One hundred years ago this month, a law that few Mexicans today have probably ever heard of set off one of the bloodiest and strangest conflicts in the country’s history — the Cristero War.
On July 31, 1926, the so-called “Ley Calles” took effect, and within days, gunfire was breaking out in church doorways across western Mexico. What followed was a three-year war that pitted armed Catholic faithful against the might of the Mexican state, left tens of thousands dead, and produced hundreds of martyrs whose memory perseveres to this day.
The law — formally called the Law Reforming the Penal Code, signed by President Plutarco Elías Calles on June 14, 1926 — was draconian by any standard. It required priests to register with civil authorities, capped the number of clergy allowed per state, banned religious orders and religious education, and authorized the expulsion of foreign-born clergy. Violators faced fines and prison time. For a population that was overwhelmingly Catholic, it was seen as an attempt to strangle the faith by decree.
None of this appeared out of nowhere. The animosity between the Mexican state and the Catholic Church stretched back to Benito Juárez’s Reform Laws of the 1850s, which had already stripped the Church of its landholdings and legal privileges. The Constitution of 1917, drafted in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, went further still: Article 130 denied the Church legal personality altogether, barred clergy from voting or criticizing the government, celebrating outdoor masses or wearing clerical garb in public. For nearly a decade, these provisions sat mostly unenforced, a loaded gun left perilously on the table. Until Calles, the vocal atheist and practicing Freemason who took office on December 1, 1924, decided to fire it.
The spark
The bishops’ response to the rigorous enforcement of the 1917 Constitution and the Ley Calles was the ultimate act of defiance. On the day the law took effect, Mexico’s Catholic hierarchy ordered a total suspension of public worship, a “clerical strike” unlike anything the country had ever seen. Churches stood open but empty of sacraments, tabernacles were bare. Many people blamed the government rather than the bishops for the fact that they could no longer go to church to worship.
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