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The Lawyer of the Church
Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma
By Pablo Mijangos y González UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7664-2
CHAPTER 1
Born with the Revolution
From Los Reyes to the Lettered City
In his verse autobiography, Thomas Hobbes suggested that his traumatic birth was the key to his political theory. Hobbes's brief reminiscence speaks for itself: upon hearing the rumors of an imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada, presumably under the command of the Antichrist's agents, Hobbes' mother was filled with such terror that she bore twins: Hobbes himself and Fear. The circumstances of his premature birth, the English philosopher added, explained his hatred for the enemies of his country and his love for peace, for the Muses, and for a quiet life. In other words, it was Fear, his twin, together with the yearning for a life without it, the true forces that shaped Hobbes's long reflections on the State Leviathan—which he understandably saw as the only device that could protect humans from their own natural brutality. Leaving historical differences aside, something similar could be said about the early years of Clemente de Jesús Munguía. Unlike other prominent intellectual figures of independent Mexico, such as Lucas Alamán or José María Luis Mora, Clemente Munguía did not experience peace and order in his childhood, nor did he have any past to which he could look back with some degree of reactionary nostalgia. Instead, and just as much as Hobbes, Munguía was born with the Revolution, two months after the outbreak of Father Miguel Hidalgo's revolt. This troubled beginning anticipates one of Munguía's main obsessions: his age was that of Revolution, and Revolution was the monstrous twin that he would have to understand and tame.
Both Miguel Martínez and the informants summoned by Morelia's cathedral chapter in 1850 give November 23, 1810, as the day when the infant José Clemente de Jesús Munguía was baptized in the Catholic faith. His parents, Benito Munguía and María Guadalupe Núñez, belonged to the parish of Los Reyes, a town of three thousand in western Michoacán, economically linked to the city of Zamora. Unfortunately, Munguía's ethnic background remains obscure, since the surviving records only state that he was born of legitimate wedlock and that his parents enjoyed the reputation of being "honest and Catholic." According to Martínez, Don Benito Munguía was a small merchant, the owner of the local grocery store, though he seems to have held municipal posts as well. By the time of his son's birth, the valley of Los Reyes was by no means a good place for business. That region suffered particularly from the Wars of Independence, owing to its strategic location between Guadalajara and Tierra Caliente and its vicinity to the partidos of Colima and Uruapan. Insurgent chieftains, such as the "amo Torres"—a former muleteer who had an intimate knowledge of the region's trade routes—raided towns and haciendas in the rear of royalist forces, robbing grain and cattle, and levying war taxes from travelers and local merchants. Royalist armies, in turn, burned down the villages that sheltered and supplied the rebel bands. Ten years of revolution devastated a formerly rich region, well known for its wealthy haciendas and prosperous commerce, and left instead a paralyzed economy and the seeds of future political instability.
Notwithstanding this turmoil, the young Clemente did have the opportunity to acquire a rudimentary education in his hometown. Schooling was not necessarily a luxury in the intendancy of Valladolid, since more than half of the 254 towns of the province had an elementary school at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Usually under the direction of the parish priest or, in his absence, minor civil and ecclesiastical officials, these schools taught children how to read and write in Castilian, basic arithmetic, Christian doctrine, and "good customs." Clemente attended the lessons of the Spanish teacher Juan Piró, and, according to Martínez, he stood out among his peers because of his gift for reading, his beautiful handwriting, and his understanding of the catechism. His parents also took him to Guadalajara in 1816 in order to receive the sacrament of confirmation at the hands of Bishop Juan Ruiz de Cabañas, a pilgrimage they had to make because the diocese of Michoacán did not have a consecrated bishop at the time. Clemente's mother died soon after that trip, and a few years later he also lost the stepbrother born of his father's second marriage. Possibly escaping the pressing poverty of Los Reyes, or perhaps just searching for a new life, both Don Benito Munguía and his son Clemente moved to Zamora in 1824. That year seems to have been one of hope not only for the Munguías. The first federal constitution had just been enacted, and its supporters guaranteed that the "happiness of the nation" was at hand: a federal, representative, and Catholic republic would finally unify the Mexican people in peace, order, and prosperity—or so they believed.
Zamora certainly offered a more stimulating intellectual atmosphere than that of Los Reyes. It had been home for the Oratorian philosopher Juan Benito Díaz de Gamarra and the neoclassical poet Friar Manuel Martínez de Navarrete, and some of its more illustrious citizens had belonged to the Royal Basque Society of the Friends of the Country, a philanthropic association that aimed to promote the development of science, letters, and arts. Following in his father's footsteps, Clemente Munguía spent his teenage days working as shop assistant in one of the main commercial houses of Zamora. This job gave him the opportunity to get acquainted with the notables of the town, and so Clemente soon frequented the house of Father Francisco Robles, who happened to possess one of the best libraries in the city. It was through this priest that the young Clemente met his intimate friend—and, three decades later, brother in the episcopacy—Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos. Recalling the memories of their youth, Labastida would emphasize Munguía's "innate leaning to piety" and his "decided inclination to study," manifested in his "determined eagerness in collecting and reading all the books that came to his notice, as if he were devoted since then to the literary career." Munguía's intellectual talents did not go unnoticed and attracted the attention of Father Angel Mariano Morales, a friend of Francisco Robles and also canon of Morelia's cathedral chapter and rector of the diocese's conciliar seminary, who met the salesclerk Munguía during one of his regular visits to Zamora. Although Munguía was already older than the average student at twenty years of age, the canon Morales offered him a scholarship to attend the seminary college in Morelia. Clemente seized that opportunity without hesitation.
From 1830 onward, Clemente de Jesús Munguía lived and studied in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán. Clemente's move to Morelia had a twofold and decisive meaning in his life. On the one hand, he left behind a family that he would never have again, since his father—his only close relative—died soon after Clemente's departure. After 1830, then, Munguía's life revolved around his books, friends, and protectors at the seminary, a fact that helps to explain his deep identification with the destinies of the church of Michoacán. On the other hand, going from Zamora to Morelia also meant entering the realm of a "lettered city," in critic Angel Rama's expression. As Rama points out, Spanish American capital cities performed the function of embodying the order and rationality required to meet the stringent demands of "colonization, administration, commerce, defense, and religion." Urban life was regarded as the highest form of human coexistence, in good part because it constituted the fundamental milieu for the activities of the letrados, the learned men who mastered the legal and religious language that ordered social reality. Morelia, just like Mexico City, Bogotá, or Lima, was above all a "lettered city," that is, a primary seat of administrative and religious authority, the place in which local lawyers, bureaucrats, and priests exercised the power needed to achieve the "happiness of the nation." This episcopal and bureaucratic city would become the main setting for Munguía's public life, at least until the outbreak of the liberal reform of 1855–57.
The Episcopal City
The first thing that nineteenth-century travelers noticed on approaching Morelia was the number and size of the city's church spires, crowned by the twin towers of its massive cathedral. Morelia's urban appearance, indeed, openly proclaimed the clerical atmosphere of Michoacán's state capital. Fanny Calderón de la Barca, to quote one of Morelia's most renowned visitors, greatly admired its "wide and airy streets, [its] fine houses, [and its] handsome public buildings," but she was especially impressed by "the cathedral, the college, and the churches." By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Morelia had no less than twenty churches and a dozen convents, and even the aqueduct that supplied water to the city had been built at the expense of the bishopric. In the words of the historian Claude Morin, "the Diocese was the life of the city," and not only in cultural and religious terms. As the episcopal capital, and therefore seat of the diocese's main tithe office and of its juzgado de capellanías y obras pías, Morelia was at the center of a very complex network of economic interests. Through offering low-rate loans, or by selectively investing funds from pious associations, the church functioned as the main banking institution of the region and was often the only available source of credit for merchants and entrepreneurs and for the government itself.
In addition to its financial power, the preeminence of the Catholic Church in the life of Morelia and Michoacán emerged from the significant role that bishops had assumed in the social development of their diocese, from the time of the Spanish conquest. In the sixteenth century, for instance, the legendary first bishop of Michoacán, "Tata" Vasco de Quiroga (1539–1565), based his missionary efforts on the model of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, an ideal Christian society that he attempted to bring into being through the hospitales, or self-sustaining Indian communities that Quiroga established along the shore of Lake Pátzcuaro. Later, the bishops of the eighteenth century, inspired by both the practical spirit of the Enlightenment and the achievements of their revered predecessor, fostered the introduction of new crafts, industries, and farming techniques into the diocese's towns and villages. They also undertook the construction of hospitals, mills, roads, and schools and preached insistently that the practice of Christian charity needed to go hand in hand with the actual improvement of the living conditions of the faithful. It is understandable, then, that during Munguía's times, the population of Morelia still remembered the decisive role that Bishop Friar Antonio de San Miguel played in alleviating the consequences of the infamous 1785–1786 famine: besides supplying grains to the cities and towns of the diocese, Bishop San Miguel and his aides of the cathedral chapter successfully implemented an innovative program of public works, intended first and foremost to provide jobs for the homeless and the unemployed and thus to relieve the misery of the poor. That is why he had been, and was still called in the nineteenth century, "Father of the Fatherland."
