Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 - Softcover

Wright-Rios, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822343797 ISBN 13: 9780822343790

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three "visions" of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop's ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman's remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s.

Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican's blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca's indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.

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Edward Wright-Rios is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

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""Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism" is an important and much-needed exploration of the evolution of religion, both popular and ecclesiastical, from the late nineteenth century to the coming of Lazaro Cardenas in 1934. Shrewdly avoiding stark dichotomies in favor of understanding how popular needs and practices interacted with church projects, Edward Wright-Rios offers multifaceted insight into the religious experience of turn-of-the-century Oaxacans."--Terry Rugeley, author of "Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800-1876"

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REVOLUTIONS IN MEXICAN CATHOLICISM

REFORM AND REVELATION IN OAXACA, 1887-1934By Edward Wright-Rios

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4379-0

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................ixAcknowledgements...............................................................xiMoving the Faithful............................................................11 An Enterprising Archbishop...................................................432 Crowning Images..............................................................733 The Spirit of Association....................................................984 Catholics in Their Own Way...................................................1415 Christ Comes to Tlacoxcalco..................................................1646 The Second Juan Diego........................................................2067 The Gender Dynamics of Devotion..............................................242Picturing Mexican Catholicism..................................................271Notes..........................................................................291Bibliography...................................................................335Index..........................................................................355

Chapter One

An Enterprising Archbishop

Catholic clergymen have long been crucial sources for historians of Latin American. For the entire colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, friars and priests served as society's educated elite and fancied themselves its moral compass. Diverse postings and the cleric's role as the eyes, ears, voice, and scribe of religious institutions, and sometimes even the state, made them irreplaceable historical witnesses for present-day scholars. Here was a sector of society that nurtured a culture of investigation, commentary, and documentation.

For the most part, the priests who engaged local practitioners of Catholicism in Oaxaca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerged from the region's newly reformed archdiocesan seminary. This institution owed its expansion and restored reputation to the efforts of one of the most important figures in the Mexican Catholic hierarchy during this period, Oaxaca's Archbishop Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza. Indeed, this man, and his supporters, sought to recast the experience of Oaxacan Catholicism in a broad, ambitious program that would mark the Mexican church well into the mid-twentieth century. His impact is still very much in evidence on the region's historical landmarks. Hence, it is fitting that this energetic modernizer, devotee of Indian martyrs, and polemical point man of Mexico's Catholic resurgence attract our scrutiny.

Gillow presided over the Oaxacan archdiocese from 1887 until 1922, although from 1914 until 1921 he lived in exile in the United States. Before his seven-year hiatus, he forwarded a reform program that sought to bring order to Oaxacan Catholicism while infusing it with the sensibilities and ideological themes in vogue in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Rome. He endeavored to transplant modernized European Catholicism in Oaxaca, and by his own estimation, he succeeded. Gaining a proper perspective on Oaxacan religious practice during this period requires a flashback to over two decades of concerted reform that began with Gillow's consecration in 1887. As the next three chapters demonstrate, the prelate and his lieutenants revamped urban piety and Catholic institutional culture within Oaxaca City, bringing it in line with prevailing European modes of practice and organizational structure. They experienced only mixed results, though, in their efforts to extend the model throughout the archdiocese. This prelate-conceived vision of Catholic religiosity and social order appeared in its most complete public expression during the 1909 coronation of Oaxaca's Marian patroness, La Virgen de la Soledad. As with all climactic events, a history of personal experiences and coeval projects offers the key to decoding the deeper levels of significance in what appears, at a century's remove, as merely an extravagant, well-attended festival. A close analysis of the Gillow program requires an examination of the man, the hierarch, and his mission.

As symbolically rendered on the souvenirs distributed at the coronation, it is impossible to separate the celebration of the Virgin of Solitude from Gillow's remarkable career. One such keepsake, an approximately five-by-seven-inch card, partners a portrait of Oaxaca's archbishop with a bejeweled but forlorn depiction of the Virgin Mother. On the most basic level, this document speaks of patronage, declaring Gillow the force behind the international recognition bestowed upon a cherished local devotion. But the imposing close-up of the resolute prelate, staring at the viewer, in the robes and ornate pectoral cross of his office, stands in stark contrast to the distant sacred image of a Virgin who appears frail and lost beneath her pearl-encrusted vestments and outsized crown. Of course, doctrine holds that Mary's potency as an intercessor before God is second to none, but this memento depicts Gillow as a formidable, flesh-and-blood image of earthly ecclesiastical power, status, and competence. In short, the archbishop's picture represents the local patriarchal countenance of the newly resurgent Catholic Church.

The pairing of the prelate and the Virgin also reveals a Oaxacan expression of the two faces of modern Catholicism during this period. Gillow's stern likeness represents the church's zealous, masculine clergy, who appropriated modernity's cachet and authority in depicting themselves as a disciplined hierarchy of professionals armed with a revitalized social mission and rigorous methods governed by faith. Soledad symbolizes the feminine refusal to accept Christianity's alienation from public life and embrace of the church's adamant assertion that miraculous intercession in human affairs remained crucial if Christian civilization was to be salvaged from the modern era's fundamental rebellion against God. Here we can perceive the emotive, rationality-be-damned style of Marian piety in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The faithful did not see the presentation of these different Catholic modalities as conflictive. Dogma and faith bound them together, and among believers their twinning made sense: Christians should employ the latest means in working for the common good, but bear witness to God's enduring power to shape human destiny. The Virgin stood for unshakable devotion, doctrinal purity, and submission to divine authority. She also served as the object of intimate supplication. Men like Gillow served as models of an informed, coordinated Catholic action and pious fortitude in the face of faith-threatening adversity. Nonetheless, in the context of the times, it is significant that the church, both in Europe and Mexico, communicated in two registers: one measured, intellectual, nearly rationalist, and gendered male; the other effusive, usually gendered female, and fused to the era's allegedly miraculous apparitions.

Gillow's career encapsulates the Mexican church's efforts to convey this message to its heterogeneous flock. It also gives us a platform from which to comment on how emergent social Catholicism, and the performative modes of European practice emulated in Mexico by Romanizing clergymen, influenced local religion. Both the church's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822343797
• ISBN 13: 9780822343790
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar