Detroit — When Salvador Gomez was growing up in Mexico, he heard stories of the 1926-29 armed resistance to the Mexican government’s campaign to control and suppress the Catholic Church.
Known as the Cristero War or Cristero Rebellion, the movement involved lay Catholics and even some priests engaging in guerilla warfare in opposition to the anti-Catholic policies of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles (1877-1945).
By the time it ended in a truce in 1929, an estimated 90,000 lives had been lost on both sides.
The conflict, until now almost unknown to most Americans, is about to become better known thanks to a new motion picture, “For Greater Glory,” opening next month.
But Gomez, who grew up in Capilla de Guadalupe in Jalisco State, learned about the Cristero War from members of his own family who had taken part as guerilla fighters.
“Two uncles, Genaro and Tomas Gomez, older brothers of my father, were fighters. One of my uncles, Genaro Gomez, was one of the chiefs — a captain of the Cristeros,” said Gomez, who lives just a few blocks from Holy Redeemer Church in southwest Detroit, where he is a parishioner.
The war was provoked by President Calles’ decision to fully enforce a strict interpretation of the articles of Mexico’s 1917 constitution regarding the practice of religion and the functioning of religious institutions.
The so-called Calles Law strictly limited the functioning of priests to church property, gave the local state governors the right to regulate how many and which priests could function in their state, and allowed churches to retain no more property than necessary to carry on the strictly limited functions allowed them.
Priests not only could not vote, but were forbidden to wear clerical garb in public or speak or write on any political issue. All religious orders were suppressed, and monasteries and convents emptied. The Church was also forbidden to operate schools.
Priests were denied the right to a trial for violations of the religious laws, and could be — and often were — executed on the spot by soldiers.
Rather than submit to such controls, the Mexican bishops suspended all public celebrations of Mass throughout the country until the law should be lifted.
Some Mexican states had already been thoroughly secularized — for example, Calles had expelled all priests from Sonora when he was governor in the late 1910s — but many faithful Catholics were unwilling to see their states go the same way.
After a peaceful boycott effort collapsed, armed resistance was organized, and fighting units began to function in early 1927, with the war cry “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” (“Long live Christ the King”).
The Cristeros were often spectacularly effective against much larger forces, as Gomez related. “My Uncle Genaro had 90 people with him, but would often be up against 500 soldiers,” Gomez said.
Both sides typically took a take-no-prisoners approach, Gomez said.
“The first time they came upon soldiers, the soldiers were sleeping. They sneaked into the camp, and stole the arms and uniforms from the soldiers — and killed all the soldiers,” he recounted.
The soldiers, Gomez explained, were desecrating churches and murdering priests, religious and anyone suspected of giving them food or other aid and comfort.
Brave priests were engaging in various violations of the law — such as visiting the sick to pray for them and offering the sacraments or religious instruction in people’s homes — for any of which violations they could be shot or lynched.
Some priests became famous for evading the soldiers, and tales sprang up of miraculous escapes and multiple simultaneous appearances, Gomez recalled.
Whatever the truth of such fantastic stories — like that of the poisoned chicken that got up off the serving platter and ran away so the famous Padre Tachito wouldn’t die from eating it — there can be no doubt of the courageous martyrdom of some priests.
An Internet search for St. Toribio Romo Gonzalez or Blessed Miguel Pro will bring up examples of two such priests. Holy Redeemer Parish has a relic of St. Toribio and has established a shrine to him in the church.
Blessed John Paul II canonized a group of 25 martyrs from this period in 2000, and another 13 victims were beatified in 2005.
But it wasn’t just priests who suffered for the faith. Gomez recalled how one man of his town was killed on the spot by soldiers who didn’t believe he didn’t know where a certain priest was hiding.
“In another town, Valle de Guadalupe, conditions were very bad for all the people. Many ranchers were lynched, and if you give something to eat to the Cristeros, death,” Gomez said.
Frustrated by their inability to hunt down the Cristeros, Gomez said the soldiers evacuated the countryside in some parts of Mexico, forcing the rural population to bring all their livestock with them and move into the towns. Then, anyone found outside town would be shot on sight.
Besides learning about the Cristero War from his late uncles, Gomez also heard it from the other side, from a former colonel in the Mexican army who had moved to Capilla de Guadalupe.
“His name was Jose Barba, and he would laugh as he talked about how his soldiers tried to take out image of the Virgin from a church, but couldn’t get it down, or how the soldiers would rape the nuns,” Gomez said.
A grandson of the colonel now lives near Gomez in southwest Detroit, he said, “and he says his grandfather was a very bad man.”
“He told me that when his grandfather married his grandmother, the first time he came to her house in our town, he pulled out his pistol and shot all the saints’ statues she had in the house,” Gomez said.
With atrocities being committed on both sides, the Mexican bishops were mixed in their response to the Cristero War. The American ambassador, Dwight Whitney Morrow — famous aviator Charles Lindberg’s father-in-law — became actively involved in trying to persuade the Mexican government to relent.
When the archbishop of Mexico City, from his exile in the U.S., signaled that the Church would not require the laws against it to be repealed, only that they not be enforced, Morrow was able to work out an agreement for a truce.
Churches began operating again in late June 1929, but damage had been done. More than 40 priests had been killed, and a great many had fled or been expelled. By the mid-1930s, only 334 Catholic priests were officially licensed to serve in a country of 15 million people — down from about 4,500 a decade before.
As Gomez put it, “Pope Pius XI started up Mass again, but the Church had no money.”
Although Calles was no longer president, he remained the country’s “maximum chief” well into the 1930s, insisting on a radically secularized program of “socialist education.” The Calles Law was repealed under President Lorenzo Cardenas, who condemned Calles’ policy in 1935, but the official animosity toward the Church didn’t really abate until President Manuel Avila Camacho — a practicing Catholic — took office in 1940.
Gomez said his uncles told him of the great privations the Cristeros’ endured, in addition to facing the armed might of the Mexican government.
“Sometimes they would eat once a day, sometimes nothing to eat for three days, or have no water. But they preferred to die to not believing in God,” he said.
