The nineteenth-century Mexican Reforma is often interpreted as the inevitable culmination of a long struggle between liberals and conservatives who held irreconcilable ideas about how to govern the nation or imagine its future. Questions related to religion and the Catholic Church led to some of the strongest disagreements. Should Catholicism remain an established religion? Who should control the Church's substantial wealth? In a broader sense, what role should religion play in public life? Did the Church act as one of the only sources of national cohesion or simply a yoke to the past that retarded progress? Liberals and conservatives could find no common ground on these and other issues, which led ultimately to a brutal civil war accompanied by foreign intervention.

In this narrative, Mexican conservatives and the Catholic Church are the clear losers, and potentially the villains. After a broad-based liberal victory, the government of Benito Juárez banished the Catholic Church from public life, upheld earlier decrees that nationalized much of its property, and established freedom of religion. These facts are well known; indeed they are foundational elements of nineteenth-century Mexican history. But they raise difficult problems for historical interpretation, since such stark end points tempt us to project them backward onto the preceding decades, so that effects become explanations. Liberals become the bearers of modernity, offering a vision of the future that threw off the burdens of the past. Conservatives, most notably the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, play the opposing roles. Reactionary bishops rejected the liberal program, clinging blindly to the privileges enjoyed by the Church prior to independence.

Although conservatives clearly lost the battle of the Reforma, the origins of the conflict, including what came to be seen as the intransigence of Church leaders, do not fit the traditional narrative described above. The Church's opposition to the liberal reforms did not emerge from “its supposed attachment to a foregone past, but, rather, because of its efforts to supersede colonial tradition and refashion itself as a ‘perfect and independent society’ within a liberal yet confessional state.” This is the provocative, deeply revisionist argument of Pablo Mijangos, delivered stylishly in an intellectual and political biography of Clemente de Jesús Munguía, one of the most important figures in the nineteenth-century Mexican Church. “If anything,” writes Mijangos, “the dichotomy between Jacobin modernizers and tonsured reactionaries was the result, and not the cause, of the Civil War of the Reform.”

The book is organized roughly into three parts, which trace the arc of Munguías life and career. The first two chapters discuss his intellectual formation and his increasing prominence in the church of Michoacán, including an appointment as rector of the diocesan seminary in Morelia, a post he held from 1843 to 1851. Though we learn little about Munguía's piety, Mijangos does a fine job explaining how the cleric's upbringing and education shaped his later political interventions, as well as his ideas about religion in the public sphere. Like many at the time, Munguía felt that Catholicism provided an essential foundation for the new nation; yet, he understood the imperative of adapting its role in public life to fit the circumstances of the time.

The next two chapters investigate Munguía's emergence as one of the most important intellectuals within the Church. Chapter 4 is the book's strongest, offering a learned and imaginative reading of Munguía's most important work, El derecho natural (1849), in which he developed his most thorough treatment of the legal relationship between Church and state. He wrote it as a textbook for law students, but used it to offer a political vision that Mijangos characterizes as “Catholic republicanism.” Munguía argued for a representative and republican government in Mexico; the Church would be independent of the state, but the two would maintain a governing partnership, given the nation's history as an “exclusively Catholic” society.

The final two chapters cover Munguía's leadership during the time of the Reforma. He was promoted to archbishop of Michoacán in the 1850s. In the years that followed, Munguía's writings and political interventions, especially his aggressive resistance to the Reform laws, transformed him into a leader of the Mexican episcopate. These chapters describe Munguía's staunch opposition to the liberal project, and thus provide a familiar, though very sophisticated narrative of clerical intransigence played out against nineteenth-century liberal reform. But they also explore the unexpected defiance of much of the Church leadership during the “conservative” project of empire under Maxmilian, because by then Munguía and others were searching for an independent, autonomous Catholic Church, not one controlled by a liberal or conservative government. Increasing clerical intransigence, including the actions of some of its most reactionary elements, was at least partially the result of a failed project of modernization, rather than the apotheosis of traditional conservatism.

We arrive at a familiar historical destination, one could say, but because of the fresh trail that Mijangos has taken we understand it in an entirely new way.