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The Religious Question in the Congress of Gran Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2017

David Bushnell
David Bushnell*
Affiliation:
University of Florida Gainesville, Florida
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Extract

In all the confusion of nineteenth century political conflict in Latin America, clearly defined doctrinal issues and policy disagreements . are often hard to detect. The clearest—it is generally agreed—had to do with religious matters. The specific content of debate might vary with time and place, but everywhere in Latin America a fundamental question was posed: i.e., to what extent the Roman Catholic Church should continue to enjoy the status it had acquired during the colonial period, when it held a religious monopoly, a vast amount of wealth, extensive influence in the field of education, and much more besides. Few Latin American leaders opposed all innovation on the ecclesiastical front, and even fewer wished a total transformation; but there was ample room for controversy, with "liberals" normally seeking more rapid and fundamental changes than "conservatives" were prepared to accept.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , July 1974 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1974 

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References

1 The equation of liberal with anti-clerical and conservative with pro-clerical is to some extent an arbitraryeven tautologicalsimplification, particularly for the Gran Colombian period, of primary concern in this article. At that time the conservative label had not yet come into use, and the term liberal was so broadly used as to be almost meaningless. However, this is not the place for a discourse on definitions; it is enough to emphasize that the two terms, with small 1 and c, are meant not as formal party designations but merely as descriptive of certain general attitudes or states of mind.

2 James Payne, Patterns of Conflict in Colombia (New Haven, 1968), pp. 80-82.

3 The words most likely are chosen with care, as the reader can readily imagine extraneous circumstances that might influence alignments even in the absence of a known prior history of Church-conservative cooperation. For that matter, such prior history was not wholly lacking at the time of Gran Colombia, if conservative is taken in the lower-case sense; for there were antecedents of religious conflict both in the colonial period and in the earlier years of the independence movement.

4 David Bushnell, The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia (Newark, Del., 1954), pp. 195-248, and Santanderismo y bolivarismo: dos matices en pugna, Desarrollo economico (Buenos Aires), vol. 8, no. 30/31 (July-December 1968), pp. 253-254.

5 On the problem of formation of the two parties, see Robert H. Dix, Colombia: The Political Dimensions of Change (New Haven, 1967), pp. 245-252 and passim, and Horacio Rodriguez Plata, Prologo, in Miguel Aguilera, Vision politica del arzobispo Mosquera (Bogota, 1954), pp. 11-29.

6 See, e.g., Mary Watters, A Hi'tory of the Church in Venezuela, 1810-1930 (Chapel Hill, 1933), pp. 108-109, 128-129.

7 Personal communication. See also Payne, op. cit., pp. 248-252, 256-258, and passim.

8 The minutes of daily sessions, including roll calls, for the Constituent Congress of 1821 and for both houses of the regular Congress through 1825 were edited by Roberto Cortazar and Luis Augusto Cuervo and published at intervals from 1923 to 1952 in six separate volumes by the Academia Colombiana de Historia. A portion of the actas of the lower house for 1826 was published at the time, but the full minutes for 1826 and 1827 have never been printed and must be consulted in the Archivo del Congreso, Bogota (hereafter cited as AC). The author recognizes that a more sophisticated analysis than this article pretends to give might well prove capable of identifying a larger and/or more definitive list of religious roll calls in the Congress of Gran Colombia.

9 The constitutional provisions governing election and tenure of Congressmen can be found in Manuel Antonio Pombo and Jose Joaquin Guerra, Constituciones de Colombia (2nd ed., 4 vols., Bogota, 1951), III, 72-73, 81-86. On the problem of absenteeism and turnover, see Bushnell, Santander Regime, pp. 51-52, and also the numerous volumes in AC bearing such titles as Renuncias or Excusas.

10 A Congressman was required to be natural o vecino of the province or department that he represented. Hence the Congressmen who were established more or less permanently in the area of Bogota yet officially represented outlying districts were presumably natives of those districts or at least had maintained residence there at some point.

11 The scaling technique employed is that described in Lee F. Anderson, et al., Legislative Roll-Call Analysis (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 98- 101. In order to ascertain whether the roll calls belong to a common universei.e., measure different shadings or layers of opinion along a policy continuumthey are first arranged in order of their percentage of yes or no (in this case pro- or anticlerical) votes. Votes of individual Congressmen are then cross-tabulated from one roll call to another, and if the roll calls scale exactly there will be no case in which a Congressman who voted no on No. 1 will vote yes on No. 2 (or on Nos. 1 and 3 or 3 and 5 respectively, etc.). Perfect scaling seldom occurs, but in the present sample only once did the statistical errors exceed 10% of the number of Representatives voting on both roll calls of a given pair that was being cross-tabulated. Not surprisingly, this pair included the roll call on freedom of interest rates (No. 2), which ranked third in over-all percentage of pro-clerical voting: 15% of the Congressmen who voted both on it and on the roll call that ranked first cast pro-clerical votes on freedom of interest yet took the anti-clerical position on the other roll call. This result tends to confirm the fact that freedom of interest was a somewhat special case for inclusion in a list of religious issues. But it did not seem sufficient reason to exclude the roll call in question altogether, since otherwise it did scale properly (in one pairing with an error of 0%) and also, quite frankly, for want of a larger number of distinct roll calls to work with.

12 While the Senate roll calls show a higher proportion of straight voting by individual membersif only because the number of roll calls is smallerthey do not scale quite as satisfactorily as the Chamber roll calls. Out of a smaller sample, there are two pairs of roll calls with an error rate of more than 10%. It is 12.5%, to be exact, in both cases. Both of these involve roll call 13, pre-independence censos, which like freedom of interest in the other house had important non-ecclesiastical implications as well. Indeed it probably touched the personal financial interests of some Senators.

