Pablo Mijangos y González. The Lawyer of the Church

Pablo Mijangos y González has created an erudite intellectual and political history of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Mexico. The author’s efficient prose, built on the foundation of a judicious exploration of archives in Europe and Mexico, provides a compelling reinterpretation of the basis of Catholic opposition to liberal reforms. Although structured around political circumstances within Mexico from the 1830s through the 1860s (all observed through the life and thought of a prominent bishop, Clemente de Jesús Munguía), this book consistently traces the transatlantic roots of Catholic intellectualism. The combination of breadth and depth in Mijangos y González’s comprehensive account converts Munguía from a spiritual and political interlocutor for his time into a prism that transmits an underappreciated worldview to the reader in our time. Mijangos y González is engaged in two missions simultaneously: in the first, he generates another blow against the battered idea that post-independence political conflict in Mexico reflected the death throes of the forces of tradition (the Catholic Church) against the forces of modernity (the secular nation-state). The author joins a growing chorus of studies of popular and religious politics that demonstrate the many ways in which actors from across the social spectrum sought to carve out a dignified existence within an evolving political environment. For the church hierarchy, this meant advocating a brand of Catholic republicanism in order to preserve institutional autonomy and a role in public life. Even though the fraught dialogue between religious and secular authorities failed by midcentury and gave rise to a destructive civil war that resulted in a resounding defeat for the church, Mijangos y González includes an illuminating coda: the legal and political setback ultimately created greater social and spiritual freedom for the church, nourishing social Catholicism in Mexico during the rule of Porfirio Díaz. The modernizing spirit of the church, the author suggests, endured throughout the nineteenth century.

Aesthetics · Humanities · Modernity · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Reinterpretation · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Studies in Latin America · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies