The Origins of the Cristiada: Maderismo

ByFelipe Ávila

This article by Felipe Ávila originally appeared in the September 7, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left-wing daily newspaper.

This year marks 100 years since the Cristiada, the armed uprising by a sector of the Catholic Church and lay Catholics, above all in the country’s center-west, against the Mexican State that emerged from the Revolution. It is worth recapping that episode.

The Mexican Revolution opened a new stage in the age-old confrontation between two visions of the nation that runs through Mexico’s nineteenth century, pitting Catholic conservatives against anticlerical liberals. The War of the Reform and the Restoration of the Republic were a historic defeat for Mexican conservatives, always backed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. After the long truce between the Catholic Church and the government of Porfirio Díaz, the revolution of 1910 reopened the wounds that had not managed to heal since the era of the Reform. The collapse of the Porfirian State and the dispute among the different groups and projects that leapt onto the national stage to impose their hegemony provoked the resurgence of that old struggle, which went through various stages and which, at its most acute moment, once again brought about a civil war whose main theater of operations was the country’s center-west. Once again the liberal project triumphed, establishing in the Constitution of 1917 the absolute predominance of the secular State and considerably restricting the legal and political rights not only of the Church, but also of the country’s lay Catholics.

The Maderista revolution was a political and democratic revolution. Madero was a convinced and consistent democrat, which is why his government was characterized by political freedom without precedent in the country’s history. That freedom for all groups and political expressions included both Catholics and Jacobin and Masonic liberals. Nevertheless, the Catholic clergy’s fear that the Maderista revolution would cancel the stage of conciliation and tolerance—and of violation of the Reform Laws—that they had enjoyed during the Porfiriato led the Catholic hierarchy, headed by the Archbishop of Mexico José Mora y del Río, to organize for the first time—and, ultimately, the only time—the National Catholic Party (Partido Católico Nacional, PCN). Supported by bishops, priests, and clergy, as well as by a distinguished generation of lay Catholics who, committed to the social question, had linked up with workers’ organizations in some of the country’s main cities, the Catholic Party, formed in May 1911, had spectacular growth and became the second national political force, behind only the new Maderista party. The PCN took part in the federal elections in the summer of 1911, in which it supported Madero for the presidency and Francisco León de la Barra for the vice presidency, the latter finishing in second place. It also managed to win the governorship of Jalisco, where it swept the elections, and obtained several federal and local seats.

The strength of the Catholic Party was confirmed in the 1912 elections, in which it won the governorships of Jalisco and Zacatecas, the legislatures of seven states, and several senate seats, and held the second-largest minority in the Chamber of Deputies. Thus the political organization of Catholics seemed to consolidate itself as an option that appeared to have overcome the conservatives’ historic defeat in the nineteenth century and that could be part of the government and the republican institutions of the twentieth century.

That stage, however, was cut short by the assassination of Madero and the establishment of the Huertista dictatorship. A sector of the Catholic hierarchy and of the PCN made the mistake of supporting the coup, a coalition of counterrevolutionary conservative groups that included former Porfiristas, Reyistas, anti-Maderistas, and Catholics. In fact, the PCN formed part of Victoriano Huerta’s first cabinet and, from the government and the legislative rostrum, helped legitimize the Huertista dictatorial government which, nonetheless, soon broke with its allies and was left governing alone under a state of exception sustained basically by the military. While one sector of the PCN refused to collaborate with Huerta and was persecuted by him—including the party’s president, Gabriel Fernández Somellera, and Enrique Zepeda, director of the Catholic newspaper La Nación—the majority of the party did collaborate, as did the main Catholic hierarchs.

Given what happened afterward, one could argue that the support for Huerta was one of the greatest historical errors of the clergy and the lay Catholics who were trying to recover the leading role and the legal and political rights they had lost with the Reform Laws. And although, when they decided to support Huerta in February 1913, they could not know that his attempted conservative restoration would be a resounding failure and that it would be swept away by a new phase of the revolution, it must also be considered that the conservatism of the hardest-line sectors of the hierarchy and of lay Catholics was identified with halting the revolution and restoring their privileges. In practice, the values and interests of that Catholic sector of the Mexican right form a core part of the conservatives’ vision of the nation, one with a line of continuity running from the royalist army and the viceregal authorities that fought against Mexico’s Independence, that sustained Iturbide’s empire, the centralist republic, and the dictatorship of Santa Anna, that opposed the Constitution of 1857 and confronted the liberals in the Wars of the Reform, and that supported Maximilian’s empire and Porfirio Díaz—and, consequently, supported Huerta as well.

Felipe Ávila is Director of the National Institute for Historical Studies of the Mexican Revolutions (INEHRM).