Summary Of Zuno In Mexico

ignorance the indigenous masses.’’ The Díaz regime maintained a strict, repressive control over the people, and the Church supported Díaz to build its own wealth and maintain a religious monopoly over the people. Roberto Blancarte states that ‘’the political participation of the National Catholic Party had also been decisive in influencing anticlerical opinion.’’ There was precedent in Mexico for the Church supporting authoritarian regimes, and there was a strong sentiment among revolutionaries that this trend would once again continue with Huerta. Señora Esther Lobato Viuda de Barreiro lambasted the church for denying Mexicans freedom of conscience and referred to the imposition of Catholicism during the Spanish inquisition. This demonstrates …show more content…
Zuno ran Jalisco during a period of revolutionary reconstruction in the 1920s. During a revolution and in post-revolutionary states there was a tendency to impose ideals and conditions upon a population. Anticlericalism was most prominent in states where the clergy enjoyed power and control. With the state trying to gain the mass support, it needed to eliminate opposition power bases, often using anticlericalism as a tactic to distract from recession or lack of reform. René Rémond describes the anticlerical as ‘’ [someone who] seeks solely to contain or reduce the influence of religion in accordance with the idea that he has made of the distinction between spheres and of the independence of civil society.’’ This is an accurate representation of Zuno and the anticlericalism he employed in Jalisco. He sought to regulate worship, impose discipline on the clergy and remove Catholicism from the social sphere. Furthermore, Zuno, along with Calles, seized Church property and drove Catholics to the margins of politics, by taking away their infrastructure Zuno like Diéguez in 1914 sought to eliminate his political …show more content…
The clergy was depicted as the seducer, a hypocritical, immoral and avaricious group that held an undeserved privileged status in society. As stated by Ben Fallaw ‘’the trope of confessional seductions was central to revolutionary anticlericalism.’’ It was felt amongst Mexican men that the clergy preyed upon women; this was fuelled by the claims of Diéguez that he found evidence of canon trials for rape and seduction of women. Anticlericals burnt confession booths in Aguascalientes, Querétero, Irapuato and Guanajuato and confession was outlawed in Chiapas by General Jesús Agustín Castro. Ben Fallaw identified five factors that explain why the laity believed priests were predators: the church emphasised confession, there would be an invasive questioning of women before they got married to determine their sexual past, the confusion between concubinage and clerical seduction, masculine suspicions that priests manipulated women and finally the nationwide networks of clerical influence. Long before the revolution, the stories of priests seducing women were frequent. Once more, revolutionary propaganda would only serve