Anticlericalism

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Anticlericalism

Anticlericalism was both a widespread attitude and a deeply ingrained sentiment among Latin America's intellectual and political elites who viewed organized religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as a threat to the state and an obstacle to social change. Although anticlericalism reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, it had its roots in the eighteenth and perdured as a powerful force well into the twentieth. It was an attitude shared by both conservatives and liberals, although not always for the same reasons.

Conservative anticlericalism was rooted in the struggle of the enlightened Catholic monarchs of Europe and their liberal advisers to reform the church and to subordinate it to the crown's interests. Charles III, influenced by the count of Aranda, Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, and others, represented the apogee of regalism, the Spanish form of Gallicanism. Both doctrines claimed that the king had the right to exercise temporal authority over the church, including the power to name bishops and collect tithes. The marquis de Pombal, with the full approval of the Portuguese crown, led the way by expelling the Jesuits from both Portugal and Brazil in 1759. These governing elites believed that in order for their nations to be great once again, they must modernize themselves. To do so would involve, most of all, reforming the church, which in Spain, Portugal, and the New World had come to resemble the church as it had been on the eve of the Reformation. The eighteenth-century church in the Hispanic-Lusitanian world had acquired enormous properties held in mortmain; monasteries and convents were overpopulated; and a tradition-laden clergy was a source of frequent scandal. Many of the reform measures that the newly independent states in Hispanic America enacted to limit the number of the clergy or to reduce church wealth were in fact modeled on earlier Bourbon Reforms.

The regalist tradition, fashioned in Spain and Portugal, resurfaced in one way or another in every one of the new republics. Simón Bolívar, although not unfriendly to the church, sought to impose restraints and controls on it. But other leaders, such as José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia in Paraguay and Guzmán Blanco in Venezuela, subjected the church to harsh scrutiny and did not hesitate to expel or even to execute priests, confiscate church property, and curtail clerical influence in every way possible. Even where conservatives considered the church an ally, they nonetheless viewed with suspicion any independent activity on its part. They resented any outside influence on the church, which meant especially the pope. In Brazil, relations between Dom Pedro II and the church, with the exception of a clash with the bishops (1873–1875), were in general rather harmonious, and the church survived the monarchy relatively unscathed.

Liberals shared with the conservatives the belief that the church should be subordinate to the aims of the newly independent states. In this sense most Latin American liberals were essentially regalists in their treatment of the church. But unlike the conservatives, they also wanted a more open, democratic society based on law. For this reason they, like liberals in Europe, considered the church, with its landed estates, special privileges, and extraordinary influence in society as the primary obstacle in the way of implanting republican ideals and bringing about social change. The liberals were influenced by the criticism the philosophers of the Enlightenment had leveled at organized religion, by the example of Protestant Europe and America, and by certain liberal doctrines within Catholicism itself that called for church reform. In particular, the ideas of the Gallicanist Abbé de Pradt and other European thinkers who proposed the creation of a national church freed from the tutelage of Rome, were well received by Bolívar, Bernardino Rivadavia in Argentina, and certain liberals in Peru.

Liberal anticlericalism mirrored the same phenomenon in Europe, but given Latin America's slower development, it arrived in the New World in smaller dosages and in differentiated phases. In general, three distinct phases can be discerned: an incipient but rather tepid anticlericalism at the time of Independence; a more aggressive mid-century anticlericalism, which coincided with the rise of liberal capitalism; and in the latter part of the century a more socially minded and openly antireligious anticlericalism, which reflected the influence of positivism.

In general, most liberals at the time of Independence were neither antireligious nor desirous of destroying the church. Rather, they sought to control it, reform it, and place it at the service of the new republics. Many of the first liberals were priests who supported the reforms. Singled out for reform from the beginning, however, were the religious orders. The liberals, not unlike the Protestant reformers, viewed religious life as an aberration in the history of Christianity. Also, given the fact that there were far more Spanish missionaries among the religious than among the secular clergy before Independence, the former were more readily associated in the public mind with the colonial past. Early on in Mexico, Peru, Gran Colombia, and Argentina, liberals enacted laws that severely limited the number of religious and that placed them under the control of the local bishops. The Jesuits in particular were the bête noire of the liberals, who had the newly returned Society of Jesus expelled from many of their countries.

As the century wore on, in Europe liberal hostility toward the church increased, and the church in turn, especially during the pontificate of Pius IX (1846–1878), assumed a more defiant attitude toward liberalism. In Latin America a second generation of liberals, determined to bring about social reform and influenced by utilitarian philosophies, became considerably more outspoken in its criticism of the church. In Chile, Francisco Bilbao, essayist and politician, equated Catholicism with absolutism. In Peru, Francisco de Paula González Vigil was excommunicated for championing the cause of freeing both the church and governments from the influence of the Roman Curia.

By mid-century, liberal minorities in Peru, Colombia, and Mexico had declared open war on the church's wealth, properties, and privileges, especially the ecclesiastical fuero. In Mexico the church decried the Reform Laws of Benito Juárez and welcomed Maximilian's rule. Liberalism in Mexico in particular made control of the church a cornerstone of its reformist thrust. The strong anticlerical articles in the Constitution of 1917 reflected the liberals' perception of the church as both a conservative and an antinationalist force. In a similar way, in Ecuador toward the end of the century José Eloy Alfaro Delgado swept aside all of the church's privileges, which had been created in Gabriel García Moreno's time, and opened the door to Protestant missionaries.

Finally, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, anticlericalism entered a third phase by assuming the mantle of positivism and scientific progress. Intellectuals such as Manuel González Prada in Peru went beyond denouncing church privileges; they attacked religion itself. González Prada, like other pro-Indian advocates, singled out clerical influence on the indigenous population as one of the principal reasons for Latin America's backwardness. In universities and avant-garde circles, intellectuals accused the clergy of maintaining women, children, and the lower classes in ignorance by appealing to their emotions and catering to their superstitions.

The greatest number of anticlerical laws in Latin America were enacted in the decade of 1880–1890. These laws called for obligatory civil marriage, the end of clerical control of the civil registry, the secularization of cemeteries, the end of the church's monopoly over public charities, and in some cases the laicization of education. Separation of church and state, unrestricted tolerance for non-Catholics, and the right to divorce were measures that only gained acceptance in most countries in the twentieth century.

Anticlericalism was an attitude most prevalent among the emerging capitalistically oriented middle and upper classes, usually centered in the capital and port cities. These classes were especially receptive to innovative and radical ideas from Europe. Masonic lodges in particular became the nerve centers of hostility toward the church. Anticlericalism, by way of contrast, was much less observable among the traditional upper-class families of the rural interior or the urban lower middle classes, for whom Catholicism was perceived as a source of stability. In general, anticlericalism was not a common attitude among the lower classes, least of all the Indians and blacks.

As a psychological phenomenon, anticlericalism can be explained in part as an expression of the liberals' frustration over the survival of the colonial mentality and its tenacious hold over the majority of Latin Americans long after Independence, and the subsequent lack of social progress that resulted from that influence. For many liberals and social reformers, hostility toward the church became the principal mode of rejecting that colonial past. Anticlericalism was also primarily a masculine attitude. Most women, even the wives of leading liberals, continued to practice their religion as in colonial times. Insofar as liberalism stood for freedom and the use of reason, Catholicism symbolized passive submission to authority and dogma.

In time classical liberalism was superseded by reform ideologies and thinkers with a more subtle and sophisticated view of religion and social change, and anticlericalism began fading away. Most important, since the Second Vatican Council, the church has undergone a historic reform and renewal, relieving some of the old sources of antagonism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

On regalism in Bourbon Spain see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (1958) and John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (1989). An overview of church-state conflicts can be found in J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations, 2d ed. (1966). To understand the intellectual background of anticlericalism see Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, translated by James H. Abbot and Lowell Dunham (1963). On González Prada and other Peruvian anticlerics see Jeffrey Klaiber, Religion and Revolution in Peru, 1824–1976 (1977). On anticlericalism in Mexico see Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910–1929 (1973).

Additional Bibliography

Butler, Matthew. Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Chasteen, John C., and James A. Wood, eds, Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations: Completely Revised and Updated. Wilmington: SR Books, 2004.

Hamnett, Brian R. Juárez. New York: Longman, 1994.

Jeffrey Klaiber S.J.

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture