The Middle Ages and Civil Sacralism
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
Just over a century after the fields of Mexico were stained with the blood of the Cristero War, the nation's spiritual and political landscape is undergoing a metamorphosis that the Catholic hierarchy seems incapable of deciphering.
While the echoes of the 1926 bells resonate in a sterile nostalgia for some sectors of Hispanic Catholic nationalism, the factual reality of contemporary Mexico is sliding toward a new syncretism that has left the Church of Rome on the periphery of its own making.
The phenomenon of the Fourth Transformation, far from representing a re-edition of Plutarco Elías Calles's Jacobinism or a Masonic insurgency, constitutes the consolidation of a civil sacralism that has been able to interpret the needs of a population exceeding sixty million poor, who, abandoned by their shepherd, have sought refuge in new folds.
During his visit to Mexico in 2016, Pope Francis was prophetic when he warned the bishops about the urgent need to become more humble and the pressing necessity of stepping down from their privileged positions.
That criticism, which resonated throughout the Metropolitan Cathedral, was not merely an aesthetic suggestion, but a diagnosis of institutional survival.
The Mexican high clergy, historically closely tied to the circles of power and benefiting from a marriage of convenience with economic elites, has allowed the social fabric to unravel, leaving a void that is now successfully filled by Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and organizations with controversial structures such as La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World).
Data from the Population and Housing Census of recent decades confirms an irreversible trend: the non-Catholic population in Mexico now numbers around 20 million people, a demographic and electoral force that has begun to coalesce into political organizations that replicate successful experiences of the religious right in Brazil and Central America.
This new religious war is not being fought with rifles on the hills, but rather in the management of hope and the administration of poverty.
The Fourth Transformation has built a religious populism that is not anticlerical, but profoundly para-religious.
By using language of moral purification, love of neighbor, and social redemption, the current regime has achieved an emotional connection that the Catholic Church lost by bureaucratizing faith.
Unlike the aggressive secular state of the last century, the current state apparatus embraces a popular religiosity that intertwines with prosperity theology and the mystique of the chosen people.
In this scenario, Mexican Catholicism suffers from severe deficits in legitimacy and effectiveness; its structure of ministers is insufficient to serve a growing population in urban peripheries and the most isolated rural communities.
This neglect extends even beyond national borders. The religiosity of the nearly 50 million migrants and descendants of Mexicans in the United States is a territory where the Mexican hierarchy is conspicuously absent.
Isolated both by an American Catholicism that often feels alien to them and by a hierarchy of origin that only reminds them of their roots through remittances, these millions of souls become fertile ground for denominations that offer them community, identity, and a survival ethic that traditional Catholicism, absorbed in its nostalgic Hispanism and sometimes with Francoist undertones, despises as vulgar or lacking in tradition.
This elite Catholic nationalism simply fails to understand that post-Cold War Mexico has mutated under the impact of a corrupting neoliberalism that atomized society, leaving the individual at the mercy of whoever offers them not only bread, but also a sense of belonging.
The Mexican electorate, historically pragmatic and inclined toward clientelism, doesn't vote for liberal abstractions, but rather for state support and handouts—elements that are now presented under a guise of political sanctity.
Morena has revived the corporatism perfected by the PRI, but has imbued it with a heterodox Christian soul.
The question that arises in this context is whether these new creeds, with their blend of theology of poverty and populist mobilization, have the capacity to lift Mexico out of its persistent social Dark Ages, or whether they are simply replacing one dogma with another.
The Catholic Church faces the institutional challenge of reformulating its social Catholicism, cleansing its structures of the corruption denounced by the Pope, and recovering an ethical influence that doesn't depend on the favor of the current ruler.
The upcoming political competition will be marked by this low-intensity culture war, where legitimacy will be won through proximity to the marginalized.
If the Catholic Church persists in its distancing itself from and disdain for new forms of popular religiosity, it will end up as a mere figurehead in a country that has decided to seek its salvation at other altars.
The civic sacralism of the Fourth Transformation has demonstrated that power in Mexico is built at the intersection of faith and need.
Until the upper echelons learn to walk among the dust of the slums once again, the void will continue to be filled by a new political class that has understood that, in Mexico, to govern the body, one must first win over the spirit of the people.
