Mexican Nicodemus: The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero, on the Islas Marías* Matthew Butler University of Texas at Austin This article explores lay responses to religious persecution during Mexico’s cristero rebellion (1926–1929), using devotional testimonies produced by Catholic deportees to the Islas Marías penal colony, Nayarit. Faced with the Calles regime’s anticlericalism, the article argues that Mexico’s episcopate developed an alternative religious model premised on a revitalized lay apostolate; the article then considers how lay actors enacted this identity in practice, through white masses, lay sermons, and clandestine communions. The article concludes that religious persecution, if intended to promote a secular revolutionary culture, also opened new spaces for popular religious participation. Este artículo explora respuestas a la persecución religiosa durante la rebelión cristera de México (1926–1929), usando testimonios devotos producidos por deportados católicos a la colonia penal de las Islas Marías, Nayarit. Frente al anticlericalismo del régimen de Calles, el artículo sostiene que el episcopado de México desarrolló un modelo religioso alternativo a través de un apostolado revitalizado, pero no profesional; el artículo entonces considera cómo se adoptó esta identidad en la práctica, a través de misas blancas, sermones de no expertos, y comuniones clandestinas. El artículo concluye que la persecución religiosa, al haber intentado promover una cultura revolucionaria secular, también abrió nuevos espacios para la participación religiosa popular. Key words. Catholic laity; cristero rebellion, 1926–1929; Islas Marías; LNDLR; Nayarit; Refugio Padilla, religious persecution. Palabras clave: catolicismo; rebelión cristera, 1926–1929; Islas Marías; LNDLR; Nayarit; Refugio Padilla; persecución religiosa. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 25, Issue 2, Summer 2009, pages 271–306. ISSN 0742-9797 electronic ISSN 1533-8320. ©2009 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprint info.asp. DOI: 10.1525/msem.2009.25.2.271 271 272 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Though often characterized as agrarian or political, Mexico’s 1910– 1940 Revolution was also a period of religious change. As recent research shows, the destructuring of Mexico’s religious field after 1910 gave opportunities to a host of spiritual specialists including Protestants, schismatic curas, Mennonites, indigenous seers, curanderos, spiritists, and—most presciently—Pentecostals.1 Surprisingly, however, innovations in revolutionary-era Catholicism have not been well studied: More precisely, although a focus on Catholic sociopolitical activism is not new, historians shy away from exploring the devotional elements of modern Catholic experience. Instead, the story is reduced to one of burgeoning clericalism and structural rechristianization circa 1890–1920— the introduction of Rerum Novarum-driven white radicalism, culminating in the Church-state clashes of the 1920s.2 In all this, a discussion of Catholicism itself is often strangely absent. As Adrian Bantjes notes, the historiography still evidences a strong “secularist”bias compared to those of colonial or early republican Mexico, which prevents the integration of religious questions into the analysis.3 As a result, our knowledge of revolutionary-era Catholic practices and beliefs lacks dynamism and depth. This imbalance obscures the interrelationship among revolutionary and religious change and the interconnectedness of Catholicism and other religious fields. This is even true of the period of Catholic revolt known as the cristero rebellion (1926–1929), which constituted a period of genuine effervescence within the fold of orthodox Catholicism.4 During the revolt, the ferocity of state anticlericalism obliged the episcopate to endorse changes to Catholic practice that, even if temporary, were radical: lay preaching, vernacular massing, lay ministration of some sacraments, and self-communion. In certain circumstances women, too, could handle the santísimo, recite the Mass, and baptize. A persecuted Church thus relinquished its monopoly over spiritual capital and allowed lay ac1. Guillermo de la Peña, “El campo religioso, la diversidad regional, y la identidad nacional en México,” Relaciones, vol. 25, no. 100 (2004): 22–71, for a survey. 2. Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, Religiosos y laicos en tiempos de cristiandad: la formación de los militantes sociales en el Centro Unión (1918–1921) (Mexico: IMDOSOC, 1984). Silvia Arrom, “Mexican Laywomen Spearhead a Catholic Revival: The Ladies of Charity, 1863–1910,” in Martin Austin Nesvig, Religious Culture in Modern Mexico (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 50–77. 3. Adrian Bantjes, “Religion and the Mexican Revolution: Toward a New Historiography,” in Nesvig, Religious Culture, 223–254. 4. The cristero rebellion broke out after the episcopate suspended public worship in 1926 in protest at the anticlericalism of President Plutarco Elías Calles. In 1927, the rebellion spread to a dozen central-western states including Nayarit. It ended after a Churchstate truce was negotiated in 1929. Jean Meyer, La cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1973–1974). Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 273 tors to put God into the hearts—even the mouths—of the faithful. A flock that the hierarchy saw as spiritually unreliable was reconstituted, in extremis, as an apostolate with a salvific remit: layfolk could now intervene in the religious economy as purveyors, not mere consumers, of spiritual goods. Persecution thus heralded a period of unusual lay agency, even when it came to strictly religious questions. In post-revolutionary Mexico, prayers became a site for the social construction of lay actors.5 Indeed, the clamor for wider participation—so central to the revolution as a whole—quickly echoed through Mexico’s bishopless dioceses as lay leaders assumed a quasi-sacerdotal role as directors of the faith. None of this is meant to imply that Catholic devotional practices were in any sense static outside unusual periods of revolutionary stress: as two groundbreaking studies of southern Mexican Catholicism by Edward Wright-Rios and Terry Rugeley eloquently show, they were not.6 Millenarian expectations, too, have been noted both in times of exceptional violence, as with the Insurgence, and during periods of apparent calm, as in the mature Porfiriato.7 Also true is that persecution often stimulates underground devotionalism and social revolutions rearrange spiritual norms (among other things) as they unfold. Above and beyond any commonplace historical recurrence, however, the manner and the degree of religious dynamism amid revolutionary turmoil are crucial to evaluating and distinguishing particular cases. The nationwide suspension of public cult in Mexico in 1926 and the reconcentration of the clergy were unprecedented in the history of the Mexican Church.8 As a consequence, these events produced surprising changes in the practice of official—in the sense of liturgically prescribed, rather than putatively “unpopular”—religious observance: worship not only became subter5. Matthew Butler, “Revolution and the Ritual Year: Religious Conflict and Innovation in Cristero Mexico, 1926–1929,”Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 3 (2006): 465–490. Michael M. Brescia, “Liturgical Expressions of Episcopal Power: Juan de Palafox y Mendoza and Tridentine Reforms in Colonial Mexico,” Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 3 (2004): 497–518, makes a similar argument for the colony. Cf. Antonio Rubial García’s Profetisas y solitarios: espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006) is a good study of lay religion. 6. Edward Wright-Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men:Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 7. Paul Vanderwood, The Power of God Against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 8. Recent church closures—a response to influenza in Mexico City—notwithstanding. 274 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos ranean, but laypeople also became involved in formal celebrations to a degree that was unusual even when compared to other revolutionary moments, for instance, in 1790s France or 1930s Spain; to bouts of persecution, as in Golden Age Holland; or to cases elsewhere in Latin America in which the laity was entrusted only with a social apostleship.9 For example, laypeople in Mexico had never before been allowed to administer Catholic sacraments (other than emergency baptisms): now they could self-administer communion—Rome itself allowed it, which was a measure of the change’s perceived importance—celebrate marriages, and assist the dying in achieving absolution. In this context, it was not so much that people “reclaimed the sacred” in the absence of the clergy, or responded to eventual or existential threats through (semi) autonomous millenarian visions or apparitions, but that the clergy was perforce the driver of changes that significantly scaled back the extent of its own interventions in sacramental matters and reversed an historic tendency to sideline the laity in terms of ministry. The Revolution’s modernizing impulse was in this way part absorbed and reflected back in a laicized Catholicism that gave new prerogatives to lay believers. Doubtless the Revolution contributed to other, more localized religious innovations, as Paul Vanderwood’s recent work, particularly, attests;10 however, official change, too, was a significant if underappreciated part of the religious history of the 1920s. Researching how this kind of lay religion evolved during the cristero rebellion is not easy. There is a surfeit of normative religion, from diocesan circulars authorizing lay baptisms to papal letters endorsing selfcommunion; impressionistically, too, we know that lay priesthood was common.11 But what Catholics did, or thought, in the catacombs is often hard to tell. This is clearly a consequence of persecution’s inhibiting effects: this was a religion of hedge-preaching and moonlight massing, much of which was illegal; hence, few records were kept and cultic paraphernalia was kept to a minimum. We simply do not have the documents—let alone the house chapels—that survive in other persecution 9. Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins:Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred:Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). William Christian Jr., Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Gertrude M. Yeager, “In the Absence of Priests: Young Women as Apostles to the Poor, Chile 1922–1932,” The Americas 64, no. 2 (2007): 207–242. 10. Paul Vanderwood, Juan Soldado:Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 11. Meyer, La cristiada, ii.275–282. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 275 contexts.12 Orality presents another problem: many of these rituals were improvized by lay celebrants from memory or on the basis of formulae that, even if they found their way into parish archives, were not necessarily accurate representations of what was said. In times of persecution and restricted literacy, not everyone had printed devotionalia at hand; others discovered that the words that flowed effortlessly from curas’ mouths came out differently when they said them. Thus, even if most laity knew stock prayers and biblical passages by heart, many lay-led devotions were “one-offs,” lost in the act of enunciation. The silence or opacity of the archival sources is compounded by the assumption, common to many cristero memoirs, that it was in the sphere of armed insurrection, not underground devotionalism, that extraordinary, hence noteworthy, things happened. This soldierly bias means that the vast testimonial literature is also of limited use in delineating the contours of cristero piety: most first-hand accounts are pieces of peasant militaria, dense with feats of arms and arcane topographical references—but accounts of the odd drumhead Mass aside, few participants say much about the interior aspects of their Catholicism. Most veterans, apparently, concluded that their devotion was most fittingly expressed in descriptions of how they fought for Christ the King. The embeddedness of rebel piety makes it harder still to penetrate the cristeros’ religious world. In this context, however, detailed memoirs of religion—such as that produced by the Catholic schoolteacher and cristero sympathizer, José Refugio Padilla Galindo—should be evaluated.13 This memoir, which forms the basis of this essay, does give unusually detailed first-hand insights into what one historian calls the “prayer-life”14 of ordinary people, allowing us to reconstruct an evolving lay piety during the religious persecution of the 1920s. Padilla and his wife, Escolástica Morán, were arrested in Mexico City two weeks after Easter 1929 for the crime of sheltering clergy in their 12. Cf. Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,”American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 1031–1064. 13. The original text, No éramos bandidos . . . tan sólo cristianos, Islas Marías 1929, is now in the library of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca. I am very grateful to Dr. María Alicia Puente Lutteroth for supplying me with a copy of the text, uncovered during the course of her research. A published edition, No éramos bandidos . . . tan sólo cristianos, Islas Marías 1929: narración testimonial del profesor José Refugio Padilla Galindo, ed. María Alicia Puente Lutteroth (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos), is being prepared for publication. All translations from the Spanish are by the author of this essay. 14. Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours:English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 4. 276 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos home. Days later, the couple were deported to the Islas Marías penal colony located off Mexico’s Pacific coast as part of a prison gang (cuerda) containing both ordinary felons and militant Catholics. Catholic deportees were freed in July 1929, in the wake of the Church-state truce signed the previous month. In the aftermath of these arreglos, Padilla produced the memoir on which this article is based. His account consists of 100 pages or so of handwritten text and is dated May 10, 1930, with the first entry referring to April 17, 1929. The memoria is not a diary, therefore, but it is as close to one as we are likely to get and was written within a year of the events it describes. The document is also valuable because it captures so many everyday aspects of catacomb religion. Above all, the memoir gives us particularly vivid insights into the affective dimensions of lay apostleship, not just the religious methods that were used in developing an underground church. We see which elements of scripture or liturgy, which saintly legends and apocrypha, Refugio selected as most meaningful, and hence built into his repertoire of clandestine observances. Refugio also gives us suggestive glimpses of what people felt as they prayed the words because he relates not just the specific prayers, but often, in his view, how the prayers were experienced on an emotional plane.15 In sum, here we have an unusually intimate, detailed portrait of cristero religiosity. Two caveats—both concerning typicality—are in order. The first concerns representativeness in a situational sense: though Refugio’s memoir belongs to a recognized subgenre of cristero biography—the captivity narrative16—it emerges from the isolated setting of a penal colony rather than a locus classicus like San José de Gracia. How valuable, then, is this account as a guide to the religious experiences of Catholics under persecution? Here it bears repeating that, even if the situation was highly unusual, religious persecution and decentralization were happening across the whole terra firma of western Mexico. Across Mexico, moreover, religion went partially or totally underground and laypeople assumed significant new roles. In broad terms, therefore, the 15. As Duffy notes, we rarely know what emotions pray-ers experienced when reciting formulae since individuals attached different “levels of interiority”to identical prayers. Ibid., 67–70, 107. 16. Cristero-era incarcerations are described first hand in Heriberto Navarrete, En Las Islas Marías (Mexico: Jus, 1965); Memorias de la Madre Conchita (Concepción Acevedo de la Llata), ed. Armando de María y Campos (Mexico City: Libro Mex, 1962); and J. Andrés Lara, Prisionero de callistas y cristeros (Mexico: Jus, 1956). Luis Rivero del Val, Entre las patas de los caballos (Mexico: Jus, 1992), 148–153, and Aquiles P. Moctezuma, El conflicto religioso de 1926. Sus orígenes. Su desarrollo. Su solución, 2 vols. (Mexico: Jus, 1960), ii.447–450, both reproduce the testimonies of anonymous 1927 deportees. The polemical Irishman, Capt. Francis McCullagh, also visited the islands incognito in 1927; see Red Mexico (London: Brentano’s, 1928), 246–271. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 277 Islas Marías’ antipodean status as the “tomb of the Pacific”17 does not mean that colonists’ religious experiences should be seen as entirely unique. This said, two key differences between deportees’ religious experiences and those of Catholics in Mexico proper must be understood. First, no public religious transcript existed in the colony because all expressions of Catholicity—not just priestly services—were banned.18 Thus, while Catholics across the water could pray in church so long as no priests were present, on the islands all religion was practiced secretly. Persecution did not lead to the strategic disaggregation of public/private Catholicism, but to religion’s wholesale relocation to marginal, offstage sites. Second, no priests were ever available on the islands, hence Catholic cult became entirely laicized—the only ordained cura among the deportees, Osorio Leyva, was deliberately secluded from his coreligionists and made to haul cartfuls of rocks, one cristero writes, “yoked to the beam like an ox”;19 the colonist dubbed “el cura,” meanwhile, turned out to be an old lag from Iztapalapa whose “ministry” consisted of donning a cassock and pilfering in parish collection boxes.20 In these two respects—religion’s wholesale laicization and furtiveness—the island regime was clearly more repressive than elsewhere. But this was still a “pure”—unusually intense, more than fundamentally aberrant, case. If anything, deportation created “laboratory” conditions for the building of a lay church: although comparable conditions were periodically met elsewhere, as in Garrido’s Tabasco or during military occupations in the cristero heartlands, priestlessness and spiritual selfsufficiency were the norm on the islands. In such controlled conditions, revolutionary anti-Catholicism could be taken to institutional, regimented extremes. Thus island Catholics faced an endless, Sisyphean martyrdom, breaking rocks every day rather than experiencing occasional terrors when priest-hunters burst through the front door. Even so, Refugio speaks to us from the end point of a long continuum of catacomb religion, whose main elements—secrecy, improvisation, fear, and elation—would have been recognized by Catholics everywhere. Furthermore, island Catholics could still articulate a hidden transcript of lay observances and did so using methods (and for reasons) that were very similar to those found elsewhere. What is more, the island authorities— though they meted out exemplary punishments in cases of proven recusancy—probably knew that Catholicism was being practiced in secret 17. Popularized by La Prensa’s Miguel Gil, La tumba del Pacífico: impresiones de mi viaje a las Islas Marías, 2 vols. (Mexico: La Prensa, 1932). 18. I borrow the notion of transcript from James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 19. No éramos bandidos, 20–22, 95. 20. Navarrete, Islas Marías, 78–82. 278 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and, to some extent, accepted more than tolerated such improvisation. The fact that the islands were an open prison in which colonos enjoyed relative freedom in the early morning and evening helped, so, too, the dispersed nature of the island’s work camps. This penal regime was cruel, but never panoptical: the authorities simply did not possess the material capacity to police Catholics round the clock, and official determination to root out religious practices, therefore, had its practical (and, under Governor Francisco Múgica, humane) limits. To that extent, the contours and scope of prison piety, though much reduced, were tacitly negotiated between Catholics and the penal—not just the ecclesiastical—authorities.21 That both deportees and the authorities were aware of places to which the revolutionary writ could not always run, however, does not mean that the regime simply turned a blind eye. Catholics caught in the act received punishments that were by no means token ones. To a greater extent than on the mainland, therefore, persecution on the Islas Marías gave rise to the practice of covert worship known as Nicodemism, after the Pharisee who visited Christ at night in John’s gospel.22 Clarifying the varying politico-religious contexts in which this took place is important because Nicodemism has traditionally been associated with lying and fakery, hence bad conscience: as the Christian’s duty is to bear witness to faith, Nicodemizing has been denounced by theologians, including Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Pascal, as a betrayal of Christ.23 The distinction between simulation and dissimulation becomes crucial here, as Perez Zagorin notes in his study of early modern Europe. CryptoCatholics (“church papists”) in early modern England, for example, were forced to feign conformity to an established Protestant Church through enforced attendance at Sunday services; such simulation—pretending to 21. Catholicism has survived harsher regimes involving concentration camps and the rack: cf. Jean Bernard, Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau (Bethesda: Zaccheus Press, 2007), and John Gerard, John Gerard:The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (1609. Oxford: Family Publications, 2006). 