The “Religious Question” and the GLO’s Spanish Collection
The GLO Archives provide a fascinating window into the shared history of Texas and Mexico. GLO records are the premier source for studying the history of pre-1836 Texas land grants in general, and empresario colonization during the Mexican period in particular. At the heart of the GLO’s Spanish Collection, after all, is a group of over 4,000 land titles issued by the crown of Spain or the government of Mexico between 1720–1836.
Yet the GLO’s Archives contain much more than titles, and the Spanish Collection itself can be used to explore topics sometimes only loosely related to land grants. Some of these documents require us to delve deeper into the political context of Mexico in the tumultuous years of the 1820s and 1830s.
One such document in need of contextualization is an 1834 decree. Originating with the Vice President of Mexico, Valentín Gómez Farías, the decree notified citizens that the Congress of the republic had decided to “present to the Holy See a native Mexican cleric of renowned virtue and enlightenment” for the diocese of Yucatán. It was sent to the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs in Mexico City, which then transcribed it to the various states. This copy was in turn transcribed to the Political Chief of the Department of Béxar, who passed it on to the ayuntamiento (municipal council) of Nacogdoches.
Why did Texans need this information?
To understand this document, we need to review the history of the long-running political and diplomatic conflict known among Mexicans of the early nineteenth century as the “Religious Question.” At its most basic, the Religious Question was “what is the place of the Catholic Church in an independent republic?”
During the Spanish period, church and state had been deeply entangled, with blurred jurisdictional boundaries and overlapping interests. Their relationship was partially governed by an agreement called the Patronato Regio, or Royal Patronage, which dated from the fifteenth century. The Patronato allowed the Crown (and in New Spain, the Viceroy) to staff church vacancies and exercise control over other administrative duties of the ecclesiastical power in the Americas in exchange for a commitment from the Crown to foot the bill for the conversion of the indigenous peoples to Christianity. The idea was that, since Crown officials were “on the ground” in the American colonies and had a vested interest in the stability of the Catholic Church, they should be able to quickly name new bishops and archbishops to keep the institution operating smoothly.[1]
Mexico’s independence in 1821 threw this colonial church-state pact into sharp relief. If authority in Mexico was no longer derived from a divinely-ordained king, what did that mean for the Patronato? Did the new state (constituted first as an empire under Agustín de Iturbide in 1821 and then as a Catholic republic in 1824) automatically inherit the rights of patronage? Or had independence broken the pact?
Mexicans almost uniformly agreed that the church was fundamental to the character of their new nation, and the Constitution of 1824 reflected this conviction, recognizing Catholicism as Mexico’s official religion and prohibiting the practice of all others. But they were highly divided on the issue of the Patronato. Some intellectuals — including some priests influenced by Enlightenment thinking — favored the view that the new state could exercise the same patronage rights as the monarchs had, using the Patronato to staff dioceses with more liberal prelates and shaping the church in their image. More conservative clerics disagreed, arguing that the Patronato had ruptured with independence and that a new agreement with the Holy See in Rome (called a Concordat) was necessary before the state could exercise patronage rights.
The issue quickly developed into a major political conflict and a diplomatic impasse, since the Holy See — acceding to Spanish pressure — refused to recognize Mexican independence or negotiate a Concordat. While the conflict around the Religious Question deepened, however, the Mexican clergy began to dwindle, with several dioceses remaining without a bishop at their helm for years. The Catholics of Mexican Texas were in this condition. A part of the expansive Diocese of Linares (later renamed the Diocese of Monterrey), they had lost their bishop in 1821, and political wrangling over the Patronato had impeded efforts to replace him. In the absence of a bishop, parishes languished and Catholics were deprived of the sacrament of confirmation.
In 1830, the two sides came up with a temporary fix, whereby the state would send a slate of candidates to the Holy See, which would in turn directly select the new bishops. This method worked, and in 1830–1831, a new group of bishops was confirmed — including that of Linares, the Franciscan Fr. José María de Jesús Belaunzarán y Ureña.[2]
Yet the underlying Religious Question remained unresolved. In fact, in 1833, the crisis deepened when a clique of congressional liberals under the leadership of Vice-President Valentín Gómez Farías proposed a set of radical reforms meant to subjugate the church to state power. Along with attempts to secularize schooling and end the state’s involvement in tithe collection, the reforms would allow the state to assume the power of patronage unilaterally.[3]
This power was immediately put to the test in southeastern Mexico, homeland of one of Mexico’s most prominent liberals and future vice-president of the Republic of Texas, Lorenzo de Zavala.
There, conservative clerics had worked with Rome to get the centralist priest José María Guerra named as the new bishop of Yucatán and Tabasco in 1832. Gómez Farías’s government, likely at the urging of de Zavala and other liberals, objected to Guerra’s nomination and halted the papal bull. Instead, it announced it would fill the vacancy with a “native Mexican cleric of renowned virtue and enlightenment” of its own choosing. The result was the decree that found its way into the hands of the officials of Béxar and Nacogdoches. Simply put, the decree was meant to put Mexican officials throughout the nation on notice that the Gómez Farías government planned to use the Patronato to deal a blow to the more conservative wing of the church.[4]
The Yucatán peninsula may seem to be a world away from Mexican Texas, but as this document shows, the two were connected in more ways than one. Texas residents of all political and religious leanings followed the drama of the Religious Question closely, especially as it intersected with the issue of colonization and religious tolerance for non-Catholics. (Coahuila y Texas’s Colonization Law of 1825 mandated that foreign colonists also be Catholic.) Liberal Catholics and Protestants in Texas likely applauded much of the state’s efforts to create a more “enlightened” church. Many frontier Catholics, however, were dismayed at what they saw as government attacks on the nation’s oldest and most influential institution.[5]
Gómez Farías’s reforms of 1833, including his use of the Patronato, created a significant Catholic backlash and prompted Antonio López de Santa Anna to return abruptly to the presidency in late April 1834. As Santa Anna’s regime veered increasingly towards authoritarian centralism, people on Mexico’s periphery, including both Yucatán and Texas, began to think more seriously about leaving the Mexican federation.
National Hispanic Heritage Month is a celebration of the contributions of Hispanics to U.S. history, culture, and society observed annually between September 15 and October 15, a time of many historical mileposts in the Americas. The observance emphasizes the deep historical imprint of Hispanic cultures on the United States and honors the place of Hispanics in the contemporary American melting pot, where they number nearly 62 million. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we’ll focus for several weeks on the impact of Hispanic historical figures in Texas.
[1] John F. Schwaller, The Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Michael P. Costeloe, Church and State in Independent Mexico: A Study of the Patronage Debate, 1821–1857 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978).
[2] Paul V. Murray, “Fray María de Jesús Belaunzarán y Ureña, Bishop of Linares, Mexico (1772–1857),” The Americas 11: №3 (January 1955), pp. 355–362; Carlos E. Castañeda, ed., Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519–1936, Vol. VI, (Austin: Von Boekmann-Jones Company Publishers, 1950), p. 355; Timothy M. Matovina, Tejano Religion and Ethnicity: San Antonio, 1821–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 7–23.
[3] Costeloe, Church and State, pp. 125–140.
[4] Handbook of Texas Online, Raymond Estep, “Zavala, Lorenzo de,” accessed August 30, 2017, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fza05; Margaret Swett Henson, Lorenzo de Zavala: The Pragmatic Idealist (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996); Evelia Trejo, Los límites de un discurso: Lorenzo de Zavala, su “Ensayo Histórico,” y la cuestión religiosa en México (Mexico City: UNAM, INAH, FCE, 2001).
[5] Garrison soldiers at both Monclova (Coahuila y Texas) and Monterrey (Nuevo León) adhered to Santa Anna’s “Plan of Cuernavaca,” which sought to undo Gómez Farías’s anticlerical reforms. The Monterrey soldiers started their proclamation by vowing to protect the Catholic religion “at all costs.” See The Pronunciamiento in Independent Mexico, 1821–1876 online, “Pronunciamiento de la guarnición de Monclova, 23 de julio de 1834,” accessed August 31, 2017 from https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/pronunciamientos/regions.php?r=17&pid=942; and “Pronunciamiento del comandante y guarnición de Monterrey, 17 de julio de 1834,” accessed August 31, 2017 from https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/pronunciamientos/regions.php?r=32&pid=1179.
