This special issue, fruit of an American Historical Association panel on the entanglements of Catholicism and nationhood after Mexico's Cristero War (1926-29), offers five new histories that cumulatively give the lie to anything so monolithic as a twentieth-century “Catholic history.” As is well known, the Cristero War was a major armed confrontation between the Church and the postrevolutionary state and their respective bases, followed, as the story goes, by an uneasy truce and an enduring coexistence lasting for decades, to the 1950s and perhaps to the 1970s.

This article examines the cultural and political repertoire that contributed to Catholics’ understanding of violence as a legitimate means to resist the secular state in 1930s Mexico. Following the end of the Cristero War (1926-29), the Church officially and overtly rejected the use of violence by Catholics as a means to defend religious freedom. However, many Catholic militants and organizations continued to support violence as a last but necessary recourse to resist the country's so-called tyrannical government and to build a Catholic nation that would recognize the kingship of Christ on earth. Informed by noncanonical understandings of martyrdom, sacrifice, and redemptive violence, as well as by an intransigent view of politics, these Catholics regarded violence as a moral response against the injustices and dangers posed by what they considered an oppressive and blasphemous state. The article is based on the examination of a series of violent events perpetrated by Catholic militants during the 1930s, as well as on the analysis of several newspapers, official documents, and Catholic publications. Contrary to government portrayals of Catholicism as a top-down, monolithic, and unchanging set of institutions and practices that promoted recalcitrant forms of religious militancy, Catholics were in fact deeply divided regarding the legitimacy of violence along theological, moral, and practical grounds.

This paper examines the public relations battles in the US media over Mexico's Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS), an explicitly Catholic social movement founded in 1937 that aimed to restore the Church to its traditional role in Mexican society and to reject the reforms of the revolutionary government. The sinarquistas shared many of the features of fascism and Nazism, the major global antidemocratic movements of the time, including a strident nationalism, authoritarian leanings, an emphasis on martial discipline and strict organizational structure, and a militant aesthetic. Both its ideological leanings and rapid growth (as many as 500,000 members by the early 1940s) led many US writers to suggest that the UNS represented a dangerous fifth-column threat to both Mexico and the United States. Others, particularly in the Catholic press, saw the UNS as an anticommunist organization that could actually help foster democracy in Mexico. For their part, UNS leaders defended themselves vociferously and sought to build relationships with influential US Catholics who could advocate for them in the press. By analyzing this debate, this paper both underscores the transnational characteristics of the UNS and highlights the crucial role of US public opinion in Mexican politics during the 1940s.

This article examines the silencing and repression of rebellious priests in Mexico from the 1940s to the mid 1970s and places the divergent actors that composed the Catholic Church during this period as key players in the Cold War. It examines the web of personal and organizational connections of a single emblematic individual whose transnational history has been mostly absent from the accounts of the era: the Jesuit priest Rodolfo Escamilla García. Founder of the Catholic Workers’ Youth (JOC) in the late 1950s, he championed the radical “See, Judge, Act” method that politicized thousands of people across Latin America during the 1960s, when liberation theology emerged throughout the continent and competing conservative authorities came together to repress it. In 1977 Escamilla García was brutally killed in Mexico City, likely with the approval of government security agencies. Yet, his brutal killing, and the murders and torture of other priests examined in this article, were never investigated by police authorities. Further, their silencing points to a moment in Mexican history when government leaders and iconic leftist intellectuals erroneously championed the idea that the nation was exceptional in the Latin American region, meaning less authoritarian and more democratic. The most influential ecclesiastical authorities overwhelmingly agreed. For them, maintaining a productive relationship with the state took precedence over the need to publicly condemn the assassination of rebellious priests. Instead, the loudest voices of condemnation came from progressive Catholics representing the Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM) and the National Center of Social Communications (CENCOS).

This article deals with the emergence of the Nazas-Aguanaval group of priests in the northern region of La Laguna, in northern Mexico, after the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 Medellín Conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). I argue that both the reformism of the Second Vatican council and the push for a “preferential option for the poor” provided the space for an alliance between the progressive priests of the Nazas-Aguanaval group and the Maoist activists of Política Popular (People's Politics, PP). In this context, it was the Nazas-Aguanaval priests who introduced Política Popular's Maoism in La Laguna and Chiapas among peasants and students. At the same time, the radical tradition and economic conditions of La Laguna made it possible for local left-wing activists to connect with transnational currents such as the Movement of Priests for the Third World and Christians for Socialism. Based on a broad array of sources—including oral histories, Maoist pamphlets, local newspapers, Mexican security archives, and documentation from Mexican and Latin American priests’ organizations—this article brings together the regional history of protest in La Laguna, the historiography of the Global Sixties, and the history of the progressive factions of the Catholic Church in Latin America.

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Mexican traditionalist Catholics mobilized in apparent unity against Catholic “progressivism” and the Left. Yet, they succumbed to their own internecine fights. This article examines the conflicts within Mexico's post-Cristero Right during the 1960s and 70s by tackling the ruptures and realignments surrounding the excommunication of Fr. Joaquín Sáenz Arriaga, a traditionalist Jesuit famed for attacking conciliar reforms and the legitimacy of Paul VI's papacy. I argue that the ensuing debates put into question the apparent coherence of conservatives in the face of social unrest after 1968, highlighting the long-standing entropy of right-wing Catholicism, as traditionalists clashed over matters of orthodoxy, Catholics’ historical relationship with the postrevolutionary state, and the contested memory of the Cristero War, which they used to legitimize their positions and define the terms of their traditionalism. Using anticommunism and anti-Semitism to wage their battles, these traditionalists occupied important spaces in the public sphere, contributed to Mexico's Cold War polarizations, and shaped the Mexican Right's international outlook. Their conflicts attest to the contentious plurality of the Mexican Right during this period, which invites further study to better understand how these actors situated themselves in a rapidly changing world.