22. John, 3:1–2, 7:50–51. Other texts cited for/against Nicodemism are Galatians (2:11–14), which asks whether converts to Christianity are bound by Jewish law, and the story of Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings, 5:17–19), a Jewish convert who accompanied his monarch to the temple of the idol Rimmon. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 68, 75. For a regional case, see Luis Martínez Fernández, Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 23. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 15–35, 154, 170. This tradition, which distinguishes between inner and outer expression—by excusing useful lies or misleading statements made good by unspoken mental reservations (oratio mixta)—begins with Jerome, and proceeds through Gregory the Great to early modern casuists such as Dr. Navarrus. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 279 be what one, in conscience, was not—could only be done with casuistry or mental reservation, provoking spiritual anguish.24 In 1920s Mexico, by contrast, Catholics faced a modern—anticlerical, even secularizing—state, which aimed to uproot fanaticism rather than consolidate a theological revolution. This colored the religious atmosphere surrounding Mexican crypto-Catholicism, since, in this context, Nicodemism was a way of preserving, and even exemplifying, the faith. This was especially true on the islands, where the risks of overt religious observance absolved deportees of any spiritual doubts associated with hiding their religion. Mainland Catholics, by contrast, were expected to maintain a public cult without priests, in so far as this was possible. This difference, too, helps to account for the felicitous tone of island Catholicism, which, circumstantially, is hard to comprehend. Catholic deportees could be made to feel social shame through penalization, but not— unless this was self-inflicted—religious guilt. Instead, they would even argue that spiritual perfection could be found in clandestine worship. This brings us to the second caveat, concerning typicality of authorship. Refugio was no peasant fighter but an urban Catholic militant and liguero, or member of the National League for the Defence of Religious Liberty (LNDLR) founded in 1925. He was also a member of the Comité Central de Guardias de Sacerdotes y Templos in Mexico City and a correspondent of Archbishop Pascual Díaz.25 This places Refugio squarely in the ranks of educated, middle-class, capitalino/urban provincial Catholics from which the lay directors of pious-civic associations typically emerged in 1920s Mexico.26 Such figures were used to exercising devotional, social, and civic leadership through modern sodalities such as the Nocturnal Adoration, credit societies, or civic unions like the League; they felt comfortable in clerical circles, and many, like Refugio, sheltered curas in priest’s holes in their homes. They also knew about the wider Catholic world and historic persecutions from reading newspapers, encyclicals, and novels like Quo Vadis. We know, too, that the regime used deportation disproportionately against this group, which would suggest that most Catholic deportees shared a similar outlook. Criminalizing respectable Catholics—among the revolt’s alleged intellectual authors—was a shock tactic designed to weaken the revolt’s urban base: it brought some of the rebellion’s ferocity into polite circles, 24. Ibid., 129–152. 25. Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (AHAM), Pascual Díaz, c. 35/exp. 14, J. Refugio Padilla to Pascual Díaz, Mexico, 26 Dec. 1931. 26. Martha Patricia Torres Meza, “El proyecto social y político de la Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, 1925–1929” (MA diss., Instituto Mora, 1998), 62–73. 280 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and stressed that the regime saw the religious question as simply a law and order problem.27 Padilla’s memoir thus describes the persecution and evolution of an orthodox, middling sort of piety, transplanted to the islands but already attuned to the idea of lay apostleship. Doubtless this religiosity overlapped with the cristeros’ rural purview in most fundamentals; the socio-religious particularity of deportees’Catholicism, however, must be kept in mind, because it helps to explain the style and character of the lay apostolate that emerged on the Islas Marías. If nothing else, the role of lay apostle was probably scripted to a greater degree in urban Catholic circles than in rural ones: in country parishes like Jalpa (Gto.), stories were told of congregations reacting angrily to lay “usurpers” of sacerdotal functions during the Cristiada.28 Official pronouncements were clearly echoed in the lay religion developed on the islands. One Mexico City párroco, for instance, wrote a monumental treatise in 1928 describing persecution as a divine scourge for the laity’s “somatic”approach to the Mass before 1926; he urged the faithful to seize the God-given moment to atone by enacting a joyous “liturgical apostolate” of prayer and psalmody inspired by the early Church.29 Refugio’s accounts of spontaneous lay cult also fizz with primitivist allusions—the cristeros, he posits, are the modern-day heirs of Tarcisius and Lawrence. At times, however, one suspects that priests would have found Refugio guilty of overinterpretation, even excess. He ups the providential ante, for example, by suggesting that the deportees are a kind of spiritual elect, Mexico’s chosen: although Catholics everywhere are suffering, the cristeros are the ones who have been selected as instruments of purification and who will play the lead role in a national drama of expiation. Such intimations of sanctity suggest that deportees were not blandly reading off an official hymn sheet, but instead showed creativity within the spirit, if not always the letter, of clerical dictates. One even occasionally senses that urban, educated Catholics were sometimes less submissive than rural ones, more given to making autonomous decisions. The charisma attributed to the disgraced Madre Conchita, for 27. By all accounts, the deportations—announced in the press—shocked Catholic Mexico. Rivero del Val claims Catholics were stunned when Calles banished them like common criminals (Entre las patas, 148). Francis McCullagh, who followed the 1927 cuerda to the islands, noted that the Catholic deportees were students, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Yet even middle-class Catholics hung their heads in shame as they shuffled along in chains; and, as the prison gates opened, deportees’ relatives burst into wild sobbing. McCullagh—a hardened observer of world revolutions—found this humiliation so shocking that he turned away. Red Mexico, 253–258. 28. Cecilio Valtierra, “Mis Memorias y Actuación en Pro del Movimiento Libertador, en Jalpa de Cánovas, Gto.,” Archivo Aurelio Acevedo Robles (AAAR), cajas 41, 43. 29. Amado G. Pardavé, La restauración de la sociedad moderna mediante la liturgia católica, 2 vols. (Madrid: Estanislao Martínez, 1930), ii.238. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 281 example—deported for alleged involvement in the assassination of president-elect Obregón in 1928—would have caused episcopal concern, likewise her smuggling of sacred specie on to the islands and its effective rationing by women. How we conceptualize the shift in religious competences that occurred from 1926–1929 matters therefore, was clerical religion laicized, or lay piety clericalized? 