In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.
By adopting the Italian practice of spiritual pilgrimage, the archbishop hoped to rekindle the faith of Mexico's demoralized Catholics and enlist the laity in the spiritual struggle against lerdista anticlericalism.Footnote 1 The practice would also strengthen the religious bonds between Mexico and Catholic Europe, since it called on Mexicans to transport themselves mentally to places such as the Grotto of Lourdes in France and the Holy House of Loreto in Italy.Footnote 2 In effect, the exercise would serve to alter the mental maps that structured Mexicans' religious worlds, adding sacred sites in France, Italy, and Spain to religious imaginations often oriented around local shrines and miraculous images.Footnote 3 Guided spiritual travel to places such as Lourdes—site of a recent Marian apparition and a symbol of Catholic intransigence in the face of modern rationalism—would furthermore help to propagate the Ultramontane style of Catholicism associated with Pius IX's pontificate.
The exercise would not relegate Mexico's own locally rooted religiosity to the sidelines. Rather, the Papal Brief of 1874 specified that Mexican pilgrims undertaking the virtual journey during the 30-day period should travel first to holy sites in “other nations,” then to the “most celebrated sanctuaries of the Mexican republic,” and lastly to those sites associated with the life and death of Jesus in the Holy Land.Footnote 4 That is, Mexican sacred places, including proto-national pilgrimage sites such as the Basilica of Guadalupe and regional and local hubs of devotion such as the shrine of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos (Jalisco), were to be placed symbolically in the company of the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua, the cathedral at Santiago Compostela, and the Hill of Calvary itself. Spiritual pilgrimage would thus prompt Mexican believers to reimagine the place of their nation—and indeed their towns and villages—in a larger network of Catholic holy sites that transcended the Atlantic and united American and European believers in a single spiritual community. Further, it asked them to lend their spiritual energies to the Church's global struggle against liberalism, since Mexican lerdismo, Italian unification, and German Kulturkampf were considered symptoms of a common political malady that demanded a universal religious solution.
As such, the practice provides historians with a unique opportunity to reexamine Catholic globalization in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, an analysis of the spiritual pilgrimage underlines the importance of transnational currents to understanding religious change and Catholic political mobilization in Mexico. Recent scholarship has stressed the plural and local-centric nature of modern Mexican Catholicism—insights that have greatly enhanced our understanding of the cultural lenses ordinary people used to confront the great political transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 5 Yet, fewer advances have been made in connecting local Catholicism to transnational processes and trends, especially in the sphere of religious practice.Footnote 6 To be sure, scholars have identified a process of “Romanization” of American churches in the late nineteenth century, a series of institutional reforms meant to shore up Vatican control over the fragmented and largely autonomous national churches of the Americas and thereby strengthen the Church's hand against hostile governments.Footnote 7 As Cecilia Bautista García has demonstrated, in Mexico such papal centralization intensified in the final decade of the nineteenth century, and it took the form of new, Rome-imposed programs of reform and the direct intervention of papal emissaries in the administration of Mexican dioceses.Footnote 8 Nonetheless, the spiritual pilgrimage and other religious developments in Mexico suggest that Romanization had an earlier, more cultural and more malleable phase. This earlier trend for Catholic globalization encompassed new and personal relations between Mexican clergyman and Pius IX, the creation of institutional links between Mexico and Rome, and displays of symbolic affinity between Mexican and European devotions. The spiritual pilgrimage was one such symbolic display, and it captured a moment in the spread of a new, Ultramontane style of Catholicism—a complex of rituals, symbols, gestures, and devotions meant to harness worldwide Catholic sentiment in favor of the beleaguered pope.Footnote 9
If the evidence generated by the spiritual pilgrimage points to the increasing purchase of Ultramontane Catholicism in Mexico, it also suggests that such religious change was not simply a Roman imposition. Since the 1850s, Mexican clerics had worked to forge spiritual and institutional links with Catholic Europe, which they put to essentially domestic ends. Through such links, they hoped to restore the “ruined foundation” of the Mexican Church in the wake of its crushing defeat of 1867, when liberals under Benito Juárez overturned the Church-supported Second Empire and executed the Austrian interloper at its head.Footnote 10 Weakened and politically tainted by its involvement in the French intervention, the Mexican Church pursued devotional renovation along Ultramontane lines as part of a larger scheme for institutional revival and religious modernization.Footnote 11 More importantly, practices like spiritual pilgrimage allowed Mexicans to claim increasingly important roles for their myriad local cults and for regional pilgrimage traditions in the Catholic world. Mexican bishops interpreted papal favors to Mexico as proof of the nation's privileged position, and they took advantage of the Papal Brief's open-ended nature and Mexico's tradition of diocesan autonomy to promote favorite saints and exalt local shines in their respective jurisdictions. Thus, Catholic globalization in the late nineteenth century simultaneously reinforced Mexican religious localism while promoting the reform of the faith along Ultramontane lines.Footnote 12
This essay analyzes the 1874 spiritual pilgrimage in Mexico and situates the practice within the larger contexts of Ultramontane globalization and Mexican anticlericalism. It begins by considering the changing nature of virtual and physical pilgrimage in the Catholic world over the longue durée, and then assesses the 1874 pilgrimage's relationship to Catholic revival on both continents. Next, it turns to the practice of spiritual pilgrimage itself, examining pastoral writings, newspapers, and parish-level documentation, and comparing several surviving “spiritual itineraries” to demonstrate how Mexican clerics and laypeople implemented and reshaped the Italian practice. Diocesan correspondence, especially, allows historians to draw some preliminary conclusions about the extent and forms of popular practice in several dioceses, even if it does not preserve the voices of ordinary participants.Footnote 13
Taken together, the evidence suggests that popular responses to the spiritual pilgrimage were decidedly mixed. Certainly, some Catholic communities—particularly in the archdioceses of Mexico and Michoacán and the diocese of Zamora—hewed to the Ultramontane line and boasted fairly widespread observance. Yet even in the central-western Catholic heartland, local religious conflict, political turmoil, and clerical laxity sometimes presented significant obstacles to the project. Outside that zone, the pilgrimage encountered even more rocky terrain. Clerics and laypeople in places such as Guerrero and Nuevo León tailored the pilgrimage to regional tastes, thus contesting the centralizing designs of Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos. In other places, the pilgrimage failed to garner much interest at all. Perhaps most tellingly, Mexican clerics and laypeople declined to develop an institutional structure that could sustain the practice for the long term and make it part of the popular religious calendar. Designed as a kind of spiritual set-piece, the practice soon made way for other Ultramontane strategies, especially the staging of elaborate pontifical coronations of local virgins. Despite its one-off nature, though, the pilgrimage captures a pivotal moment in the Mexican Church's increasingly globalized strategy for restoration, since its call for imaginative identification with Rome paved the way for subsequent, more permanent devotional innovations of an Ultramontane hue.
Spiritual Travel and the Nature of Modern Pilgrimage
Catholics have long embarked on “imagined” or “virtual” spiritual journeys to holy sites.Footnote 14 Indeed, interior travel is fundamental to the Christian mystical tradition, since, as Victor and Edith Turner have reminded us, “Pilgrimage may be thought of as extroverted mysticism, just as mysticism is introverted pilgrimage.”Footnote 15 For much of Catholic history, the goal of introverted travel was to develop an affective relationship with Jesus Christ by accompanying him in his Passion.Footnote 16 Structural and political barriers to physical pilgrimage—particularly the rigors of the cloister and the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman forces in the fifteenth century—also played a role in spurring innovations in contemplative travel, some forms of which relied on somatic aids such as pilgrimage accounts, paintings, and relics that could engage the religious imagination of the pilgrim. For cloistered religious women, virtual pilgrimage offered the opportunity to transcend the convent walls, where they could relive the mysteries and emotions of Jesus's life and death or marvel at the great churches of Rome through exercises of contemplation and bodily reenactment. Crucially, with papal approval in the fifteenth century, they could also earn indulgences at the same rate offered to those who made physical journeys to Palestine or Rome.Footnote 17
Under the influence of the Franciscan order, especially, monastic forms of mental travel developed over the seventeenth century into more regimented practices such as the Stations of the Cross (Via Crucis), in which devotees retraced Jesus's march to crucifixion along a miniaturized pilgrimage route.Footnote 18 Painted or sculpted images of the stations—which proliferated throughout the Catholic world in various versions long before the standardization of an official, 14-station Via Crucis in the early eighteenth century—served as immersive aids to mental travel, and their adoption by parish priests allowed for significant democratization of the practice beyond the religious elite. Indeed, the still gestational Via Crucis came to the Americas with the Franciscan missionaries, where it was used to teach the neophytes about the central mysteries of the faith.Footnote 19 Though Via Crucis displays were not a universal feature of Mexican churches by the time of independence, they exerted a strong pull on many local religious cultures. In fact, Mexican priests and pious individuals were still commissioning Via Crucis cycles for their parish churches or private oratories in the 1870s.Footnote 20
Mexicans thus had some exposure to the practice of virtual travel—at least as it related to the Via Crucis—by the time of the 1874 spiritual pilgrimage. Furthermore, interiorized and mental forms of piety flourished in certain Mexican Catholic circles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such an inward spiritual turn owed much to the efforts of enlightened Catholic reformers, who rejected the collectivity and externality of baroque religion in favor of a more austere and individualized piety.Footnote 21 Yet, interiority was also central to the spiritual practices of the reformers' erstwhile adversaries, including the Jesuits and the more traditionalist Catholic elites who favored the creative refashioning of baroque religiosity over rigorous reform.Footnote 22 In the eighteenth century, for example, Mexico City's Oratorian Congregation popularized the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, which took the form of guided self-reflection and meditation in an atmosphere of enclosure. From Margaret Mary Alacoque and her Jesuit followers, Mexicans of the era also adopted the Holy Hour, a weekly ritual of contemplation—performed Thursday nights in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament—that took devotees figuratively to Gethsemane during Christ's hour of agony.Footnote 23 In the nineteenth century, a new lay association, the Vela Perpetua, channeled female religious ferment into quiet meditation of the Eucharist.Footnote 24 Given this context of religious introversion, the 1874 spiritual pilgrimage would not have been wholly alien to the devotional repertoire of many Mexican Catholics.
The pilgrimage sought interiority not for its own sake, however, but in response to a frustrated call for extroverted pious travel. In Europe, a new pilgrimage style was emerging, in tandem with a renewed emphasis on apparition and miraculous healing. Crucially, this revival took on distinctly political hues, related as it was to the continent's culture wars and the spread of a new Marian devotionalism. High-profile Marian apparitions at La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), and Pontmain (1871), along with Pius IX's 1854 definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, served as direct repudiations of modern rationalism and reaffirmations of divine power in the physical world. The Virgin of La Salette warned of a looming catastrophe born of religious indifference, for example, and at Lourdes the Immaculate Conception demanded penitence of an errant humanity. The sacred spring that the Virgin revealed at the apparition site cured sicknesses that modern medicine could not. France's national pilgrimage events of the 1870s channeled popular anti-liberal sentiments into mass, voluntary acts of devotion and expiation for modern sins—chief among these the Paris Commune of 1871.Footnote 25 The ancient Christian tradition of bodily pilgrimage was thus being reinvigorated and reimagined as a salve for the wounds inflicted on the Church by liberalism, revolution, and anticlericalism.
The new, popular Marianism of France dovetailed neatly with the spiritual and political aims of Pius IX, who had become liberalism's most intractable foe in the course of the Italian unification effort. Pio Nono's condemnation of modern “isms” in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), his adoption of papal infallibility during the First Vatican Council (1869-70), and his intransigence in the face of the Risorgimento earned him a reputation as an arch-reactionary. The clerics, Catholic intellectuals, and laypeople who rallied to his side in Europe, meanwhile, were labeled Ultramontanes, since they looked “beyond the Alps” to Rome for spiritual and temporal leadership. In collaboration with the Roman Curia, they pressed for the centralization of Church power in the papacy (against Gallicanism and Josephinism) and developed an emotive, expiatory religious style centered on the Virgin Mary and the pontiff himself. Jesuit devotions that emphasized atonement for modern sins, especially the Month of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, had increasing purchase among Ultramontane Catholics, for whom the sudden reappearance of the Virgin in Europe supplied proof of God's displeasure with modern society.Footnote 26 This, then, was a battle for the soul of Catholic Europe, and it was to be fought primarily using spiritual means—what Peter D'Agostino has aptly called “rituals of protest.”Footnote 27
Yet, if this new style of Catholicism rejected rationalism, it was not itself anti-modern. Ultramontane Catholicism selectively appropriated Enlightenment ideas (freedom, popular will), and used modern forms of communication, transportation, and organization (the periodical press, the passenger train and steamship, the modern devotional association) to mobilize the faithful. Indeed, the Catholic revival of the era depended on an unprecedented expansion of the role of the laity, and its call to lay mobilization resonated especially for women, who found new opportunities for leadership in lay associations and Catholic voluntarism.Footnote 28 The new, modern form of pilgrimage set in motion by the Marian apparitions reflected these trends, reconfiguring pilgrimage as both a mass democratic act and a statement of political resistance.Footnote 29 As Christopher Clark has noted, the “New Catholicism” created a “transnational community of sentiment” in Europe, since Ultramontane publications worked to connect the struggles of Catholics in various countries and foster solidarity through projects such as the Óbolo di San Pietro (Spanish: Óbolo de San Pedro), a small voluntary donation sent by individuals throughout the Catholic world to subsidize the defense of the Papal States.Footnote 30 Meanwhile, the spread of devotions such as the Miraculous Medal, which was a gold medallion commemorating the apparition of Mary to Catherine Labouré in 1830, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus unmoored European Catholicism from specific localities, making Catholic material culture and new devotional trends widely available for consumption across state lines.Footnote 31
Mexican Ultramontanism
Yet Ultramontane Catholicism was not solely a continental trend. Mexican high clerics enthusiastically embraced the new religious style and contributed to its development, as they forged new relationships with the papacy and other European Catholic institutions. Such an embrace of Ultramontanism was related to Mexico's own particularly severe history of Church-state conflicts in the nineteenth century. Over the course of the Liberal-Conservative civil wars, a segment of the Mexican clergy had become increasingly disgusted with the tradition of state patronage developed in the colonial era and appropriated by nineteenth-century politicians seeking to subjugate the Church to the nascent state. In resisting liberal attempts to disentail Church property and broaden the civil jurisdiction, Mexican prelates such as Labastida y Dávalos (then the bishop of Puebla) and Michoacán bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía adopted an unabashedly Ultramontane position, conceiving of the Church as a kind of supra-national state headquartered in Rome and imbued with sovereignty and independence.Footnote 32
Such Ultramontanism drove clerical support for conservative caudillos and for Maximilian's short-lived Second Empire. Nonetheless, the direct political involvement of the Mexican clergy in the partisan turmoil of the 1850s and 1860s made it increasingly vulnerable to punitive attacks by the liberals. Indeed, during the Reform Wars, the liberals implemented laws nationalizing Church property, dissolving religious brotherhoods, declaring freedom of worship and the separation of Church and state, and expanding the civil jurisdiction over marriages and burials. Subsequent “laws of reform” curtailed public acts of religiosity and mandated that public officials take an oath to uphold the liberal constitution of 1857 and the new anticlerical legislation. Liberal lawmakers also expelled eight of the country's 11 bishops.Footnote 33
Foreign exile, however, offered new opportunities for strengthening Mexico's bonds to the papacy and new tools for effecting a religious revival back home. In Roman exile, Mexican prelates nurtured new personal and institutional relationships with the Vatican and steeped themselves in the cosmopolitan devotional trends of the continent. Pius IX signaled his esteem for Labastida y Dávalos by granting him the title of Domestic Prelate (an honorary title bestowable only by the pope) and making him Assistant to the Pontifical Throne. For his part, Labastida y Dávalos became increasingly interested in Old World (and especially Italian) geography during this time, even making his own pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1862.Footnote 34 Before embarking for the east, he joined the Crusades-era Order of the Holy Sepulcher, donning, as his eulogist would put it, “the spurs of Godfrey of Bouillon and [taking] up the sword of the crusader.”Footnote 35 Along with five other exiled Mexican bishops, Labastida y Dávalos also attended the canonization ceremony of Mexico's first saint, San Felipe de Jesús, in Rome in 1862.Footnote 36 Although Felipe de Jesús was only one of 26 seventeenth-century Franciscan martyrs celebrated in Rome that day, we should not discount the symbolic importance of his canonization to Mexican Catholics. In the midst of the country's transnational entanglement with Europe, a Mexican holy man had finally gotten the nod from Rome.Footnote 37
Mexican churchmen repaid such papal favors by fomenting solidarity with the embattled Pio Nono. Most of the exiled prelates returned to Mexico in 1868 when the government of Benito Juárez reversed the order of expulsion, but many continued to follow the “Roman Question” closely and exhort their respective flocks to support Pius IX with prayers and voluntary donations via the Óbolo de San Pedro.Footnote 38 Ten Mexican bishops also attended the First Vatican Council of 1869–70, and although Vatican I became the site of controversy over the dogma of papal infallibility, all of Mexico's prelates closed ranks around Pius IX and adopted the Ultramontane position.Footnote 39 During the council, Labastida also received a special dispensation from Pius IX, enabling him to grant papal blessings and plenary indulgences to penitent Mexicans who prayed for the triumph of the Church. This precedent-setting privilege—which in effect turned the Mexican prelate into a kind of papal vicar—was followed by other papal favors to Mexican clerics, including permission to participate in the spiritual pilgrimage.Footnote 40
New connections between Mexico and Catholic Europe had concrete institutional ramifications, too. In 1862, Labastida y Dávalos and Munguía petitioned the pope for a major ecclesiastical restructuring in Mexico, one that would raise the bishoprics of Michoacán and Guadalajara to the status of ecclesiastical provinces (archdioceses) and create seven new dioceses. Pius IX not only approved the scheme but sent Labastida y Dávalos and Munguía back to Mexico at the head of the reorganized Church, as archbishops of Mexico and Michoacán, respectively. Regionally focused on the center-west, a historic Catholic stronghold and recently the scene of strong local liberal movements, the restoration aimed to reform the rural clergy, implant new models of priestly education, and combat “religious indifference,” devotional error, and Protestant conversion among the flock.
Culturally, such reform projects drew direct inspiration from the Ultramontane Catholicism of Europe, especially in its Roman, French, and Spanish varieties.Footnote 41 European-style devotions and lay associations dedicated to the Good Death, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Virgin of Lourdes made appearances in central Mexico, often at the behest of Mexican high clerics eager to modernize local practices. Religious congregations and lay associations dedicated to charitable and educational work, many of them of French origin, grew explosively.Footnote 42 Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos (controversially) recruited foreign Jesuits to lead his seminary, and his nephew, Father José Antonio Plancarte y Labastida, developed a plan to send young men from his parish of Jacona (Michoacán) to study for the priesthood in Europe. In sum, European institutions and devotions augmented the Mexican hierarchy's own project for religious restoration, and they served as tools to be employed alongside Catholic educational initiatives, frequent pastoral visits and missions, and closer supervision of the rural clergy and their flocks.Footnote 43
Such trends suggest that Romanization was not simply a political project for papal centralization—it was also an attempt to reform and modernize Mexican religious culture itself. Likewise, the spiritual pilgrimage offered Mexican Catholics who lacked the means to travel abroad an opportunity to immerse themselves figuratively in the modern, cosmopolitan religiosity of the continent and the “pure” and ancient Christianity of the Holy Land. There, believers would follow spiritually in the footsteps of their well-traveled religious leaders, whose own experiences of exile and pilgrimage in the Old World had proven formative. Labastida y Dávalos's sojourns had taken him to Italy, Spain, and the Holy Land, but also to England, where he arranged for his two nephews to study at the seminary at Saint Mary's College in Oscott.Footnote 44 Along the way, the trio observed European practices, such as pontifical coronation, that inspired later projects in Mexico.Footnote 45
Meanwhile, Rafael Sábas Camacho, the Guadalajara canon (and future bishop of Querétaro) who accompanied Labastida y Dávalos on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1862, offered readers back home a taste of the pilgrimage experience by penning an account of his journey from Rome to Jerusalem, which he published in 1873.Footnote 46 In it, the canon took pains to describe the sites along his itinerary, including Naples, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, and he remarked on the wonders of travel in a modern steamship. Such reading material would have proven useful for Catholics preparing to undergo a mental journey to the faith's Old World center in 1874. Further, as Camacho's book suggested, pious travel could also help Mexicans to reform their own religious customs. Alongside long, emotional descriptions of his visits to places sanctified by Christ and the early saints, Camacho made space for an extended celebration of the “true Gregorian, Roman chant” used by the Franciscans of Jerusalem and the prelates of Rome, drawing unflattering comparisons with the vernacular and “profane” music that accompanied the Mexican Mass. Embarrassed by the way Mexican priests “disfigured the holy melodies” of the Mass, he made it his personal mission to introduce the Gregorian style back home in Jalisco.Footnote 47 Here, then, was a concrete example of the ways in which travel could change Mexican Catholics' religious worlds, initiating them as members of a “pure” version of Catholicism. Spiritual pilgrimage could serve as an initiation too, since it suggested that, in the ever-shrinking modern world, Mexicans could endeavor to go much further afield than their local shrine in search of religious edification—even if only in spirit.Footnote 48
Pilgrimage and the Challenges of Lerdismo
An attention to the religious logic of spiritual pilgrimage should not, however, blind us to its political significance. After all, if the exercise was part of a larger clerical attempt to revive and reform the faith, it also constituted a novel response to lerdista attempts to curtail public religiosity in 1873. Certainly, the novelty of the practice was not lost on the editors of Morelia's liberal La Bandera de Ocampo, who sarcastically warned that Mexican bishops were leading their flocks toward Spiritism.Footnote 49 Nonetheless, the spiritual nature of the pilgrimage made the act particularly suitable to Mexico's changing political circumstances. The execution of Maximilian had dashed clerical hopes for a durable alliance between throne and altar. Instead, Mexico's high clerics turned their energies inward to focus on clerical and devotional reform and the creation of a Catholic counterculture within a secular regime.Footnote 50 Such a project was built on the selective appropriation of liberal tenets, including popular sovereignty and individual rights, which could be used to counter the anticlerical designs of the Juárez and Lerdo regimes. The Ultramontane Catholicism of Europe, with its “rituals of protest” and modern forms of association and Catholic solidarity, offered an apt model for such a project.
Of course, the Church's turn away from politics reflected practical considerations, too. Still reeling from its mid-century losses and weary of provoking further anticlerical attacks, the Mexican Church was ill disposed to dive headlong into another standoff with the liberal government. Indeed, the hierarchy struck a conciliatory stance toward the state, even as lay outrage over the lerdista reforms boiled over into real violence. The Laws of Reform (introduced as emergency war measures between 1859 and 1861 but raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government in 1873) triggered an explosion of Catholic dissent across Mexico, and by mid 1874 Lerdo faced a significant armed rebellion in Michoacán. Essentially a movement to restore Catholic exclusivity and overturn the Laws of Reform, this so-called “Religionero” rebellion rallied its followers to the cry of “Death to the Protestants! Long live religion!”Footnote 51
Crucially, public acts of devotion, including collective pilgrimage, sometimes sparked local uprisings, especially when state forces intervened in order to enforce the ban on public worship.Footnote 52 In April 1874, for example, the eastern Michoacán town of Angangueo witnessed a violent confrontation between the prefect of Zitácuaro and a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Atotonilco (Guanajuato), when the official tried to break up the pilgrimage.Footnote 53 In early 1875, the prefect of the Zinapécuaro district arrested 32 men who were carrying three images in procession from Queréndaro to Araró, the latter an important regional pilgrimage destination. The official feared that the pilgrimage was only a pretext for Religionero mobilization.Footnote 54 It is true that enforcement of the Laws of Reform's ban on public worship varied from nonexistent to fairly rigorous across Mexican locales, and that Michoacán might be characterized as particularly prone to religious conflict. Nonetheless, physical pilgrimage in other regions also had the potential to become a source of considerable Church-state friction in the lerdista context.Footnote 55
The Mexican hierarchy was eager to avoid such friction. Notwithstanding accusations of clerical collusion with the rebellion by liberal editorialists, the Church neither supported the Religionero movement nor advocated violating the Laws of Reform. In fact, in a pivotal joint pastoral letter issued in early 1875, Mexico's three archbishops explicitly condemned armed rebellion.Footnote 56 In the preamble, they expressed a desire to “impede [Mexican Catholics] from being dragged and impelled by their religious susceptibility into hostile demonstrations and threats of violence, which we are far from desiring and positively condemn as contrary to the peace and public order, and, as such, contrary to the doctrine of the Church and religion.”Footnote 57 Instead, they counseled the laity to pursue Catholic restoration through peaceful means, using the guarantees provided by the liberal constitution (freedom of association, freedom of worship, freedom of education). The latter included joining lay associations such as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, creating new private Catholic schools to counteract liberal education, and providing voluntary donations to their parishes in order to skirt the Laws of Reform's prohibition of public tithe collection by Church officials. In effect, the archbishops sought to reconfigure the Church as a countercultural silo in a secularized society.
The spiritual pilgrimage of 1874 advanced this countercultural project, since it offered a concrete way to rally the Mexican laity to the defense of the Church without promoting armed rebellion. For Labastida y Dávalos, the practice would not only show the “enemies of the Church” that laws could not extinguish the spirit of religion, but would also expose the hypocrisy of the liberal program itself, since the latter proclaimed freedom of association yet restricted the rights of Catholics to carry out collective acts of devotion in public. Despite the perils faced by the Church, therefore, the prelate concluded his pilgrimage instructions by offering thanks that God had not allowed the civil power to restrict the “liberty of conscience, the liberty of thought, the liberty, in sum, of the spirit.”Footnote 58
Spiritual pilgrimage thus pressed Ultramontane Catholicism into the service of combating lerdismo. If it operated as a ritual of solidarity with the pope, its interiorized character and its call to the laity to make use of modern “liberties” reflected adjustments to particularly Mexican circumstances. Mexican clerics adopted the practice not for lack of a national religious imagination, then, but as a strategic, globalized response to domestic conditions and religious priorities. Further, as we will see below, their version of the spiritual pilgrimage remained essentially Mexican, even while it opened up space for debate about the very nature of Mexican Catholicism.
Imagining the Catholic World
The Italian spiritual pilgrimage of 1873, from which the Mexican practice drew its inspiration, fused lay ferment at the grassroots with top-down papal centralism. With its origin in lay circles in Bologna in 1873, it sent a direct response to the prohibition of public pilgrimages. The prohibition was ostensibly meant to combat an outbreak of cholera, yet political motives clearly guided both the would-be pilgrims and the Italian officials who suppressed the pilgrimages. According to North American Protestant critics who followed the events of the Risorgimento, Bologna Catholics had planned a flurry of mass pilgrimages to Italian shrines in 1873 as an act of political defiance and perhaps even a call to armed rebellion. As the editor of the Christian World averred, “Under the pilgrim's cloak the form of the conspirator against the established order was plainly visible, and his staff might easily be laid down for a musket.”Footnote 59 The true object of the pilgrimages, according to the Protestant observer, was to marshal the forces of Ultramontanism for a crusade to reclaim the Papal States. As far as the Christian World was concerned, Pius IX and his duplicitous clergy were the true authors of such a conspiracy.
Notwithstanding such facile assumptions about clerical intrigue and manipulation, Pius IX was aware of the political utility of mass bodily pilgrimage, and he quickly moved to appropriate the lay practice of spiritual pilgrimage after Victor Emmanuel's government suppressed the former. As Apostolic Secretary Cardinal Fabio María Asquini explained in the original brief, the Bologna laypeople had asked the Roman Curia to grant indulgences to those who undertook the spiritual journey, hoping thus to popularize the practice. Not only did the pope accede to this request, but he also took steps to standardize the ritual and promote it throughout the Catholic world, scheduling the universal exercise for September 1873. He divided the month into three ten-day blocks, or decadi (Spanish: décadas), during which the faithful would travel spiritually to three different categories of holy site. The first decada would take pilgrims mentally to the Holy Land; the second to the celebrated shrines of Italy; and the third to “foreign” shrines. In its officially sanctioned instructional pamphlet, to be used as a guidebook for virtual pilgrims, the Roman Curia set the itinerary for each decade and prescribed a brief contemplative exercise for practice at each shrine.
The devotional guide doubled as a carefully crafted meta-narrative. The order of the three decades paralleled the historical and geographic trajectory of the Church, which emerged in Palestine and was consolidated in Italy, and then proliferated throughout the world. The first decade followed the events of Jesus's life in chronological order, with pilgrims beginning their journey at the Grotto of Bethlehem, witnessing Christ's transfiguration on Mt. Tabor and the resurrection of Lazarus in Bethany, and accompanying Jesus in his Passion and resurrection in Jerusalem. Its penultimate stop was at the Church of the Primacy of Saint Peter, located at the spot where Jesus vested leadership of the Church in the Apostle Peter and thereby established the apostolic succession that legitimated papal power. At the final Holy Land destination, the Mount of Olives, pilgrims were instructed to celebrate Christ's injunction to imitate his sacrifice and spread his Church across the globe, and they were to pray for the conversion of the “miserable people who in our times refute the teachings of the Church.”Footnote 60 Notwithstanding its lay origin, then, this was an exercise entirely in keeping with the intransigence and centralizing ethos of Pius IX.
The original spiritual pilgrimage's second and third decades further reinforced the theme of Catholic resistance to modern impiety. Mental journey around Italy, in the second decade, offered a counter-geography to the liberal Italian statehood heralded by the Risorgimento, since it linked sacred places both within and outside of the former Papal States and sought the aid of Italian saints such as Anthony of Padua, Francisco de Assisi, and Januarius of Naples in defeating “the customs of the devil, impiety, and modern libertinage.”Footnote 61 The itinerary of the final decade, dedicated to “foreign shrines,” likewise reflected Ultramontane priorities, beginning as it did with stops at La Salette and Issodun—the latter the site of a new shrine dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Mary—and concluding with a mental visit to Lourdes. In between, the itinerary took pilgrims to the shrines of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), St. Ignacio of Loyola (Spain), St. Thomas of Canterbury (England), and St. Boniface of Fulda (Germany). The itinerary included only one extra-European shrine, that of St. Francis Xavier of Goa, the co-founder of the Jesuit order who led extensive evangelization campaigns in Asia in the sixteenth century. Here, the faithful were to beseech St. Francis Xavier for aid against the “false apostles who spread lies and errors in this center of Catholicism.”Footnote 62 The Jesuit's evangelizing work among non-Christians in Asia, then, was to be linked symbolically to the reconversion of liberals back home in Italy.
Pius IX offered rich spiritual rewards for such acts of piety and ritual protest, which could be performed in church buildings or in the privacy of the home. Indeed, Catholics could earn 300 days of indulgences for each day that they practiced the pilgrimage during the month of September, as long as they undertook the journey with “a contrite heart.” Further, a plenary indulgence, to be applied only to the souls in Purgatory, could be gained by those who completed an entire decade of spiritual travel and who, after confession and communion, visited any church in order to pray for “peace among Christian princes, the extirpation of heresies, and the exaltation of the Holy Mother Church.”Footnote 63 Crucially, these indulgences were a one-time offering: they could be garnered only for spiritual pilgrimage and only during September of 1873. Such temporal limits had a theological rationale, since the concentration of Catholic prayers was thought to increase their spiritual efficacy.
In its carefully crafted itinerary, Italo-centric yet transnational, and its highly regimented and politicized devotional exercises, the original spiritual pilgrimage faithfully reflected the Ultramontane drives toward globalization and papal centralization. Essentially a ritual of globalized spiritual solidarity with the pontiff, the practice sought to join Catholics across Europe (and, theoretically, across the world) in a singular spiritual struggle with liberalism.Footnote 64 Within the context of Western Europe, such Catholic transnationalism is notable but perhaps not surprising, given the rise of opposition between the liberal and Catholic transnational “public spheres” in the mid nineteenth century.Footnote 65 In such a context, the pilgrimage served as a spiritual parallel to the economic solidarity offered by Catholics via the Óbolo di San Pietro and the militaristic solidarity of the papalist volunteer militiamen.Footnote 66
What is extraordinary, however, is the singularly enthusiastic adoption of the practice by Mexican clerics and laypeople an ocean away from Rome. For Mexico, the adoption of the practice involved overcoming significant structural and cultural hurdles. First, the slower pace of transatlantic correspondence meant that Mexican prelates did not learn of the practice until early 1874, too late to participate in the universal ritual. Since the indulgences had expired at the end of September 1873, it took several “urgent and submissive” petitions from Labastida y Dávalos and a special dispensation by Pius IX to reactivate the indulgences for Mexicans.Footnote 67 Surely, the close personal relationship between Pio Nono and Labastida y Dávalos, along with the Roman Curia's strategic interest in reconnecting with Latin American churches, played an important role in such a concession. Thus, the pontiff himself altered the structure of the practice to include Mexican shrines, and he changed the order of the pilgrimage's three decades, repositioning Mexico's national itinerary in between mental visits to Europe and the Holy Land.Footnote 68 Such a reordering likewise followed a narrative logic, tracing the spread of Catholicism from Europe to Mexico, whose demoralized and neglected believers would then journey figuratively back to the Holy Land as pilgrims rediscovering the origins of their faith. As such, the practice offered the Mexican Church an opportunity to move closer to Catholicism's geographic core in a symbolic sense.
Yet, even with papal approval, Mexican churchmen seeking to implement the practice faced other questions. Which Mexican shrines should be included in the visit, considering the notoriously provincial character of Mexican Catholicism? Which European and Palestinian places would be privileged? Would the practice call down the wrath of zealous secular authorities? And how would Mexican Catholics, the vast majority of whom were poor, rural people who had never visited Europe or the Holy Land, imagine the celebrated sites at the center of the Catholic world in the first place? A dearth of firsthand accounts of the experience of spiritual pilgrimage keeps definitive answers to the latter question mostly out of reach. However, pastoral writings, parish correspondence, and the various spiritual itineraries adopted by Mexican bishops in 1874 do offer some intriguing clues about the how the practice was conceived, organized, and implemented.
First, the clerics used published manuals and pastoral instructions—sometimes based on the Italian original, sometimes created from whole cloth—to stimulate the religious imagination of the faithful, and they enlisted the lower clergy and sectors of the mobilized laity to serve as spiritual guides for would-be pilgrims. Second, bishops modified the Italian practice to reflect their own religious priorities and the political circumstances of their dioceses. Rather than a simple imitation, then, the spiritual pilgrimage constituted a creative refashioning of a European trend. Indeed, despite the strong centralizing ethos and zeal for uniformity of the pilgrimage's central promoter—Labastida y Dávalos—the practice was carried out in a highly regionalized and autonomous fashion outside of the archbishopric of Mexico. Such regional variation is well in keeping with sociologist Roderic Ai Camp's depiction of the modern Mexican Church, whose bishops have long functioned as autonomous actors within their respective jurisdictions.Footnote 69
Although Labastida y Dávalos wielded considerable influence, thanks in large part to his connections to Rome and his role in the Reforma conflicts, the archbishop's powers were mostly restricted to his own ecclesiastical province.Footnote 70 Thus, although Mexican bishops generally embraced the practice and worked to promote it in their respective dioceses, many also tailored the pilgrimage to what they referred to as the “special circumstances” of their territories. The resulting practices reflected a diversity of religious preferences and political postures. Certainly, each diocesan pilgrimage served to promote the cosmopolitan Catholicism of Pius IX's Rome and call Mexican Catholics to spiritual action in the pope's defense. Yet the cumulative effect of the regionally tailored practices was to create space for local, regional, and national Mexican devotions on the map of global Catholicism. Rather than a simple tool of Romanization, then, the spiritual pilgrimage reflected a more malleable and responsive, if no less hierarchal, form of religious globalization.
Mexican Cults and the Routes of Intransigence
As we have seen, permission for Mexican participation in the spiritual pilgrimage came by way of Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos. After receiving the papal dispensation, the archbishop vigorously promoted the practice in his province and took pains to ensure its uniformity. To those ends, he sent a circular to all of the parish priests of his archdiocese, who were to affirm their intention to carry out the practice in their respective parishes, and he circulated a specially made guidebook and itinerary “with the intention of uniformizing the spirit of the faithful.”Footnote 71 The prelate enlisted a Mexico City publisher, Enrique Neve, to print the finished pamphlet, and he coordinated with Neve during the spiritual pilgrimage to ensure timely distribution.Footnote 72 In a departure from the Italian model, the prelate mandated that each day of spiritual travel begin at a church building, and not in a private home.Footnote 73 Such a provision had political ramifications, since the spectacle of scores of Catholics moving individually or in groups to church buildings could deliver a powerful message about popular attitudes toward liberalism. Labastida y Dávalos also used his authority to add 40 days' indulgence per day of spiritual travel to the 300 days offered by Pius IX.
At each stop in the itinerary, the archbishop provided brief devotional exercises to inspire contemplation and help pilgrims to visualize Old World sites. On the second day of the first decade, for example, pilgrims would figuratively “climb the Mount of the Guard, near Bologna, and prostrated before the image of Mary painted by Saint Luke, we will ask her to conserve us in our faith.”Footnote 74 Such exercises doubled as tools for teaching Mexican Catholics about the history of holy images and places a world away. Consider, for example, the entry for day seven of the first decade, which informed pilgrims that Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza “is one of the oldest images venerated in Spain, and with good reason it is believed that the Apostle James the Greater introduced the public cult [to the image].”Footnote 75 To further aid in pious contemplation at specific sites, the guide also borrowed and translated a series of prayers from the Roman Society for Catholic Interests, the lay association that had organized the spiritual pilgrimage in Rome the previous year.
Labastida y Dávalos's virtual itinerary reflected both personal devotional tastes and strategic priorities for Catholic restoration in Mexico. His first decade, dedicated to shrines in Europe, prioritized Italian sites (five of the ten destinations), some of which he had visited during his exile.Footnote 76 After visits to Loreto, Padua, Assisi, Mount Gargano, and the Mount of the Guard, the itinerary took travelers to Spain (Santiago Compostela and Zaragoza), England (Canterbury), and Prussia (Fulda), finally arriving in France, center of the new Ultramontane Marianism. Interestingly, in Mexico City the virtual journey to Lourdes on this final day of the first decade was accompanied by a membership drive for the Apostolado de la Oración (Apostleship of Prayer), a Catholic prayer group established by French Jesuits in the mid nineteenth century that sought to unite the hearts of Catholics across the world with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in an effort to attain “the triumph of the Church and the salvation of souls.”Footnote 77 In promoting the Apostolado, then, the archbishop sought to parlay the devotional set-piece of the pilgrimage into a more permanent form of Ultramontane globalism.
In the second decade, dedicated to spiritual travel to the “most notable sanctuaries” of Mexico, the archbishop carved out a route that foregrounded the geography of his own restorationist project. Certainly, the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the shrines of the Lord of Chalma (Mexico State) and Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos (Jalisco) were three of Mexico's most renowned religious places, and their inclusion in the itinerary was to be expected.Footnote 78 However, the rest of the itinerary reflected a clear preference for sites in central Mexico, cradle of Church power since the colonial period and focus of the ecclesiastical reorganization and restoration of the 1860s.Footnote 79 By including these lesser-known shrines in the itinerary, the prelate symbolically elevated the Virgin of Ocotlán (Tlaxcala), the Entombed Christ of Amecameca (Mexico State), the Virgin of Los Angeles (Puebla), Our Lady of Health of Pátzcuaro (Michoacán), and Our Lord of Health of Zamora (Michoacán) to the status of national icons worthy of a place on the map of global Catholicism. Of course, the inclusion of the shrine of Our Lord of Health, in Labastida y Dávalos's native Zamora, was likely as much a matter of local religious patriotism as it was a symbolic act. Yet Michoacán's preeminent place on the itinerary is notable, since the state had by the time of the spiritual pilgrimage become a kind of laboratory for the European-oriented reformism of Labastida y Dávalos and his clerical allies, not to mention its being the center of the Religionero movement.Footnote 80 In short, the spiritual journey around Mexico organized by the archbishop served to harness central Mexico's unique local devotions to the project of Ultramontane restoration.
Labastida y Dávalos's itinerary for spiritual travel to the Holy Land, in the third decade, followed a strict chronological order, retracing Jesus's footsteps from Bethlehem to the Holy Sepulcher. As such, it jettisoned the legitimizing meta-narrative of Pius IX's itinerary in favor of a more streamlined and pedagogical review of Christianity's central story. Indeed, since Catholics in Mexico City were to undertake the spiritual journey from churches and public oratories, Labastida y Dávalos prescribed specific church buildings for each day of the decade as a way to reinforce the theological links between local shrines and the Holy Land sites to which they referred. Thus, the virtual visit to the Cenacle (location of the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist) would be effected from Mexico City's church of Corpus Christi, and the Hill of Calvary would be accessed spiritually via the chapel of the Holy Cross.Footnote 81 Since the pilgrimage was to take place in October, an additional day was added to the 30-day itinerary. On October 31, Catholics were to visit any church where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, and there to offer thanks to God and promise “not to offend him again.”Footnote 82
Ultramontanism on the March in the Archdiocese of Mexico
The ecclesiastical record for 1874, though fractured, suggests widespread practice of the spiritual pilgrimage in the archdiocese of Mexico. As mentioned above, the archbishop took special pains to ensure that local religious officials implemented the practice among their flocks. Further, in response to various queries and in the hopes of maximizing lay participation, he vested all parish priests and even vicars with the power to absolve would-be pilgrims who were guilty of herejia mixta (a term denoting heresy of both thought and deed).Footnote 83 In mobilizing laypeople, he could also count on the support of Mexico City's Catholic press, and especially La Voz de México, mouthpiece of the recently established Sociedad Católica, a lay association.Footnote 84 Throughout the month, La Voz published daily notes about the pilgrimage, reminding the faithful of the physical and virtual locations to be visited and offering occasional expositions about the nature of the practice. On the latter occasions, the editors emphasized the political purpose of the pilgrimage. Before the virtual visit to Lourdes, for example, the paper explained that through “expiation and through the power of common prayer,” the spiritual pilgrimage would “move the divine mercy in favor of the anguished Church, of the Catholics cruelly persecuted in many nations, and of [the Church's] august chief, the Pontiff-King, unjustly despoiled of his domain and tyrannically held in a long and painful captivity.”Footnote 85 Mexico City's Catholic press and middle-class activists, then, were key partners of the archdiocese in the propagation and regimentation of the virtual pilgrimage. Their efforts seem to have paid off, too, since the archdiocesan hierarchy had to move the image of the Lord of Expiration from its chapel (site of the spiritual journey to Gethsemane on October 27) to the church of Santo Domingo to accommodate the large crowds of pilgrims.Footnote 86
Yet, the lay devotional ferment occasioned by the spiritual pilgrimage could also create conflict. Indeed, the Mexico City press played host to a brief but acrimonious dispute during the last decade of the pilgrimage, when the editors of La Voz complained that Presbyter Juan María Garay, priest of the church of Santo Domingo, had allowed a pianist to “profane” the somber atmosphere of the spiritual journey to Gethsemane with popular tunes, including “The Carnival of Venice.”Footnote 87 Father Garay shot back in the pages of El Pájaro Verde, denying that any profanation had occurred in his church and accusing the editors of La Voz of “excessive zeal.” Santo Domingo was home to “the most select [Catholics] of Mexican society,” he declared, and its organist, Professor Cornelio Camacho, enjoyed a highly favorable reputation “among those who have a taste for religious music.”Footnote 88 Though it quickly fizzled, the conflict suggests that among the well-to-do Catholics of the capitol, the spiritual pilgrimage offered an opportunity to enact a particularly cosmopolitan Catholic identity.
Outside of Mexico City, many rural priests and parishioners in the archdiocese enthusiastically embraced the spiritual pilgrimage. The vicar of Almoloya, who was at the time serving as interim cura of Tenoaya, wrote with urgency to the archbishop requesting that he name a full-time priest to Tenoaya so that he could lead his own parishioners in the spiritual pilgrimage.Footnote 89 Several other priests requested that the archbishopric extend their licenses without requiring that they attend the necessary ecclesiastical conference in Mexico City, citing the increased demand for confession among the pilgrims.Footnote 90 Participants at Tenango and Tepozotlán sought to augment the spiritual efficacy of the practice by exposing the Blessed Sacrament to public veneration in their parish churches during the event.Footnote 91 Such an act would necessitate close priestly supervision. Thus, the priest of Tultepec, in backing his parishioners' request for eucharistic exposition in all four of the parish's pueblos during the entire 30-day ritual, assured the archbishop that he would personally oversee the exercise in each pueblo. This meant rotating the venue for the practice each day among Tultepec, Tenopalco, Teyahualco, and Visitación, and to such ends, he crafted a scaled-down local itinerary by which the parish's spiritual pilgrims would follow the Host and its priestly custodian from pueblo to pueblo.Footnote 92 Here, physical movement between local pueblos stood in for travel to distant holy places.