13 The Constitution provided for both Senators and Representatives to be chosen normally by the vote of provincial electoral assemblies, but the initial membership of the Senate was chosen by the Constituent Congress itself. Subsequent vacancies were filled by the existing Senators from among the runners-up in the voting of the Constituent Congress, which no doubt tended to reinforce the rather homogeneous liberalism of the body.

14 Besides Mendez, the only non Zulia Venezuelan Senator recorded as voting on any of the listed roll calls was Col. Judas T. Pifiango, also from the Department of Venezuela. He took part in Nos. 11,12, and 13, always on the anti-clerical side. 55 A Rice Index of 100 denotes perfect agreement, 0 an even split. It was the Ecuadorian regional bloc that scored 53.

16 Antonine Tibesar, The Peruvian Church at the Time of Independence in the Light of Vatican II, The Americas, vol. 26, no. 4, (April 1970), pp. 361-363.

17 Admittedly, where the patronato was at stake the position classified as anti-clerical was in one sense the true conservative position. But the intent that lay behind it was not necessarily to conserve the institutional church in the place of influence it had enjoyed; in the latter respect, the anti-patronato forces were more genuinely conservative. See also note 25, below.

18 Bushnell, Santander Regime, pp. 112-126.

19 Cortazar and Cuervo, eds., Congreso de 1825, Camara de Representantes: actus (Bogota, 1947), pp. 231,301, 318-321, 339; Actas de la Camara de Representantes, March 7 and April 17 (night), 1826, AC.

20 One of the 1825 roll calls simply docs not scale and therefore has been eliminated from consideration. It has to be assumed that in this case an extraneous factor or factors entered in to affect the outcome.

21 Of whom one was Fr. Jose Lorenzo Santander, who not only represented the Vice- President's home province of Pamplona in the lower house but was bound to him by family relationship.

22 Cortazar and Cuervo, eds., Congreso de 1824, Cdmara de Representantes: actas, (Bogota, 1942), pp. 44-45.

23 Cortazar and Cuervo, eds., Congreso de 1825, Cdmara de Representantes: actas, p. 316.

24 Ibid., pp. 317-318.

25 Actas de las sesiones de la Cdmara de Representantes del Congreso Constitucional de la Republica de Colombia que se publican por disposicion de la misma Cdmara [Bogota, 1826], p. 15. The patronato had already been assumed unilaterally by Gran Colombia as a natural function of sovereignty without awaiting specific renewal by Rome of the powers over the church formerly vested in the Spanish crown. This move had been strongly opposed by many clerical and lay conservative spokesmen, more for its manner and rationale than for the substance of what was done. The problem of the patronato is discussed at some length in Bushnell, Santander Regime, pp. 229-248, where some of the reasons for regarding its adoption and maintenance as constituting an expression of anticlericalism are set forth. Obviously, it was also more than that; but it should be noted that roll calls 4 and 6, both of which fundamentally involve an aspect of the patronato, do scale in a statistical sense with other roll-call votes of the same Congressmen on issues with a clerical/anti-clerical dimension.

26 Actas de la Camara de Representantes, February 11, 1826, AC. The legislation as finally adopted is in Codificacidn nacional de todas las leyes de Colombia desde el ano de 1821 (Bogota, 1924- ), II, 201-202.

27 Actas de la Camara de Representantes, March 14, 1826, AC. The thrust of the statement being voted on was not, of course, to emphasize the support of the state for the collection of tithes but rather to make clear that they were a human or national rather than a divine institution. Although the issue is the same as in roll call 4, it is evident that the two roll calls measure different levels of intensity of feeling concerning it, and it is thus appropriate to list them as two separate items. Those Congressmen who voted affirmatively on No. 6, even in the face of the Vice-President's message, were presumably the more uncompromising defenders of state prerogatives vis-a-vis the church.

28 Actas de la Camara de Representantes, May 11, 1826, AC; Codificacidn nacional, II, 395.

29 Libro de Actas de las Sesiones Celebradas por la Noche en la Legislatura de 1827, July 7,1827, AC; Codification nacional, III, 300.

30 Actas de la Lejislatura del Aiio de 1827, July 9,1827, AC.

31 Cortazar and Cuervo, eds., Congreso de 1823: actas (Bogota, 1926), p. 356. The reasons for considering this measure anti-clerical are, fundamentally, the same as for roll calls 4 and 6.

32 Cortazar and Cuervo, eds., Congreso de 1824, Senado: actas(Bogota, 1931), p. 202.

33 Actas del Senado, January 14, 1826, AC. The Department of Venezuela for which Mendez was Senator should not be confused with the former Captaincy General of Venezuela or the Venezuela of today; it included just Caracas, Valencia, and, basically, the north-central region. In the following table, Ecuadorian Senator Jose Larrea y Villavicencio has been counted as pro-clerical on this issue even though his votes were in fact equally divided; the assignment is frankly based on the author's personal interpretation of Larrea's fundamental leaning. In further defense of the inclusion of this item in the analysis, it is worth noting that it, too, scales statistically with other roll calls of the same (i.e., Senatorial) subseries.

34 Ibid., April 13 (night), April 14, and May 1, 1826. This rather complex problem is briefly discussed in Bushnell, Santander Regime, pp. 102-104. Senator Larrea again cast as many votes on one side of the issue as on the other. But on this issue I do not presume to read his mind; and he was simply omitted from consideration in preparing the table.