RELIGION

The average Mexican ranks family, work, and religion most important to his life and considers it far more significant than politics.

Roderic Camp, 1997 375

In 1974, to strengthen his ties to the Church, Echeverria visited Pope Paul VI in the Vatican. This was the first papal visit by a Mexican president. By visiting the Vatican, Echeverria officially recognized the Church as an organization. His administration also provided financial support for the construction of a new Basilica of Guadalupe in 1976.376

In 1979, the government facilitated Pope John Paul Il’s visit to Mexico to open the Latin American bishops conference in Puebla. The outpouring of enthusiasm for the pope by perhaps 20 million Mexicans served as a reminder of Mexico’s deep Catholic roots. The conference issued a statement strongly condemning poverty in Latin America. John Paul II urged the Church to become engaged in social issues so as not to become irrelevant. Yet, at the same time, he attempted to rein in proponents of liberation theology by declaring, “The concept of Christ as a political revolutionary, as a subversive, is not in keeping with the teachings of the Church.”377

In response to the economic crisis of the 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy recommended to the faithful that they remain calm and aid the government. However, it soon became apparent that no changes were forthcoming from the government in terms of increased morality, economic recovery, or democracy. This led the majority of the Catholic hierarchy to intensify its criticism of electoral fraud and human rights abuses. The Church was in a stronger position to make such criticism since the government was on the defensive and needed allies to maintain the system.378

It was no secret that the Church’s condemning election fraud favored the PAN, which was strong in the very areas where electoral fraud occurred. After the 1988 presidential elections, when it was the political left that was the victim of fraud, the Church remained conspicuously silent. This silence was rewarded by Salinas inviting two members of the Catholic hierarchy to attend his inauguration—the first time the hierarchy had attended a presidential inauguration since the Cristero rebellion in the 1920s. In his inaugural address, Salinas promised to “modernize” (his favorite word) Church-state relations.379

During his administration, several constitutional amendments largely eliminated anti-clericalism, which was so woven into the document that it was necessary to amend five different articles. Article 3 was modified to allow the Church to impart primary education, something that in fact was already occurring. A revised Article 24 allowed religious ceremonies to be staged outside of churches and private homes. Article 130 was changed to recognize the legal existence of religious associations such as the Catholic Church. In addition, priests and ministers were granted the right to vote. After these amendments were passed, the principal remaining vestige of anticlerical legislation was the prohibition on priests holding political office. In 1992, Salinas followed up his reforms by establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican for the first time since the end of the Maximilian government in 18 67.380

Since he was not a practicing Catholic, Salinas’s reforms did not appear to be religiously motivated. His building bridges to the Catholic Church broadened his political base, since Mexico’s largely Catholic population favored the constitutional reforms. In addition, the normalization of Church-state relations made Mexico a better suitor for the upcoming negotiations to establish the NAFTA.381

More Mexicans—62 percent—express confidence in the Church than in any other public institution. However, they are increasingly making up their own minds on matters of individual

Behavior. Even among peasant women, traditionally viewed as more conservative, more than 53 percent practice birth control and one in five has had an abortion. After the Federal District legalized abortion in 2007, an initial sampling of the women choosing a legal abortion found that 81.4 percent were Catholic. Similarly, few Mexicans followed Church counsel concerning the film The Crime of Father Amaro, which depicts a priest who has an affair with a parishioner and portrays the Church as being in league with drug traffickers. The Church declared the film blasphemous and announced its support for anyone protesting it. in large part to the Church’s publicizing it extensively, the film was a huge box office success.382

Between 1970 and 1990, the number of Protestants increased by 17.6 percent a year, and in southern Mexico, by 24 percent a year. By 2000, the more than 5 million Protestants made up 5 percent of the population. The Protestant churches with the largest following include the Mormons with 783,000 members and Jehovah’s Witnesses with 518,000.383

The evangelical churches have been especially successfully in obtaining converts in the poor, indigenous states of southern Mexico. In 2000, Protestants made up 14.5 percent of the population of Chiapas, while in traditionally Catholic Guanajuato, they comprised only 1.4 percent. Many Mexicans appear to convert to Protestantism in response to the anomie caused by modernization. For such converts, Protestantism is a mechanism for providing order and meaning in the lives of the dispossessed.384

One of the reasons for Protestants having greater success at proselytization compared to Catholics is that the Catholic Church grew complacent with its monopoly status. As a result of this monopoly, which was de jure up until the nineteenth century and de facto well into the twentieth, Catholics provided limited service to poor, outlying communities. Protestants then moved into these underserved communities and gained converts. The Catholic Church has been hard pressed to respond, in part due to its costly, overarching bureaucratic organization that stretches back to Rome. In contrast, the Protestants’ low personnel training costs and short lead-time facilitate the ready creation of new churches. Finally, even though the Catholic Church was eloquent in denouncing the undemocratic top-down nature of 1980s PRI administration, it has been unwilling to alter its own structure in response to the more democratic structures in Protestant churches involving elections, pastors, deacons, elders, and women, and where most decisions are made locally with the views of laity taken into account.385

Mexican society, as it has for decades, has continued to grow more intellectually independent and secular during the twenty-first century. Indicators of this are the 2007 legalization of abortion in the Federal District as well as the approval of same-sex unions the same year in the District and in the northern state of Coahuila. As journalist Patrick Corcoran commented:

The recent series of events are simply an affirmation of what has long been true: the Church now, more than ever, is not Mexico’s pre-eminent moral guide. It is simply a guide, followed by some, ignored by others. Just as in the United States, the Church in Mexico has been damaged by a series of sex scandals.386