MESSAGE ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER THAT 1926

THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICT IN MEXICO

THE CHURCH BELLS FELL SILENT; THEIR BLOOD SPOKE

The Memory of Our Martyrs, Religious Freedom, and the Building of Peace

“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [...] keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus” (Heb 12:1–2); “you have approached [...] Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Heb 12:22, 24); “by faith, Abel still speaks, even though he is dead” (Heb 11:4).

To the People of God journeying in Mexico, to our brothers and sisters of other confessions and religions, to the authorities of our nation, and to all people of good will

I. A Date We Cannot Allow to Pass in Silence

1. On July 31, 1926, the regulatory law governing religious worship — known as the “Calles Law” — came into force, penalizing the ordinary life of the Church and subjecting the ministry of priests to State control. A few days earlier, on July 25, the bishops of Mexico had published a collective pastoral letter by which, faced with the impossibility of freely exercising their ministry, public worship in all the churches of the country was suspended as of that date. At dawn on August 1, 1926, Mexico awoke without public Masses: the churches remained open and silent, guarded by the faithful themselves. Thus began one of the most painful chapters in our history, which developed into an armed struggle from 1926 to 1929, until the “Arreglos” of June 1929, followed by a second period of hostility that extended through the end of the 1930s.

2. One hundred years later, we, the bishops of Mexico, wish to address you. Not to reopen wounds, but to heal them; not to judge the dead, but to serve the living. We have chosen to inaugurate a time of grateful remembrance and ecclesial discernment that will accompany us in the coming years, until the Guadalupan Jubilee of 2031 and the Jubilee of the Redemption in 2033. We do so convinced that a people who do not remember are left at the mercy of those who write history for them, and that Christian memory is not nostalgia for the past: it is strength for the present.

3. We also recall that barely seven months earlier, on December 11, 1925, Pope Pius XI had instituted the Feast of Christ the King with the encyclical Quas primas. That teaching on the kingship of Christ — which is not imposed by arms, but reigns from the Cross — became in Mexico a popular cry that no army could silence: “Long live Christ the King and Our Lady of Guadalupe!” One hundred years later, that cry remains a program for life: to recognize that no human power is absolute, because God alone is Lord of conscience and of History.

II. What We Commemorate and What We Do Not Commemorate

4. We wish to say this with complete clarity, so that no one may misunderstand or instrumentalize our words. We do not commemorate a war or celebrate a victory; we do not exalt weapons or idealize violence, regardless of where it came from. We do not call for revenge, we do not nourish resentment, and we do not place this memory at the service of any political or partisan project. Nor do we reduce those years to a dispute confined to the sacristy: it was a national tragedy that cut across families, towns, schools, and entire rural regions, where the Federal Government attacked its own citizens.

5. Instead, we commemorate three things. First, the fidelity of a believing people who, amid fear, continued to pray in their homes, baptized their children in secret, protected their priests, and kept the faith alive when there were no churches open: the faith of our grandmothers is the first heritage of this memory. Second, the witness of the martyrs, who did not kill for Christ, but died for Him while forgiving their executioners. And third, the lesson learned at an extraordinarily high price: that religious freedom is not a privilege of the clergy, but a right of every human person, and that its denial always ends by costing blood.

6. Christian remembrance does not repeat the past: it purifies it and hands it on, healed, to new generations. Recent magisterial teaching asks us to foster “processes of healing collective memory” as part of the justice that repairs broken bonds (cf. Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, 79). To this we commit ourselves: to a memory that does not justify injustice, but neither feeds upon hatred.

III. The Fratricidal Wound: “Where Is Your Brother?”

7. The first question God addresses to man after original sin is not about God, but about his brother: “Where is your brother Abel?” (Gen 4:9). And Cain’s response — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — is the exact formula of all violence. What happened in Mexico a century ago bears this tragic face: it was not a nation invaded by foreigners, but a people divided against itself. On the side of the trenches and on the side of the battalions were sons of the same land, baptized in the same parishes, heirs to the same culture, bearing the same Mother upon their breast, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Brothers killing brothers. That is the most exact definition of a tragedy.

8. As pastors, we cannot remember these events from the comfort of presumed innocence. With humility, we acknowledge that in those years, alongside heroism, there were also among some Catholics hardness of heart, political calculations, words that inflamed passions, and decisions made without the clarity that today we ask of others; and that the Church herself, at certain moments in history, has not always known how to serve the truth through the peaceful means of the Gospel (cf. St. John Paul II, Tertio millennio adveniente, 35). Asking forgiveness for our own failings does not weaken our denunciation of the failings of others: it makes it more credible.

9. And for this reason we say with prophetic firmness: the persecution of the Church was real. Churches were closed and profaned, priests were executed without trial, religious women were expelled, laypeople were hanged from roadside poles, thousands were killed, and there were deportations, denunciations, and children made into victims. To name these injustices is not to offend anyone: it is to fulfill the duty of truth, without which no reconciliation is possible, only imposed silence. A brother’s blood cries out to God from the ground (cf. Gen 4:10); but the blood of Christ — and with it that of His martyrs — is “far more eloquent than that of Abel” (Heb 12:24): it does not demand vengeance; it is an offering so that there may be life. The church bells fell silent then; their blood spoke, and its voice has reached us.

IV. The Martyrs: Witnesses Who Build the Kingdom and the Nation

10. “Martyr” means, quite simply, “witness.” Before designating one who dies, the word designates one who has seen and cannot remain silent. The first who merits this title is Christ, “the faithful witness” (Rev 1:5), who before Pilate declares that He was born and came into the world “to testify to the truth” (Jn 18:37). Every baptized person receives this vocation on the day of baptism: “you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). There is a daily martyrdom — honesty that does not yield to temptation, forgiveness repeatedly offered in the face of injury, fidelity without applause — that prepares for and makes possible definitive martyrdom.

11. Martyrdom is not a defeat: it is a Passover. Benedict XVI taught that the martyr is the freest person who exists, because no one can take away what he has already given out of love (cf. General Audience, August 11, 2010). For this reason, Revelation does not describe the martyrs as defeated by evil, but as victors: “They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Rev 12:11). Whoever gives his life does not lose: he sows. There is “no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13).

12. Mexico has its own martyrology, verified by the Church: the twenty-five martyrs canonized by St. John Paul II on May 21, 2000, headed by St. Cristóbal Magallanes; the thirteen beatified in Guadalajara on November 20, 2005, among them Blessed Anacleto González Flores — lawyer, catechist, father of a family, and apostle of peaceful resistance, declared by this Conference patron of the Mexican laity —; St. José Sánchez del Río, canonized on October 16, 2016; Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro, S.J., executed by firing squad on November 23, 1927, with his arms extended in the form of a cross; St. Luis Batis Sáinz and the laymen of Chalchihuites, who chose to die together, the priest offering himself in place of the father of a family and the father refusing to abandon his priest. Alongside them stands the immense multitude of those whom no one inscribed on any list and whose names God alone knows.

13. They built the nation. Not with weapons, but with what sustains a people from within: the conviction that there are truths worth living and dying for, the certainty that power has limits, and the freedom of a conscience that cannot be bought. Above all, they built the Kingdom of God, which is not a conquered territory, but life in Christ becoming history among us. The memory of the martyrs does not belong to one group or region: it is the spiritual heritage of all Mexicans.

V. Religious Freedom: A Fundamental Human Right, Still Incomplete

14. The Second Vatican Council taught that religious freedom is founded upon the very dignity of the human person: no one should be forced to act against his conscience, nor prevented from seeking and professing the truth, whether publicly or privately, with due respect for the social order (cf. Dignitatis humanae, 2). Pope Leo XIV has reaffirmed that this right must be guaranteed by the legal order and that it remains a decisive criterion for building pluralistic and peaceful societies (cf. Magnifica humanitas, 34). We do not ask for a privilege for Catholics: we defend a right belonging to everyone — believers of every confession and also those who do not believe — recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in our Constitution.

15. With gratitude and a sense of history, we acknowledge the steps taken by our country: the constitutional reforms of January 1992, the Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship of July of that same year, the restoration of diplomatic relations with the Holy See, and the reform of Article 24 of the Constitution in 2013. Mexico left behind the period of confrontation and pretense. We thank all those who, in government and civil society, have made possible a climate of respect and collaboration for the common good, helping to forge a Mexican State with greater freedom.

16. And yet, calmly and without giving offense, we say that religious freedom in Mexico is still not complete. Restrictions remain that do not correspond to a mature democracy: limits on the ordinary exercise of worship outside churches; the inability of religious associations to obtain radio and television broadcasting licenses; restrictions on parents’ freedom to choose the religious education of their children in the face of educational models imposed without consensus; and an attitude within the political class that has not assimilated the new constitutional culture of religious freedom, remaining instead in a climate of mistrust and preventing believers from defending and living their convictions in the public sphere. More serious still is when the State allows organized crime to become a parallel government controlling territories where all human rights are annulled: kidnapping, extorting, killing, and deforming the consciences of the young. This climate of generalized violence affects society as a whole and also prevents some communities from freely living their faith. The blood of priests murdered in the exercise of their ministry — among them our Jesuit brothers of Cerocahui, Father Marcelo Pérez in San Cristóbal de las Casas, and others — tells us that the list of witnesses did not close in 1929.

17. There is also a new risk: that rights may be proclaimed in a purely formal manner while other violations of human dignity advance in concealed forms (cf. Magnifica humanitas, 56). Today conscience can be coerced without closing a single church: through manipulation of information, reduction of the person to a consumer profile, the capture of attention by algorithms that polarize, and the new forms of slavery of the digital age. To safeguard religious freedom today also means safeguarding every person’s right to seek God without being reduced to data.

VI. The Value of the Person: The Key That Illuminates Everything

18. At the foundation of everything we say lies a single conviction: the greatness of the human person. St. John Paul II inaugurated his magisterium by recalling that the person is “the primary and fundamental way of the Church” and that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of the human person become clear (cf. Redemptor hominis, 14). Nearly fifty years later, Pope Leo XIV takes up this inheritance in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, dedicated to safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, and reminds us that dignity is neither earned nor demonstrated: it is a gift that precedes and surpasses the person, and which no exclusion, no failure, and no power can suppress (cf. Magnifica humanitas, 50–53; Dignitas infinita, 1).

19. This is the profound reason why martyrdom matters to us. The martyr is the most radical affirmation of the value of the person: he prefers to lose his life rather than lose his identity and his conscience. It is also the reason we reject all violence, yesterday’s and today’s alike: because whoever kills a brother destroys not merely a body, but an image of God. We therefore denounce the ideology, so prevalent today, that measures the value of a person according to usefulness, efficiency, or productivity, and turns the poor, the sick, migrants, the elderly, and the unborn into disposable material.

VII. National Unity and the Building of Peace: From Babel to Nehemiah

20. Pope Leo XIV has placed before the eyes of the Church two biblical images for discerning our times: the Tower of Babel, the work of human pride that excludes God and ends in dispersion; and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, who before acting invokes God and then calls together the families and entrusts each with a section of the wall, so that the city is reborn through the shared responsibility of the entire people (cf. Magnifica humanitas, 7–10). In that rebuilding, social bonds are restored before the stones.

21. Mexico today needs the path of Nehemiah. Our nation is fractured by violence, disappearances, impunity, humiliating inequality, and a polarization provoked by political strategies that divide Mexicans and have turned the adversary into an enemy. One hundred years later, the lesson of the religious conflict is precisely this: when the other ceases to be a brother, the entire country loses. National unity cannot be decreed or imposed: it must be woven by recognizing that we share an identity, a faith, a heart, and a common culture, and that no one is superfluous.

22. Building peace does not mean silencing conflicts, but transforming them. “The effect of righteousness will be peace” (Is 32:17), and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9). For this reason, we reaffirm our commitment to the National Dialogue for Peace, to diocesan walks and days of prayer for peace, to accompanying victims — whose perspective must guide all public policy — and to a culture of encounter that first disarms words. We ask legislators and authorities for laws and practices that fully guarantee religious freedom; and we ask Catholics not to claim for themselves what they are unwilling to defend for others.

VIII. A Time of Grace That Has Already Begun

23. We want to tell you something that fills us with hope: this commemoration is not being organized from behind a desk. It is already happening, and it is happening in the hands of the people. It is the laity — families, young people, teachers, professionals, catechists, men and women of our parishes — who are taking this memory into their own hands, just as one hundred years ago they took the faith into their own hands when the church bells fell silent. And so it should be: most of our martyrs were laypeople.

24. Throughout the country, in these years, our communities will observe days of prayer for peace in Mexico and for freedom of conscience; walks and pilgrimages for peace, in which walking together is already a way of becoming reconciled; celebrations and pilgrimages at the Shrine of the Martyrs, the Cerro del Cubilete, and so many places that preserve the memory of self-giving; and those expressions of popular culture and devotion — songs, plays, films, altarpieces, patronal feasts — which among us have never been mere decoration, but the concrete way in which faith becomes a people and the people become one.

25. Our universities, seminaries, and institutes will offer courses of study, congresses, and symposia in which this history can be studied with documentary rigor and without apologetics, because truth does not need to be embellished in order to shine. Commemorative editions are also being prepared to make the documents, testimonies, and faces of those years accessible to all. And the catechetical series “Witnesses of the Kingdom” is already underway, being published through our social media and digital platforms: we have wanted the memory of our martyrs to reach precisely those places where the hearts of our young people are being contested today.

26. Behind all this lies a desire that we wish to make explicit, because it is the commitment that we, the bishops of Mexico, have assumed for these years. We desire that this time find us being a Church that listens before speaking and walks together, with no one considered superfluous and no one left outside; a Church that awakens in every baptized person, and especially in the laity, the awareness that faith is lived in the family, at work, and in public life; a Church capable of reading with evangelical clarity this change of epoch, in which threats to conscience no longer arrive with soldiers but through screens; and a Church that devotes all its strength to justice, reconciliation, and peace. We do not propose to you an agenda of activities: we propose a time of grace.

IX. A Memory That Walks Toward Tepeyac

27. Our martyrs did not cry out only the name of Christ the King: they also cried out the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe. For this reason, this memory does not walk alone. It journeys within the great spiritual itinerary that the Church in Mexico has opened toward the Fifth Centenary of the Guadalupan event: the Intercontinental Guadalupan Novena, inaugurated by Pope Francis on December 12, 2022, in St. Peter’s Basilica and entrusted by our Plenary Assembly to the Presidency of this Conference, in conjunction with the Primate Archdiocese of Mexico. Nine years of preparation, one after another, so as to arrive at 2031 not only with outward celebrations, but above all converted in heart.

28. And we wish to emphasize something that seems to us a grace rather than a coincidence: the centenary of the religious conflict is being lived within the Guadalupan Novena. This means that the memory of our martyrs is neither a domestic matter nor Mexican nostalgia: it is a gift that we offer to the sister Churches of the Americas, the Philippines, and Spain, which are walking with us toward Tepeyac. It was precisely along this path that the series “Witnesses of the Kingdom” was born. We therefore invite the dioceses, parishes, consecrated life and societies of apostolic life, universities, movements, and families of Mexico to live this commemoration within the Novena, and the sister Churches of the continent to receive our martyrs as their own: in them we see what the Virgin of Guadalupe does with a people when that people allows her to act.

X. Under the Gaze of Our Lady of Guadalupe

29. The fact that our martyrs cried out with one voice, “Long live Christ the King and Our Lady of Guadalupe!” was not a devotional coincidence: it is the key to our identity. The Mother who at Tepeyac bent down toward the littlest one and said to him, “Am I not here, I who am your Mother?” is the same Mother who sings the Magnificat, in which God casts down the mighty and raises up the lowly (cf. Lk 1:46–55). That song — the song of hope — is the one we wish to sing as we open this time of remembrance, learning to look at history through the eyes of the little ones.

30. May this time find us reconciled: capable of naming the truth without hatred, of forgiving without forgetting, and of building together a nation in which no conscience is coerced and no life is considered disposable. May the blood of our martyrs, united to that of Christ, continue to speak more eloquently than that of Abel — of life, freedom, and peace.

31. To all Mexicans, to those who have adopted this land as their own, and to those who pass through it, we say with the hearts of pastors: do not be afraid of the truth of this history. There, in the midst of so much darkness, there were men and women like us who did not allow hope to be taken from them. We are their heirs, more by faith than by blood. May their memory make us better. May Christ the King reign in our hearts, and may Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the true God for whom we live, cover our nation with her mantle.

Mexico City, July 31, 2026,

on the one-hundredth anniversary of the suspension of public worship in Mexico.

+ Ramón Castro Castro

Bishop of Cuernavaca

President

+ Héctor M. Pérez Villarreal

Auxiliary Bishop of Mexico

Secretary General