If the spiritual pilgrimage inspired some communities, it faced significant obstacles in others. In Actopan, parishioners complained that the departure of vicario Fray Francisco Azoños, after a spat with a faction of dissident vecinos, had brought the spiritual pilgrimage to a halt in early October. Protestant agents had then leaped into the vacuum of religious leadership, “speaking Mexicano [Nahuatl] in an effort to seduce the Indians.” Actopan's pious Catholics hoped that Azoños's return would staunch the Protestant flow, but their more immediate concern was for access to a priest to hear their confession so that they could reap the spiritual rewards on offer for a full decade of virtual pilgrimage.Footnote 93 Days later, Tenango del Valle's pilgrimage was imperiled when communal caretakers of the chapel of the Calvary refused to turn it over to the priest named to the parish by the archbishopric. Catholics loyal to the archdiocese even petitioned for the intervention of the local civil authority to dislodge the dissidents, who had chained the doors of the church building to prevent the new priest from taking possession.Footnote 94 In Nopala, by contrast, Protestant converts and their allies in the local government had driven out the local priest, leaving the parish “in complete abandonment” and without the necessary leadership for the spiritual exercise.Footnote 95
Perhaps most tellingly, the pilgrimage experienced setbacks even at Chalma, a shrine of nearly national importance and a key stop on the pilgrimage itinerary. There, the Augustinian chaplain of the shrine, Fray Severiano Arellano, had lost his license to confess in response to reports that he “was never seen in the confessional,” and consequently the cura of nearby Ocuila found himself swamped with confession requests by spiritual pilgrims. As the overworked priest of Ocuila explained, the Augustinian ordinary was ignoring his requests for the “rehabilitation” of Arellano, which prompted him to go to Labastida y Dávalos instead. Yet, notwithstanding his desire to promote the spiritual pilgrimage at a key shrine, the archbishop refused to grant the license to the lax Augustinian friar, whom he considered “insubordinate.”Footnote 96
Domesticating the Spiritual Pilgrimage
Labastida y Dávalos may have envisioned the spiritual pilgrimage as a tightly regimented and centralized exercise, but it nonetheless faced significant local obstacles in the broken religious terrain of his archbishopric. What is more, such fragmentation was compounded outside the archdiocese, where Mexican bishops made recourse to their traditional autonomy to modify and domesticate Labastida y Dávalos's Ultramontane program. Back in August, the archbishop had sent word of the papal dispensation to the country's other 17 prelates, inviting them to implement the practice in their own dioceses in a month of their choosing. Notably, some received the news more enthusiastically than others. While the bishop of Oaxaca promised “complete compliance” with Labastida y Dávalos's plan for the spiritual pilgrimage and Michoacán's archbishop adopted the Mexican hierarchy's program and itinerary “in all its parts,” the interim bishop of Chilapa indicated only that he would do “as much as possible” to implement the practice.Footnote 97 Zacatecas's prelate, for his part, assured the archbishop that he “approved” of the practice and would “try to make sure [Labastida y Dávalos's] pious desires [were] realized.”Footnote 98 The bishop of Tamaulipas, the European-trained Ultramontane Ignacio Montes de Oca, hoped to carry out the pilgrimage, but he explained that he faced “obstacles that would not be comprehensible or even imaginable there [in the Archdiocese of Mexico], without understanding the impiety and glacial indifference of these regions, and the hostility of the majority of the priests to any kind of authority.”Footnote 99 Since Tamaulipas had been the focal point of a liberal schismatic movement in 1861, the bishop's fears were not unfounded.Footnote 100 In such places, both spiritual solidarity with Pius IX and Ultramontane reformism had their limits, and local and regional circumstances worked against even powerful reformers such as Labastida y Dávalos. Meanwhile, the bishops of Sonora and San Luis Potosí did not respond to the archbishop's circular at all.
Even in regions with fewer political and religious “obstacles,” however, the practice of spiritual pilgrimage remained far from uniform. Certainly, several prelates, including the archbishop of Michoacán and the bishop of Zamora, adopted Labastida y Dávalos's published guide and itinerary wholesale.Footnote 101 Considering the central-western bias of the original itinerary, its adoption by the hierarchies of Michoacán is perhaps unsurprising. However, other bishops found the religious flavor and geographic focus of the journey designed by Labastida y Dávalos less useful for their flocks, and they modified the itinerary accordingly. The interim bishop of Chilapa, for example, explained in his pastoral letter that he had taken the liberty to substitute several local shrines in his southern Mexican jurisdiction for those of Labastida y Dávalos's original, because many of the latter were “generally unknown here.” Thus, his parishioners would pay tribute to the images of Nuestro Padre Jesús of Acamixtla, Saint Nicholas Tolentino of Zitlala, and the Entombed Christ of Xalpatlahuac (all three in Guerrero), alongside the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Lord of Chalma.Footnote 102 The bishop of León likewise substituted several images of his native Guanajuato, including the Lord of Atotonilco (whose shrine was a pilgrimage destination of regional importance) and Our Lady of Light of León, the patron saint of his recently established diocese, for shrines in Puebla and Mexico State. Further, instead of adopting Labastida y Dávalos's itinerary for the first and third decade, as most bishops did, he offered new itineraries that reflected his own devotional preferences. Thus, the León bishop's revised first decade included two stops in Rome (Saint Mary Major and the Tomb of St. Peter), three in Spain (Zaragoza, Santiago Compostela, and Montserrat), and a visit to both Lourdes and La Salette in France—an itinerary befitting a cleric with a special affinity for French and Roman devotions.Footnote 103 The third decade of the León pilgrimage, meanwhile, retraced the events of Jesus's life chronologically, but in reverse.Footnote 104
If many Mexican prelates tended to share Labastida y Dávalos's concerns for Catholic revival and solidarity with Pius IX, they often privileged local religious geography and personal religious tastes over uniformity. The spiritual pilgrimage was designed to exalt “the most notable shrines of the Mexican republic,” but Mexico's Catholics and their prelates did not agree on which shrines deserved the honor. Strikingly, the bishop of Linares, Francisco de Paula Verea, omitted all of Mexico's nationally recognized shrines except that of Guadalupe. In the place of mental visits to Chalma or San Juan de los Lagos, therefore, he prescribed an almost entirely local-centric itinerary centered on the cities of Saltillo (Coahuila, two stops) and Monterrey (Nuevo León, five stops). The itinerary even included a visit to the obscure village of Agualeguas, site of a shrine housing a seventeenth-century miraculous image of Mary Immaculate that was credited with protecting converted Indians from Chichimeca (nomadic Indian) raids.Footnote 105 These, Verea indicated, were the shrines most likely to arouse the devotion of his diocesan parishioners. Verea even discarded the specialized prayers used by the Italian pilgrims and adopted by Labastida y Dávalos in favor of a single verse, a sonnet to Christ crucified that was credited to Saint Francis Xavier.Footnote 106 Despite such idiosyncratic localism, however, the bishop of Linares did not lose sight of the Ultramontane goals of the spiritual pilgrimage. He hoped his flock would repay the “singular predilection with which [the pope] has distinguished us,” by praying for the peace of the Church, the liberty of the pontiff, and even “the conquest of the Holy Land.”Footnote 107
The laity seems to have repaid Verea's localism with enthusiasm during the spiritual pilgrimage. Three weeks prior to the event, for example, diocesan authorities ran out of copies of the pastoral letter containing the instructions and itinerary, and they turned to Monterrey's Imprenta Religiosa to help them to meet popular demand.Footnote 108 On the first day of the pilgrimage, Catholics filled the Monterrey cathedral, clamoring for the blessings to be bestowed upon their rosaries by the bishop.Footnote 109 Then, on December 11, a reported 400 believers left the state capital and traveled to the nearby village of Guadalupe, where they celebrated the first day of the second decade with a special Mass to the Lord of Expiration, an eighteenth-century image housed in the sanctuary of El Roble.Footnote 110 Interestingly, the diocesan itinerary had reserved this particular day for a figurative journey to the shrine of the Crucified Christ of Saltillo, but the middle-class Catholics of Monterrey had collaborated with the chaplain of El Roble, Manuel Martínez, to transform the spiritual journey into a mass bodily pilgrimage to their favorite shrine. That they could affect a bodily pilgrimage of such scale in defiance of the Laws of Reform suggests local civil collusion with Monterrey's peculiar iteration of the spiritual pilgrimage.
