Plutarco Elías Calles, president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928, led the revolutionary state's confrontation with the Catholic Church. Under his presidency, enforcement of the anticlerical provisions of the 1917 Mexican Constitution precipitated the suspension of public worship and the Cristero uprising. When this conflict was settled in the Arreglos of 1929, a deeper question emerged: can spiritual life be protected while the temporal institutions that form social life are treated as independent from man's supernatural end? The political problem thus leads finally to the question at the center of this essay: who forms the human heart, and toward what end?
I. The Revolutionary State and the Formation of Man
Political authority can behave as though the social order derives all of its legitimacy from the state itself. Institutions with their own purposes and authorities then become difficult to tolerate. The family claims an authority over children that precedes government; the Church claims a truth and an internal order she did not receive from political power; schools, religious congregations, unions, newspapers, and voluntary associations can generate judgments and loyalties that the state neither creates nor completely controls.
Ernest Jones's concept of narcissistic omnipotence offers an analogy for this political temptation. In The God Complex (1913), Jones describes the difficulty some patients in his psychology practice have accepting a reality possessing value and authority independently of the self.
Applied analogically rather than as a psychological diagnosis, the same problem appears when political authority increasingly treats independent sources of social authority as rivals, precisely because their values did not originate in and are not controlled by the state.
In The City of God, St. Augustine presents a deeper theological grammar. Two loves make two cities: love of self even to the contempt of God—amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei—and love of God even to the contempt of self—amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui. The distinction concerns what occupies the highest place in the hierarchy of goods. Amor sui becomes disordered when the self attempts to become the measure of an order it should instead receive. Conversely, contemptus sui does not mean self-hatred, but the refusal to make the self supreme: the recognition that one's dignity, authority, and place within reality are received rather than self-created.
Political authority has always exercised a formative function, and Christian societies were never morally neutral. But a decisive modern transformation appeared in the French Revolution, with its ambition to regenerate society by producing a new kind of man. Institutions inherited from the old order could now be understood as obstacles precisely because they had formed the wrong kind of person. The old formative order first had to be dismantled before a new one could take its place.
This perspective clarifies the importance of intermediary bodies: social institutions standing between the individual and centralized political authority. Families, parishes, schools, unions, newspapers, confraternities, voluntary associations, and religious congregations create a social world not reducible to the state. The latter were especially significant because communities such as the Jesuits, themselves part of an international religious order, connected Mexican Catholics to authorities, intellectual traditions, educational practices, and formative networks extending beyond the nation-state. Through such intermediary bodies, people learned loyalty, responsibility, cooperation, worship, moral judgment, and participation in public life. Because these institutions formed persons through education, relationships, practices, and traditions that political authority did not create, they prevented society from collapsing into a direct relationship between the isolated individual and government.
Revolutionary Mexico inherited elements of this modern revolutionary project through its own liberal, positivist, nationalist, and anticlerical history. Freemasonry also belonged to this historical environment. Masonic lodges constituted genuine formative networks. Through association, ritual, fraternity, moral instruction, symbols, and political relationships, they helped transmit conceptions of secular citizenship and anticlerical public life.
The conflict can therefore be understood partly as a confrontation between rival formative ecologies. Catholicism formed persons through families, parishes, schools, religious congregations, confraternities, devotional associations, unions, newspapers, sacramental practice, and lay movements. Masonic and revolutionary networks developed a different understanding of citizenship, secular authority, and religion's role in public life. The struggle was consequently not only between Church and State. It concerned which institutions would possess legitimate authority to form Mexican society and educate its next generation.
Under Calles, this conflict became especially acute as Revolutionary legislation sought to enforce articles in the 1917 Constitution that reached beyond restrictions upon public worship into the institutional life of the Church itself, asserting state authority over clergy and the conditions under which priestly ministry could legally be exercised.
Nor did the struggle cease with Calles's presidency or with the cessation of armed conflict. Calles remained the dominant political figure through much of the Maximato (1928–1934) while the revolutionary project increasingly turned toward education. In his 1934 Grito de Guadalajara, Calles announced a new revolutionary phase directed toward childhood and youth, while the reform of Article 3 that year established socialist education. Political victory was incomplete until the Revolution reached the child.
The conflict can be symbolized by two rival acclamations: “¡Viva el Supremo Gobierno!” and “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” They should not be interpreted simplistically as exact counterparts of Augustine's two cities. Their importance lies instead in where ultimate sovereignty resides. Viva Cristo Rey affirms that political authority, however legitimate within its sphere, exists beneath an authority it did not create. The state therefore encounters limits not simply because other institutions possess competing power, but because truth, conscience, family, Church, and ultimately the human person's destiny cannot derive their legitimacy entirely from political sovereignty.
II. Integralism and the Ends of Formation
Here Edmund Waldstein's integralism clarifies the nature of the dispute. Integralism, in his formulation, “reject[s] the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life” and holds that political rule must be ordered toward man's final good. This does not abolish the temporal order. Waldstein insists that although the supernatural end is “the absolutely final end to which all other ends must be in some way subordinate,” it “does not do-away with a common good of temporal life that is final in its own order.”Temporal and spiritual authority therefore remain genuinely distinct: “the two powers—the temporal power of earthly rulers and the spiritual power of the Apostles and their successors—are meant to enter into an ordered relation. Each has its own proper concern.” The integralist objection to the revolutionary state is consequently not that government forms citizens, nor that temporal society lacks a genuine common good, but that political authority claims the power to define that good as though man's temporal existence could be finally understood apart from his supernatural destiny. Because “man's temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end,” the temporal order possesses real sovereignty within its own sphere but cannot constitute an autonomous moral universe.
The real dispute, then, is not between a formative state and a Catholicism wishing merely to be left alone. Both recognize that human beings are formed socially. The dispute concerns the structure and end of that formation: whether government may absorb, regulate, or marginalize institutions transmitting independent sources of moral and spiritual authority, and whether the temporal common good can be defined without reference to the supernatural destiny of the persons composing it.
But institutions alone do not determine the quality or final orientation of the persons they form. At least in theory, a Catholic society could possess schools, seminaries, religious congregations, associations, newspapers, and political organization while still producing persons who rejected the very worldview those institutions sought to transmit. Mexican anticlericalism itself offers striking examples. Benito Juárez received years of education at Oaxaca's Seminario de Santa Cruz before becoming the central political figure of the liberal Reform, while Francisco J. Múgica studied at the Seminary of Zamora before emerging as one of the revolutionary generation's most forceful anticlerical voices. Their trajectories reveal an important limit of institutional formation: institutions can transmit a hierarchy of goods and cultivate habits ordered toward it, but they cannot substitute for the person's free interior appropriation of those goods.
On the other hand, the Catholic Seminary in Guadalajara produced fifteen saints and martyrs. The problem of social formation therefore leads ultimately from institutions to the ordering of the heart, and particularly to how the person responds to injury, disappointment, ambition, suffering, and persecution.
III. Ressentiment, Martyrdom, and the Sacred Heart
It is precisely the transformation of suffering, particularly that caused by a more powerful person or entity, into a way of seeing the world that Max Scheler calls ressentiment. Ressentiment is not simply anger or the memory of injustice. Anger may be truthful, and remembering injustice may be morally necessary. It begins when injury is repeatedly relived until the wound reorganizes perception itself. “I have suffered injustice” may be entirely true; the distortion occurs when it expands into a moral universe in which the victim becomes innocent in everything, the adversary wholly evil, and whatever humiliates him appears just. The wound has become a worldview.
Christian formation must acknowledge genuine injustice without permitting victimhood to become an exemption from moral judgment. Having been wronged does not exempt the victim from the moral law. For Scheler, love counters ressentiment because it restores the capacity to perceive value beyond the wounded self. The enemy can be guilty without being reducible to his guilt; justice can be demanded without his humiliation becoming an end in itself. Love does not erase memory or abolish punishment. It prevents injury from becoming the organizing principle of moral perception.
A movement may speak correctly about justice and the common good while its members remain governed by pride or grievance. Consequently, the Church's sacramental and devotional practices hold not only spiritual but social significance. Confession makes absolute self-innocence hard to sustain; the Eucharist incorporates persons into a Body that transcends political faction; adoration removes the wounded ego from the center; prayer for enemies preserves the distinction between opposing evil and hating the person who commits it; fasting strengthens self-possession.
Martyrdom represents the extreme test of such formation. The martyr refuses both capitulation and hatred. He does not deny the injustice committed against him, but neither does he permit the persecutor to determine his interior life. The executioner may control his body but cannot compel him to reproduce the executioner's hatred. The martyr thereby becomes a moral mirror: the victim's apparent weakness can expose the interior servitude of the person exercising coercive power.
The possibility of conversion makes this particularly important. General Joaquín Amaro Domínguez, Calles's Secretary of War and one of the principal military figures in the campaign against the Cristeros, fiercely opposed the Church but reportedly reconciled with her before his death. The martyr's refusal to answer hatred with hatred preserves the possibility that even the person who persecutes him may eventually recognize the truth for which he dies.
This principle appears with particular clarity in San José María Robles Hurtado, the priest and apostle of the Sacred Heart executed in Jalisco in 1927. Shortly before his martyrdom, he wrote:
Quiero amar tu Corazón,
Jesús mío, con delirio;
quiero amarle con pasión,
quiero amarle hasta el martirio.
The progression is significant: "quiero amar" culminates in "quiero amarle hasta el martirio". Martyrdom is understood not simply as endurance, but as the final extension of love. In this sense, the Sacred Heart is the theological inverse of ressentiment. Both the resentful heart and the Sacred Heart are wounded; the difference lies in what the wound produces. Ressentiment allows suffering to govern the perception of the other, whereas the Sacred Heart receives the wound without replicating its logic.
The Christian can therefore resist injustice without making victimhood his identity, oppose an enemy without reducing him to an object of hatred, and remember persecution without turning memory into an inheritance of vengeance. Social organization and martyrdom thus represent two dimensions of the same formative problem: constructing institutions through which a Christian people can live and forming persons capable of inhabiting those institutions without replicating the logic of control they oppose.
Without a social ecology, Catholicism risks becoming a private spirituality unable to reproduce itself culturally. Without transformation of the heart, Catholic institutions themselves can become instruments of pride, faction, or grievance. A Catholic social order therefore requires both: institutions capable of carrying faith into social life and persons whose loves have themselves been rightly ordered.
But this raises a further question: what happens when Catholics regain access to the sacraments while the Church's freedom to govern her own institutional life and the intermediary bodies through which the faith enters social life remain constrained?
IV. The Arreglos and the Autonomy of the Temporal Order
In the Arreglos of June 21, 1929, President Emilio Portes Gil reached an accommodation with representatives of the Mexican hierarchy that permitted churches to reopen and sacramental life to resume. Yet the anticlerical constitutional structure remained substantially intact.
This point is essential because the revolutionary state's claim had never been confined to public worship. The constitutional and regulatory regime reached into the Church's organization and discipline. It restricted religious orders, subjected the public exercise of priestly ministry to civil regulation, and permitted political authorities to determine the number of priests legally authorized to minister. The conflict therefore concerned not only whether Catholics might worship, but whether the Church had an institutional life and spiritual authority that the state was bound to recognize rather than constitute.
The significance of what followed becomes clearer in light of the relationship between revolutionary politics and Freemasonry. On July 27, 1929, little more than a month after the Arreglos, Portes Gil addressed members of the Masonic community. He insisted that the clergy had now recognized the state and submitted to its laws, but he also described the larger struggle as continuing over two millennia and urged persistent vigilance. Most remarkably, he declared that in recent years “el Estado y la masonería” had been closely joined because those holding political power had identified themselves with revolutionary Masonic principles.
Portes Gil thus publicly situated the postrevolutionary state and Masonry within a shared anticlerical political project. The settlement with the hierarchy ended one phase of the confrontation without requiring acceptance of the Church as an independently constituted formative body within Mexican society.
This difference helps explain why the Arreglos cannot be judged simply by whether churches reopened. Freedom of worship and freedom of the Church to exist, govern herself, and act as a formative social body are not identical. A government can permit Mass, confession, preaching, and sacramental life while continuing to restrict religious congregations, and constrain Catholic schools, associations, unions, newspapers, and other institutions standing between individual and political power. The same person who receives the sacraments also inhabits families, schools, workplaces, associations, and political communities; his temporal and supernatural lives can be distinguished, but they cannot be divided into two unrelated persons.
A Waldsteinian reading lets us state the problem more precisely. The difficulty concerned the conceptual grammar within which the settlement could be understood: religion as spiritual liberty, politics as independent temporal sovereignty. Such a division appears coherent only if the temporal common good can ultimately be understood independently of man's supernatural end.
The sequence from 1929 to socialist education in 1934 makes the problem especially visible. Churches reopened, yet revolutionary formation increasingly concentrated upon childhood. A Catholic child might therefore have access to the sacraments while spending much of his formative life within institutions transmitting an anthropology detached from the supernatural end proclaimed at the altar. The settlement dealt with the immediate exercise of ecclesiastical life without resolving the deeper dispute over the formation of Mexican society.
The fundamental question raised by the Arreglos, therefore, was not simply how much liberty the Church should receive from the State, but whether political society possesses an autonomous finality independent of man's supernatural end. If it does, the Arreglos could be interpreted as a reasonable liberal compromise—had the government respected their terms. If it does not, then protecting certain “spiritual functions” of the Church while conceding to the secular revolutionary state predominant authority over the temporal formation of society contains a major contradiction.
V. Americanism and the Voluntary Surrender of Formation
The Mexican conflict reveals the danger of political power attempting to subordinate the Church through law, coercion, and control of her institutional life. But the same fundamental problem can appear in a less violent form when Catholics themselves accept the premise that religion belongs primarily to a protected spiritual sphere while the temporal order operates according to principles presumed to be religiously neutral. The Church can lose her formative influence not only when the state forcibly excludes her from social life, but when Catholics voluntarily cease attempting to form that social life according to a Catholic understanding of the human good.
This possibility is central to John Rao's critique of Americanism. Rao argues that American pluralism presents itself as a practical arrangement allowing different beliefs to exist together without the state judging among them. Yet because it presents itself as impartial and pragmatic, its formative assumptions can become hard to see. In Rao's interpretation, Americanism gradually encourages Catholics to accommodate themselves to the surrounding culture by treating the American political settlement not simply as a contingent constitutional arrangement but as the normative framework within which Catholicism itself must learn to operate. The result is not necessarily persecution. It can instead be assimilation: Catholic institutions remain standing while increasingly absorbing the surrounding society's anthropology and priorities.
The historical controversy over Americanism makes the distinction important. Leo XIII did not condemn American political institutions simply because they were American. In Testem benevolentiae nostrae, he distinguished legitimate American characteristics and political conditions from doctrines that would alter Catholic teaching or imagine an American Church fundamentally different from the universal Church. His concern was therefore not patriotism itself, but the possibility that adaptation to the surrounding culture might begin to determine Catholic life rather than Catholic truth judging that culture.