Not surprisingly, the church's successful activism awoke more than once the suspicions of the civil authorities, who were incapable of fully asserting themselves in a territory that Spanish officials labeled as "the most obstinate province in the Kingdom." If during the early stages of colonial rule church and state acted as partners in a common task of evangelization, that spirit of harmonious cooperation disappeared following the arrival of Visitor General José de Gálvez in 1765. The historians David A. Brading, Nancy Farriss, and Oscar Mazín have documented the impact that the Bourbon reformers' persistent assault upon the church had on the former intendancy of Valladolid, particularly during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth. In order to affirm the ultimate authority of the state, and, in doing so, removing the institutions that supposedly prevented the colonies from reaching their full economic potential, the Spanish crown ordered first the secularization of the rural parishes entrusted to the regular orders, then the abrupt expulsion of the Jesuits and the subsequent imposition of limits on the bishops' jurisdiction and income, and finally the opprobrious Consolidación de Vales Reales (1804), a confiscatory decree that threatened the economic stability of the entire viceroyalty. Meanwhile, at the local level, parishioners witnessed an increasing number of conflicts between state officials and rural parish priests, who were no longer treated as the natural representatives of the Spanish power in the hundreds of small communities of the countryside. In spite of the bishops' unquestioning loyalty to the crown, all these measures ultimately undermined the reciprocal alliance between church and state and pushed many priests—such as Miguel Hidalgo—toward an active involvement in the insurgency of 1810.
The Wars of Independence affected the church of Michoacán in multiple ways. In the first place, the participation of priests as insurgent leaders led to a deep division within the ranks of the clergy. Whereas Manuel Abad y Queipo, bishop-elect of Michoacánand a brilliant, liberal-minded reformer himself, deplored the rebellion against the Spanish king "as the greatest sin and crime that a man could commit," Father Hidalgo and his followers cast the insurgency as nothing less than a defense of the church and of the Catholic faith, in this case against a godless Spain that was now in the hands of the (French) "monster of tyranny." In a second and more important way, the war damaged the church by severely diminishing its economic assets: both royalist and insurgent armies confiscated cash, liturgical ornaments, lands, livestock, and agricultural produce, and the income from tithes dropped as the economy stagnated. The diocese's two schools of higher education—the San Nicolás College, administered by the cathedral chapter, and the Conciliar Seminary of San Pedro, under the care of the bishop—were forced to close their doors temporarily, the first until 1847, and the latter for almost nine years. To make things worse, Abad y Queipo was never consecrated and abandoned New Spain in 1815, leaving the diocese without an ultimate spiritual authority and therefore making virtually impossible the ordination of new priests. In such conditions, facing an alarming decline in personnel and resources, no one would have predicted the quick resurgence of the church of Michoacán during the first two decades of republican rule.
Munguía entered Morelia's conciliar seminary in February of 1830. First inaugurated in 1770, and then reopened in 1819, the seminary's restoration had been made possible through the generous efforts of canon Angel Mariano Morales, who invested his personal fortune in repairing the building and in creating a new chair of jurisprudence, the only one of its kind in the state of Michoacán. As had been customary since the eighteenth century, Munguía spent the first years of his seminary education learning Latin grammar, rhetoric, and literature, a harsh introduction to the humanities that usually took about five years to complete. Munguía finished this curriculum in less than two. His certificate of studies states that Munguía excelled in his public examinations of etymologies and Latin pronunciation, attaining "the highest grade and the first rank among his fellow students," and that he impressed his professors with his mastery of Cicero, Cornelius Nepote, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Roman Catechism of Pius V, and the Grammar of Antonio de Nebrija. Munguía, however, felt that these classical readings were not enough, and in his free time he devoted himself to the study of the great works of Spanish literature, such as those of Miguel de Cervantes, Friar Luis de Granada, Antonio de Solís, Juan Meléndez Valdés, and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Munguía was clearly an outstanding student, but he still needed a mentor who could best cultivate his talents. Luckily, he soon found such a person in Mariano Rivas, a new, more progressive rector of the seminary, who would bring that college up to the level of the best schools of the country.
In effect, after one decade of hardships, things were changing for the better in the seminary and in the diocese of Michoacán. By the early 1830s, the region's economy was entering a phase of recovery; agricultural production increased, and, as a result, the income from tithes rose to an annual amount close to 280,000 pesos. At the same time, Pope Gregory XVI finally agreed to fill the vacant sees of the Mexican church, appointing a new line of native bishops that had a different outlook from that of the former Spanish-born hierarchy. Juan Cayetano Gómez Portugal, the bishop elected for Michoacán in 1831, turned out to be a strong, resolute, and yet forward-looking prelate. He had taken part in the Constituent Congress of 1824 and later served as representative for the states of Jalisco and Guanajuato in two legislatures. A sincere federalist, he had nonetheless opposed the laws that ordered the expulsion of the Spaniards from Mexican territory on the basis of their incompatibility with the fundamental principles of a liberal republic. In view of the deplorable situation of the diocesan clergy after a long period of episcopal vacancy, one of the first measures adopted by Gómez Portugal was to undertake a serious reform of the seminary's program of studies as a means to improve the formation of the future leadership of his church. Since Angel Mariano Morales left the rectorship for his new post as bishop of Sonora (of which he never took possession, because he suffered an attack of apoplexy the day before his departure), Gómez Portugal found himself in the position to appoint a like-minded rector for the seminary, free from the spirit of inertia that prevailed among the older members of the faculty.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lawyer of the Church by Pablo Mijangos y González. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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