Tilmahtli from the 1531 apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico.
Mexico enacted The Act of September 25, 1874 making the provisions of the Reform Law constitutional.
The act provided "liberal" reforms basically on the French model, following the results of the bitter Reform War of the late 1850s, and were hostile accordingly to the Church in certain ways. They provided:
- The State and the Church were independent of each other.
- Congress could not enact laws, establishing or prohibiting any religion.
- Marriage was a civil contract.
- No religious institution could acquire real property or capital taxes on them, with the sole exception established in Article 27 of the Constitution.
- A promise to speak the truth and to fulfill contracted obligations replaced a religious oath.
- No one could be compelled to give personal works without their full consent.
- The State could not allow any contract, covenant or agreement that provided for the loss or irrevocable sacrifice of the freedom of man, whether due to work, education or religious vow.
Anti Catholicism as an element of Mexican politics dated back to its earliest independence movements, and like the rise of protestantism in France and England, a desire to appropriate the property and wealth of the Church had a great deal to deal with it, although taking over the Church's obligations to the poor on the other hand were typically left to political theory, save in England where it was simply ignored. Mexico's first Constitution (1824) provided that it was to perpetually be a Catholic state, but hostility set in by 1857 when Benito Juárez attacked the property rights and possessions of the Church. Many of the figures of the 1854 1855 Revolution of Ayutla had been Freemasons and anticlericists.
This had caused the supporters of tradition and religion to back the Second Mexican Empire, which of course turned out badly. Anticlericalism was moderated under Porfirio Díaz, but revived during the Mexican Revolution, save for the followers of Zapata.
Ultimately, this would lead to the Cristero War, but even with its end, the Mexican government remained strongly hostile up until very recent years to the Catholic Church, having an overall impact on the practice of the faith in Mexico. Open repression mostly ended with the election of Catholic Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and most of the remaining official repressive statutes ended under President Carlos Salinas in 1992.
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