30 Does the evidence suggest lay appropriation or a secure clergy, capable of modeling lay habits to the point of granting superordinate status to trusted believers? In fact, the hierarchy never demonstrated such sangfroid during its years of exile, nor the laity such opportunism. Here it is instructive, perhaps, to borrow from analyses that posit fluctuating degrees of lay and clerical interaction, as does the study of lay identity in Guadalajara by Mexican sociologist Renée de la Torre.31 Secularization, de la Torre argues, has not led to simple disenchantment but to the differentiation of Catholic identities. Increasing pressure on the Church, she argues, is reflected in lay diversification as seen in bodies ranging from Liberationist base communities to the Pentecostals of Charismatic Renovation. Crucially, de la Torre notes, lay groups embodying this diversity—even when later proscribed by the episcopate—have always originated in official responses to secularization. She thus sees the Church as being “dynamically transversed” by a plurality of lay movements and clerical chains of command: these structures interact continually as the hierarchy struggles to create and administer ways of being Catholic that are both strategic and meaningful to the faithful. The operative principles are those of mobilization and delegitimization.32 This model of lay diversity finds clear, if incipient, parallels in the 1920s—as Fernando González’s recent study of cristero subcultures suggests33—and has more flexibility than a simple clerical/lay dichotomy. This model also helps to explain, for example, the rise and fall of the Liga and societies such as the Association of Catholic Mexican Youth (ACJM), all of which enjoyed clerical legitimacy and significant degrees of autonomy in the 1920s, but had been disbanded by 1930 or incorporated into Mexican Catholic Action (ACM).34 The lay apostleship of 30. I paraphrase Duffy, Marking the Hours, 5. 31. Renée de la Torre, La ecclesia nostra. El catolicismo desde la perspectiva de los laicos: el caso de Guadalajara (Mexico: FCE, 2006). 32. Ibid., 12–18, 29, 83–84, 123–156, 207. 33. Fernando González, Morir y matar por cristo rey:aspectos de la cristiada (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 2001). 34. María Luisa Aspe Arnella, La formación social y política de los católicos mexicanos. La Acción Católica Mexicana y la Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2008). 282 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos the 1920s also fits this pattern. During the Cristiada, lay Catholics were encouraged to embrace innovations in lay identity as a result of which they could administer communion, preach in lieu of priests, and recite the Mass. At times, layfolk discharged these functions creatively, even riskily, but little suggests much counter-hegemonic intent. If the laity occasionally resorted to cultic practices that the bishops condemned as irreverent, perhaps even sacrilegious, they did so in what they, los laicos, considered good faith. Moreover, the lay prerogatives granted temporarily as a result of persecution would not be ceded formally until the 1960s, and little evidence suggests that Catholics on the islands—or elsewhere in 1920s Mexico—wished them to be. Transportation Nayarit was seriously affected by cristero violence and provided numerous rebel contingents, many of them led by local chiefs who resisted the encroachments of discredited ligueros like Carlos Blanco.35 The state’s most notorious contribution to the history of the rebellion, however, came with the deportations of Catholic militants to its island penal colony in May 1927 and May 1929. Catholic deportees were not, strictly speaking, POWs, but political prisoners accused of sedition. As such, they were not shot like cristeros in the field,36 but subjected to a pseudoscientific program of resocialization and punishment that was meant to intimidate the cristeros’ urban sympathizers and, in breaking deportees’ spirits, achieve a propaganda victory for the regime.37 The Padillas were in the second group of deportees: the couple were arrested in a Mexico City peluquería on April 17, 1929, and taken to their home (on Londres), which was searched. Because the house was in the fashionable colonia Juárez, the Padillas were probably comfortably off. They were also closely connected to the Catholic underground: in the Padil35. Meyer suggests 1,500 Nayarit rebels. La cristiada, i.82–83, 222, 263, 273; iii.263. 36. Ibid., iii.260–264. 37. This the deportations failed to do. The 1927 coffle did not receive a fair trial, and Ambassador Sheffield reported intense indignation in Mexico City (State Department [SD], 812.00/28446, Sheffield, Mexico, 26 May 1927). El Universal described the islands as a “Dantesque inferno” and accused the regime of hypocrisy and lack of culture, not merely because it ignored due process but because it used the same legal yardstick to measure “honorable people who have been politically delinquent” and “the blackest and most filthy criminals.” Sending principled foes to the islands was the “super essence of mosaic punishment,”a violation of the law’s moral spirit that only made national life more vindictive, tyrannical, and lethal. Callistas, El Universal implicitly warned, could expect no clemency should others apply the law to them using base political criteria. SD 812.00.28445, Sheffield, Mexico, 27 May 1927. Translation of editorial “Justice is Not Vengeance,” 27 May 1927, enclosed. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 283 las’ house, police found ornaments that a priest, Father Reyes, had been using to celebrate for months, among them a silk-lined box carrying consecrated hostias. Later, Refugio was photographed holding a blackboard with a number chalked on the slate and taken to the penitentiary. When he arrived, he was forced to kneel while his head was shaved.38 After suffering in the penitentiary for two weeks, he and Escolástica were ordered to prepare for deportation to the islands. First came a forty-eight-hour train journey, via Irapuato and Guadalajara, to the coast at Manzanillo (Colima): this was a Calvary in itself.39 Arriving on May 10, Refugio writes, the prisoners were led silently through the deserted evening streets, as if in a funereal procession, then locked in the ayuntamiento.40 They stayed here for several days, in filthy clothes that refused attempts to scrub them clean. Refugio already sensed that social and gender distinctions were vanishing (“It was very strange to see that we couldn’t whiten our clothing, no matter how much we scrubbed, and so we admitted defeat. The rich confused with the poor”).41 On May 13, the prisoners were marched to the beach at Manzanillo and up the gangplank of a vessel, Washington, for transportation. The boat had to sail all night to cross the seventy-five miles of Pacific ocean that separated the islands from Manzanillo. The next afternoon, the deportees began to make out the archipelago: first, they passed the island known as María Magdalena, then María Cleofas, and finally the largest island, María Madre.42 Here the ship pulled into Balleto— the colony’s tiny port capital with its wooden jetty, few white-washed buildings, and dusty streets—in the afternoon of May 14, 1929.43 The Islas Marías occupy a place in Mexican penal history similar to Devil’s Island for France.44 This notoriety has made them attractive 38. No éramos bandidos, 23–29. When scalped, Refugio repeated Christ’s words to the disciples about persecution: “But there shall not a hair from your head perish.” 39. Once loaded into boxcars, the women were refused permission to descend and urinate at stations and the men’s arms were bound so tightly that they swelled grossly. There was little food and water and some deportees lost their minds in the heat. Catholics were told that they would be shot at once if cristeros attacked (No éramos bandidos, 25, 40–41, 47). The smell of human excrement that rushed out when the wagons opened almost knocked Francis McCullagh down (Red Mexico, 256–257). For the only time in his narrative, Refugio here takes refuge in irony: “We remembered Saint Lawrence [a Roman deacon martyred by grilling on a gridiron], who, when he saw himself roasted on one side, said to his tormentor: —You may eat from this side if you desire”). No éramos bandidos, 42. 40. Ibid., 50. 41. Ibid., 58. 42. The three largest islands are named after the women depicted weeping at the foot of the cross. The fourth and smallest island is San Juanito. 43. No éramos bandidos, 60–64. 44. Julio César Palma, La verdad sobre las Islas Marías ( panorama geográfico, histórico y sociológico) (Mexico: Editorial Botas, 1938). Cf. René Belbenoit, Dry Guillo- 284 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos to writers—among them Luis Spota, Martín Luis Guzmán, and José Revueltas45—and to cineastes such as el indio Fernández.46 By the time the Padillas arrived, the islands had already seen two decades’service as a federal penitentiary, having been purchased from Gila Azcona de Carpena in 1905.47 The opening of a colony in 1908 was part of a long struggle to bring modern penal practices to Mexico. The colony was designed, in high Porfirian style, to strengthen Mexico’s social organism by isolating groups identified as bearers of social diseases, thus preventing damage to the social body via contagion. Those singled out for deportation included thieves (identified as a pseudo-artisanate of “rateros”), homosexuals, drug addicts, alcoholics, and murderers. Such deviancy would then be modified through a scientific system of rewards and punishments designed to correct human nature and favor development. Because the aim was to resocialize colonists, not destroy them, the islands were an open prison where inmates lived with their families and acquired discipline through labor, particularly, and education.48 Revolutionaries such as Francisco Múgica—the anticlerical who governed the colony from 1928–1933–-attacked abuses such as the use of flogging and the inhuman work gang called the cuadrilla relámpago. Yet because revolutionaries had no money to pay for reforms, and because they, like the Porfirians, believed in linear notions of progress, they retained the basic isolationist model and merely criminalized new forms of socially constructed deviance. As in the 1900s, the main subgroups of colonists in the 1920s were drug addicts, homosexuals, murderers, alcoholics, and thieves.49 From 1927–1929, however, when the regime viewed Catholicism as an intellectually contagious form of sedition, undesirables included groups of confessional militants, dubbed “mochos.” Typically, Catholics were deported to pay for the crime of smuggling arms and intelligence to cristeros: the 1927 deportees would “purge their tine:Fifteen Years Among the Living Dead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938). Belbenoit went to Devil’s Island (French Guiana) in 1921 and describes a hellish regime of slavery, disease, and neglect that drove prisoners to Hobbesian extremes of self-interest including, on one doomed escape attempt, cannibalism. Incorrigibles ended up in the guillotine sèche, a black hole used for solitary confinement. 45. Spota reported for Así in 1941. His articles are reproduced in Las Islas Marías (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortíz, 2002). Revueltas was incarcerated because of his political beliefs, an experience that inspired Los muros de agua (1941. Mexico: Era, 1990). Guzmán wrote a screenplay, Las Islas Marías (Mexico: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1959). 46. Las Islas Marías (dir. Emilio Fernández, 1950). 47. No éramos bandidos, 20–22. 48. Robert Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000), 94–99, 105, 136–137, 207–222; and Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 168–174. 49. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, i.148–152. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 285 crimes working in the Islas Marías,” the regime gloated.50 Besides punishment, however, the implication was that mochos’“fanaticism”—religion ill-conceived as mere scholastical stubbornness—could itself be broken through forced labor. Deportation would exhaust Catholics body and soul, so that, “defanaticized,” they could return to the mainstream.51 By 1940, the ideological target had moved but not the methods: now communists, most famously Revueltas, went to the islands. If not the hellhole described in some accounts, the islands were a highly insalubrious place, and many were damaged permanently by deportation. The sense of alienation must have been overpowering, given that the colony was only accessible after a dangerous voyage on unseaworthy hulks.52 Escape was known to be impossible, and the whole colony could be inaccessible in the summer storms, when sea crossings were suspended and radio communications crackled unintelligibly. This sense of no-return marked colonists mentally: in 1941—Spota wrote— colonists still called themselves los rayados, as if the stripes of their prison fatigues had become imprinted on the skin. Feelings of isolation and depression were enhanced by the jungle vegetation besieging the few inhabited clearings, many of which were infested with swarms of zancudos. Then there were the oppressive temperatures and tropical humidity: at noon, the young and healthy Spota felt crushed by an “immovable white heat,” which made going outside, let alone working, impossible. Even the waters were treacherous because the shallows teemed with stingrays and the ocean with sharks.53 Virtually all human settlement was crammed on to the sixty square miles of María Madre, the largest island at twelve miles long by five miles wide. Balleto was the capital, with work camps at El Rehilete, Las Caleras, La Ladrillera, Los Centenos, El Reventón, Nayarit, Salinas, Durango, and Arroyo Hondo. In the later 1920s, Balleto had one street lined with a fort, garden, and a theater doubling as a school. Here, too, were the five barracas or long-houses where prisoners slept, a post office, plants to generate ice and electricity, a barbershop, company store, radio station, 50. Rivero del Val, Entre las patas, 148. 51. For the 1929 deportees, especially, we should perhaps incorporate some additional political analysis to explain why the deportation occurred at such a late stage in the religious conflict, when negotiations between the regime and the Catholic hierarchy were critically advanced. William Montavon—an elite U.S. Catholic closely connected to the Mexican hierarchy and the U.S. State Department—believed that the government struck using months’-old intelligence of Catholic sedition and did so to demonstrate that it was negotiating from a position of strength, “To show public opinion that it was not being influenced by the ‘cristero’ movement in reaching a religious settlement.” SD 812.404/974– 12/17, memorandum, 23 May 1929. 52. The Mazatlán tub was a “floating coffin,” McCullagh found. Red Mexico, 259. 53. Spota, Las Islas Marías, 10–15, 22. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, i. 119, 141, ii.51–55. 286 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and the modest governor’s house. Nearby stood banana plantations and sports pitches. The hospital, finally, had a dozen beds made from old soapboxes and oildrums; these pits were filthy beyond belief, Spota found, but on them a young surgeon performed “dramatic, brutal, and incredible” operations, saving the odd human life.54 The islands’ work camps and quarries, meanwhile, were places of torment surrounded by oversized fauna. The lumber camp, Arroyo Hondo, was cut off by plains of tall grass hiding snakes and bulls grown large as buffalo in the wild; Arroyo Hondo was also a natural henequenero, with a million cacti.55 In other camps, colonists broke rocks or made lime. Worst of all were the saltworks at Salinas, reached by a rocky path on which colossal iguanas sat warming their leathery bellies. The salt flats—a dazzling expanse of coastal white—reflected sunlight so fiercely that some workers were blinded.56 Refugio describes how salt was extracted: first, sludge was scooped off the floor of watery basins and slopped into baskets; next it was taken ashore and raked out for drying; then it was packed into sacks and carried uphill to a warehouse. This was the cruelest task, since full sacks weighed eighty kilos. The farthest basin was called “La Llorona,” because even the strongest wept when sent there. Salinas, Refugio tells us, is where people went mad. Yet these atrocious methods yielded 100 tons of salt a day, attracting concessionaires to keep the island economy afloat.57 As a result of these travails, another Catholic deportee records, colonists went about in dirty, bloodstained rags, infested with fleas and malaria, with sores oozing on their backs from the heavy loads, and with long, hermit-like beards.58 Those whose work involved stooping found that their backs were toasted black by the sun.59 In such a regime, malnutrition and disease were prevalent. Colonists had to subsist on watery gruel and beans, poured into tin and enamel cans and known as el rancho.60 54. According to McCullagh, Red Mexico, 261–262, Balleto “consists of about a dozen wretched houses, almost smothered by the luxuriant forests which cover the island . . . All these are built on flatter ground than is to be found elsewhere save on the dreary saltpans, and all form a single street of square, white, one-storied huts looking like the army huts of the Great War, but constructed of stone and mortar, so as to resist the tremendous cyclones . . . The far end of the little street is composed of wooden huts for the convicts: apparently it does not matter whether the convicts are blown away.”Cf. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, i. 119, 136. Spota, Las Islas Marías, 15–66. 55. Ibid., 79–87. 56. The prisoners had only just been given black goggles when Spota visited. 57. No éramos bandidos, 68–69. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii.54–73. Spota, Las Islas Marías, 9, 29–32. 58. Navarrete, Islas Marías, 74. Rivero del Val, Entre las patas, 151. 59. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii.46. 60. Spota, Las Islas Marías, 25. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 287 These meager rations were doled out by the “invertidos”—homosexual and transvestite colonists—who worked in the island kitchens.61 As well as malaria, the undernourished colonists succumbed to a debilitating disease of the legs known as granos de la isla. The sea at least provided protein, because turtles that washed belly-up on the beaches were clubbed to death and stewed in a kind of island mole.62 Crusoes also learned how to catch jungle or sea birds to eat: doves were so numerous that they could be driven into nets, and colorful herons, pelicans, and parrots swarmed along the coasts for hunting, killing, and eating.63 In such extreme conditions, people understandably sought correspondingly intense forms of alcoholic, narcotic, and sexual escapism. The most desperate colonos mutilated themselves in order to be hospitalized or swam into shark-infested waters in the hope of being attacked.64 Many grew to love doña Juanita (marihuana), though morphine addicts who reached the islands in cold turkey must have suffered badly.65 Many numbed the pain with moonshine: a vicious island poteen, distilled from a wild fruit called tepache, was illicitly manufactured and drunk, though it was known to cause brain damage. Prostitutes, known as taquígrafas, were shipped in by Múgica in an attempt to reduce the high incidence of rape. The few legal entertainments included baseball and boxing bouts organized by the famous pugilist (and murderer) “Kid Pancho.”66 Catholics—meaning those deported because of self-conscious, politicized Catholicism, not merely the baptized67—constituted a distinctive subgroup, but never comprised more than 100 or 200 reclusos in a total population of some 1,500. The referent católico was, therefore, a misnomer when applied to this subset alone; hence extrapolating the beliefs of all island Catholics on the basis of Refugio’s memoir is almost certainly an overgeneralization. Indeed, the artifice of the Catholic/militant conflation may well be one reason why the deportees quickly adopted the identifier of cristero, with its more elitist connotations of spiritual militancy and proto-martyrdom, as opposed to cradle Catholicism. The authorities reinforced this distinction, as we shall see, by applying negative epithets, such as beato or “fanatic,” to those imprisoned for their religion and by treating them as a group. 61. Navarrete, Islas Marías, 61, 71. 62. Spota, Las Islas Marías, 60, 46. 63. No éramos bandidos, 72. 64. Navarrete, Islas Marías, 67. 65. Ibid., 73. 66. Spota, Las Islas Marías, 35, 39–40, 77. 67. Statistic in Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, i.140. McCullagh’s claim (Red Mexico, 249) that the islands were “full of Catholic prisoners” is misleading. 288 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos By a mixture of inclination and requirement, therefore, this was a discrete, even insular, core of believers who cohered around the idea of bearing special witness to a more precious faith; even when able to do so, they were not interested in forging a common confessional, still less a socially inclusive identity with more “degenerate” convicts. The exclusive character of their apostolate was, therefore, partly of their own making and was consciously desired, even if reinforced by the penal regime.68 To be sure, such Catholics were singled out and subjected to a regime of threats and punishments designed to exhaust their physical resistance and shake their faith. On disembarking, all portable evidence of religious affiliation—rosary beads, missals, and crucifixes—was confiscated.69 The women were separated from the men, who were stripped and deloused in a well before their hair was cropped; then they were locked up naked in a bunker for the night before being put to work at dawn, carrying adobes at a canter. Catholics were made to feel that they had landed on a kind of godless hell from which they would never escape until they abandoned their beliefs. Governor Agapito Barranco told the 1927 deportees that they were dupes of the clergy and that he would give them life sentences for betraying Mexico.70 His guards branded the colonists as effeminate bigots ( fifís fanáticos) or hijos de tal and kicked them at the slightest provocation. “We then lost the