The historical record preserves only scant details about the practice of spiritual pilgrimage by ordinary Catholics in other Mexican bishoprics. Nevertheless, evidence from diocesan archives in the state of Michoacán—the strategic center of the Catholic restorationist project of Labastida y Dávalos and his Michoacán-based allies—suggests that many parish priests there did institute the practice, and in more typically Ultramontane ways. The priest of Jiquilpan, for instance, distributed Labastida y Dávalos's itinerary among his flock and forwarded queries from Catholics in his largely mestizo parish about whether those who could not visit a public church for 30 consecutive days could effect the journey from home.Footnote 111 Diocesan authorities in both Zamora and Morelia fielded similar queries from parishioners in the mestizo-dominated towns of Los Reyes and Penjamillo, as well as requests for itineraries from the priests of the mining town of Angangueo and the ranchero hub of Tlalpujahua.Footnote 112 Evidently, the priest of Chilchota successfully organized the spiritual journey among the Purépecha villagers of Tacuro, since in January 1875 the latter requested a license for a set of exercises of thanksgiving for the benefits they had received during the pilgrimage the previous month.Footnote 113 Despite its impressionistic and incomplete nature, therefore, the evidence from Michoacán's two ecclesiastical sees suggests that the practice was fairly widespread in the Catholic heartland of the center-west. Further—at least in places such as Chilchota, where parish priests enthusiastically promoted the project among their largely illiterate flocks—the spiritual pilgrimage was not limited geographically to provincial cities or demographically to the mestizo elite and middle class.
In some Michoacán localities, the laity seems to have played an important role in organizing and carrying out the event. Indeed, the bishop of Zamora, José Antonio de la Peña y Navarro, made lay collaboration a central theme in his 1874 pastoral letter introducing the exercise. In what was perhaps the spiritual pilgrimage's clearest theological exegesis, the bishop affirmed that through the act, lay Catholics could impact political reality by strengthening the mystical body of the Church and bringing its three constituent parts—earthly, penitent, and heavenly—into closer alignment. Indulgences earned by pilgrims of the earthly Church (or Church Militant) would release the souls of Catholics from Purgatory (the Church Penitent), allowing them to join the Church Triumphant in the Celestial Court, from whence their common prayers for the intervention of God in earthly affairs would be more efficacious. Common prayer on earth, too, was deemed more effective in reaching divine intercessors, and in such a “spirit,” the bishop authorized his priests to convene the faithful in their local parish churches each night of the spiritual pilgrimage at the toll of the bell. Where priests could not be physically present to lead the practice of mental travel, moreover, De la Peña authorized Catholic laypeople to organize it themselves, preferably “dividing themselves into small groups and designating someone to lead them as head of the chorus.”Footnote 114 Though he preferred that the activity be supervised by priests, the bishop concluded, his more pressing desire was “to extend the practice to all parts” of his diocese.Footnote 115
Yet, notwithstanding the adoption of the spiritual pilgrimage in places such as Zamora and Monterrey, the reach of Ultramontane Catholicism was far from universal in Mexico. As we saw above, even in some parts of Labastida y Dávalos's own tightly controlled jurisdiction, clerical laxity, intra-parish divisions, and Protestant infiltration threatened to derail the spiritual pilgrimage. Further, clerics and laypeople sometimes altered the practice to reflect local religious priorities, and bishops used the genre of the spiritual itinerary as a means for promoting regionalized religious identities. Worse, in places such as Tamaulipas, the lower clergy rejected the Ultramontane imperative outright, and the laity could not be trusted as partners in Catholic restoration. In sum, divergent political circumstances and religious preferences militated against the uniformity so desired by Labastida y Dávalos and sometimes hampered the spread of Ultramontane Catholicism.
Conclusion
Mexico's embrace of Ultramontane Catholicism represented neither a slavish imitation of Europe nor a simple Roman imposition. Rather, as the spiritual pilgrimage demonstrates, the Mexican church sought global, spiritual solutions to eminently Mexican problems. If Mexican reformers imbibed the devotional trends of Europe and moved figuratively closer to the Vatican for guidance, they did not advocate a simple Romanization of Mexican Catholicism. Rather, for prelates such as Labastida y Dávalos, Ultramontanism offered a chance to reform Mexican Catholicism while simultaneously claiming symbolic space for Mexican devotions at the center of Christendom. Significantly, the archbishop's efforts to define Mexican Catholicism as a primarily central-western affair were themselves contested by the more stubbornly provincialist bishops of northern and southern Mexico. Ultimately, if spiritual pilgrimage sought to orient Mexican Catholic imaginations toward Rome, France, and the Holy Land, it also exalted the place of local images and shrines in the larger Catholic world. As such, it reinforced a larger trend of Catholic globalization built on new institutions such as the Colegio Pio Latinoamericano and furthered by symbolic gestures such as the canonization of San Felipe de Jesús in 1862.
As a kind of devotional set-piece, the spiritual pilgrimage found limited success in 1874. Yet despite its ephemeral nature—the result of the failure of religious leaders to institutionalize the practice—it provided the clerical hierarchy with an ideal opportunity for experimenting with new devotional “weapons” innovated in dialogue with Ultramontane Europe. Indeed, it presaged a more durable globalizing trend in Mexico: the pontifical coronation of Mexican icons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, during which a golden crown blessed by Pope Leo XIII was bestowed on the famous image during a sumptuous ritual, has attracted substantial interest from historians, since it served as a key moment in the history of Guadalupe's evolution from evangelizing icon to national devotion.Footnote 116
Yet, Guadalupe was only one of seven virgins crowned with papal tiaras between 1886 and 1909. Indeed, the practice was innovated in the small town of Jacona (Michoacán), whose Virgin of Hope was privileged with the honor of pontifical coronation in 1886.Footnote 117 That event, organized by the ambitious José Antonio Plancarte y Labastida, inspired a wave of coronations throughout Mexico, including that of the Virgin of Health (Michoacán, 1899), the Virgin of Ocotlán (Tlaxcala, 1907), and the Virgin of Solitude (Oaxaca, 1909). Just as did the spiritual pilgrimage, Guadalupanismo competed and coexisted with other regional and local devotions on a stage of “celebrated” Mexican saints being elevated to a privileged place in the Catholic world. In such light, traditional definitions of Romanization as top-down papal centralization are insufficient for understanding changes in Mexican religious culture in the nineteenth century, since they ignore both the advance of Guadalupanismo as a devotion worthy of global recognition and the internal debate about the character of Mexican Catholicism.
As the provincialist restructuring of the 1874 spiritual itinerary demonstrates, attempts to define a national sacred geography were met with powerful assertions of diocesan autonomy and religious localism outside of Mexico City. This is not to suggest that the Mexican Church did not experience significant papal centralization during the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of the First Latin American Plenary Council (1899) and the visit of the apostolic delegate, Nicholas Averardi (1896-99).Footnote 118 Yet, such trends for papal centralization coincided with the public exaltation of uniquely Mexican devotions via practices such as the pontifical coronations. If Mexican religious culture was indeed becoming more Ultramontane in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was not becoming less “Mexican.”
