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm,” p. 117).

Mexican Mothers

Particularly heinous to Catholic parents was the imposition of classroom sex education, as promoted by the “Mexican Eugenic Society” and implemented by the Minister of Education Narciso Bassols. Demonstrations against this policy swiftly ensued. Writing for the Catholic periodical La Palabra, Josefina Santos Coy de Gomez, a wife and mother, appealed to the “mothers of Mexico” to rise up and take a stand:
“. . . raise your protest, together with ours, against those who want to pervert our children’s souls….It fills me with panic even to imagine the grade of perversion to which future humanity will sink after it has been prepared, shamelessly, by such an education” (quoted in Wilkie, Ideological Conflict, p. 58).
In an early 1935 interview with the American magazine Liberty, Archbishop Francisco Orozco y Jimenez (1864-1936), who had witnessed the entire ascent to power of the Socialists, and was now witnessing the worst of their educational offensive to brainwash Mexican children, observed, “Our Church [and] our children are under terrible persecution; behind the mask that the government turns on the world today is hatred of God, hatred of everything that is good and decent and that we hold dear.”
Regarding what was going on in the classrooms, he lamented, “Children are taught in the government schools that there is no God. They are taught to despise their parents and to look upon the state as the supreme authority in their home life and morals” (quoted in Ulices Pina, Rebellious Citizens: National Reforms and the Practice of Local Governance in Jalisco, Mexico, 1914-1940, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2017, pp. 327, 313, respectively).
The bishop of Heujutla José de Jesus Mariquez y Zarate (1884-1951) exhorted Mexico’s Catholic parents to become “lions” in the spiritual protection of their children and to turn their homes into bulwarks of resistance against the secularist onslaught. And Mexico’s laity did mobilize, most especially Catholic laywomen, who by their persistent demonstrations against the anti-Catholic policies played a key role in compelling the government ultimately to dial back on its culture war.
Every campaign to destroy the Catholic Church has always failed, and always will, because “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).