Rao's interpretation carries the problem further into the domain of formation. Immigrant Catholicism had historically depended upon a dense network of parishes, schools, religious communities, confraternities, devotional societies, and other institutions through which Catholic life was socially reproduced. Rao argues that Americanism tended to regard many of these supports as remnants of supposedly weaker Catholic cultures. He points especially to the Americanist suspicion of foreign-language parishes and separate Catholic schools and to the claim that older Catholic peoples depended excessively upon “authority, spiritual directors, miracles and other religious manifestations.” Against the supposedly “passive” virtues of obedience, religious vows, and discipline stood the ideal of the self-reliant American Catholic: “active” rather than “passive,” a “doer” rather than an obedient servant. Rao warns that Catholics who discarded these inherited structures, expecting strong individuals to sustain the faith without them, would instead find themselves living on the “diminishing capital of the past.” Catholicism might therefore survive formally while the social ecology that had transmitted it from one generation to the next gradually dissolved.
Here the contrast with revolutionary Mexico is illuminating. Calles sought through political power what Americanism achieved through cultural assimilation: weakening an independent Catholic formative ecology. The methods and historical circumstances were radically different and should not be equated. Mexican revolutionary governments regulated clergy, restricted religious orders, constrained Catholic education and association, and attempted directly to subordinate the institutional Church. Americanism, as Rao understands it, works more subtly: Catholics themselves come to regard religion as principally a private or ecclesiastical activity while accepting the surrounding temporal culture as possessing an autonomous logic that Catholicism need not fundamentally transform.
The two cases therefore illuminate opposite pathways toward a similar fragmentation. In one, the state attempts to confine the Church to the sanctuary; in the other, Catholics gradually convince themselves that the sanctuary is where religion properly belongs. The first is coercive; the second is assimilative. But both become intelligible through the same question raised by integralism: can the temporal formation of the human person finally be separated from his supernatural end?
This also clarifies why preserving intermediary bodies matters so much. Catholic schools, religious congregations, universities, associations, newspapers, confraternities, unions, families, and parishes are not simply defensive institutions protecting Catholics from hostile governments. They are the social means through which a Catholic understanding of reality becomes embodied in ordinary life. Yet their continued existence is insufficient if they stop transmitting a distinctively Catholic hierarchy of goods. An institution may remain Catholic in name while its anthropology becomes indistinguishable from that of the surrounding culture. Institutional survival and interior conversion must therefore remain joined: the Church requires both the freedom to maintain her formative ecology and persons willing to inhabit that ecology according to the supernatural end toward which it is ordered.
Conclusion
The revolutionary project in Mexico, at its most radical, aimed to break the Church as an independent social power and diminish the network of intermediary bodies through which Catholicism formed Mexican society. These included families, schools, parishes, associations, newspapers, lay movements, confraternities, and religious congregations, including international orders such as the Jesuits, whose institutions connected Mexican Catholics to traditions, authorities, and formative networks extending beyond the nation-state. As long as these bodies transmitted an understanding of the good that the state neither created nor controlled, the revolutionary project confronted a rival source of social authority.
The Arreglos did not end this deeper struggle. The revolutionary claim had gone beyond control of public worship to priests and bishops, religious congregations, ecclesiastical organization and discipline, and even the conditions under which priestly ministry could lawfully be exercised. Churches reopened, sacramental life restarted, but the underlying question—whether the Church could exist as a genuinely independent social body possessing an authority and internal order not derived from the state—remained unresolved. The subsequent campaign for socialist education extended the same formative struggle toward the next generation: from regulating the institutional life of the Church to competing with her for the formation of the child.
Rao's critique of Americanism reveals the complementary danger. A Catholic formative ecology can be weakened from without by coercion or from within by assimilation. The state may attempt to subordinate Catholic institutions, or Catholics themselves may retain those institutions while gradually accepting the surrounding culture's anthropology. Institutions are therefore indispensable but insufficient. They must remain genuinely Catholic, and the persons formed within them must freely appropriate the hierarchy of goods they transmit.
The Cristiada was thus, in the deepest sense, a struggle to preserve the Church so that she might honor God and form the human person. But preserving the Church requires more than keeping churches open. It requires upholding her freedom to form families, institutions, culture, and ultimately the human heart according to man's supernatural destiny. The fundamental question therefore remains: Who forms the human heart—and toward what end?
