Nineteenth-Century Latin American Catholicism

The Spanish crown had run the church in its American empire under a papal grant, appointing the bishops and collecting the tithes. When the colonies won independence the new republics claimed exactly the same right, and Rome — which had backed the crown — took decades to recognize either the governments or their nominees, leaving dioceses vacant and seminaries shut for a generation. What followed was a long fight between liberals and clericals over land, schools, cemeteries and marriage. Sharpest in Mexico, where the Reform laws of the 1850s stripped the church of its property and drove it out of public life, and loudest in Brazil, where two bishops were tried and imprisoned in the 1870s. Rome answered by tightening its grip, importing European clergy and religious orders, rebuilding seminaries on Roman lines, and in 1899 summoning the bishops of the whole continent to Rome for a first Latin American Plenary Council. Underneath all of it the devotional life of ordinary Catholics — confraternities, patronal feasts, pilgrimage shrines, household saints — carried on much as before, often with very few priests.