notion of being men,”writes one deportee, “and became pariahs, brutalized by fatigue and beatings.”71 Compulsory anticlerical lectures, in which pedagogues attacked “all that was most holy and beloved to Catholics with bare-faced mockery,”were another source of mortification.72 Then there were the punishments for backsliding. Some Catholics ended up in the cuadrilla relámpago, harried by whip-cracking foremen; others were simply thrown into the hole. One Catholic teacher named León Avalos Vez was caught evan68. This raises the question of how majoritarian Catholic criminals, rather than the small number of criminalized Catholics (cristeros), conducted their religious life on the islands. Unfortunately, the available sources (not least Refugio’s) fall silent here: we know, however, that no Catholic clergy were present on the islands until the 1940s and no church was built until the 1950s; therefore, it seems unlikely that the 1926 suspension of public cult represented much of a religious rupture to most colonists, cooks, guards, and so on, who probably carried on as before. For the establishment of the Jesuit mission by F. Samuel Ginori, see the account of ex-governor Adalberto Meléndez, Las Islas Marías, cárcel sin reja (Mexico: Jus, 1960), 48, 51, 202–221. 69. Perhaps fearing this, Refugio gave his crucifix—it had “incalculable value”—to a woman in Manzanillo. No éramos bandidos, 56. 70. Navarrete, Islas Marías, 60–61. 71. Rivero del Val, Entre las patas, 151. 72. Ibid., 152–153. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 289 gelizing in secret and punished by both methods, only surviving, he believed, because colonists prayed salves for him.73 Barranco’s successor, Múgica—between times as Michoacán’s anticlerical boss and cardenista confidante—used a less brutalizing approach, but its ethos was the same. To visiting journalists at least, Múgica was friendly, relaxed in slacks, shirtsleeves, and dark glasses. Officials told how he had abolished the lash (the notorious bramadero)74 and encouraged “regeneration” through healthy physical means, such as baseball. For all this, Múgica was a socialist who nurtured a deeply Manichean view of religion as a relic that would turn to dust under reason’s lights. Madre Conchita, his celebrity captive and housekeeper, wrote that he challenged her at chess using carved historical pieces: whereas white’s king was a miniature of Juárez, black’s, predictably, was Maximilian.75 An intellectual, even gamelike, concept of secularization lay behind such apparently trivial matches: Múgica’s was a vision in which the clergy could be checkmated, forced to yield on the matter of their basic spiritual claims, and religion defeated. Writ large, this rationalist tendency made Múgica unable to understand the obduracy of his less celebrated Catholic colonists and intolerant and vindictive when given evidence of Nicodemism. That Múgica, too, meant to curb religious impulses was made clear by his secretario de gobierno, a Guatemalan named Cano who berated the 1929 cohort on arrival. Like Barranco, Cano made the prisoners strip and wash in a well, before giving a lecture ordering them to quit their religion or face life imprisonment. “No prayers, no pieties” would be tolerated, Cano warned; the mulish would find their imprisonment lasted forever.76 Múgica, too, had spies and punished recusant Catholics with forced labor. Refugio was forced to chop down trees and carry limestone when Múgica discovered nuns used his shack as a massing house.77 Múgica’s determination to displace and ultimately eradicate religion was impressed upon the minds and bodies of his opponents. His surprising indulgence of Conchita—he addressed her as “the abbess” and encouraged her to pen her memoirs— did not extend to more obscure mochos.78 73. Navarrete, En Las Islas Marías, 63–75. McCullagh, Red Mexico, 271. The U.S. embassy mistakenly reported that Avalos was executed by the regime rather than deported to the islands: SD 812.00.28445, Sheffield, Mexico, 27 June 1927. 74. Punishment in which victims were hung by their thumbs from trees and whipped. 75. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, i.135–144. 76. No éramos bandidos, 66. 77. Ibid., 86–87. 78. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii.24. María y Campos (ed.), Memorias de la Madre Conchita, 214–217, 230. 290 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Providence Transportation was intended as a physical, psychological, and ontological shock that took deportees—to paraphrase Porfirio Díaz—far from God: survival on the last count thus depended, in part, on finding more than arbitrary cruelty in suffering. As a consequence, faith in Divine Providence—God considered in the act of ordering all events within the universe for his ultimate glory—became a central motif of Catholic identity. A providential theology gave meaning to deportation, submission to which was both to recognize and conform to the designs of an artificer God. This notion of willing instrumentality emerges strongly in Refugio’s memoir, where it is depicted as an index of God’s goodness and of human faith: “We always asked God,”he writes toward the end, “. . . not to permit his children to weaken, [and] that our tormentor always see that we were being assisted by an omnipotent hand.” Colonists must never show cowardice, “because the children of God are not forsaken by Him.”79 The belief that embracing captivity was pleasing to God gave capitalino Catholics a keen awareness of occupying a special place in the divine scheme. A central conceit of this providentialism was that deportees’ faith was being tested through suffering and that they had a unique chance to reflect God’s majesty through joyful resignation. The colonists’ religious economy thus diverged in tone from that of urban Catholics, whose penitences implored Cristo Rey back to empty churches. Providence was alternatively predilective or reproachful: Mexico City’s theological keynote was divine chastisement and black mourning; on the islands it was exemplary, even saintly, atonement, not abjection. “Whence our great fortune,” Refugio asked, “that God fixed his eyes on these miserable pobrecitos, as victims of expiation?”This sense of supernatural preferment, which colonos articulated in isolation, virtually obliged the deportees to become “more pious, more Christian, more prayerful,”Refugio claimed. Later their families must know that exile had “sanctified”them and “that Christ our Lord cared for us body and soul.”80 Consignment to Nayarit’s floating purgatory thus gave a thrill of sanctity as well as of terror, of being chosen to reflect God’s purpose in a special way.81 This was something that urbanites like Refugio had envi79. No éramos bandidos, 105. 80. Ibid., 73. 81. One objection might be that these were armchair providences, overtones applied retrospectively to Refugio’s memoir from the comfort of Mexico City and in the wake of the Church-state arreglos. Hence, it is worth noting that his memoir is identical in tone to the one strictly contemporaneous document that survives: a clandestine letter sent to his daughter, María Padilla, in Mexico City, while the prison train halted in Manzanillo. Describing the journey to Zapotlán, Refugio writes that though the deportees had been tied together “con unas sogas duras . . . endulzábamos todo con que rezábamos el rosario Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 291 ously associated with rural Catholics, particularly those from Jalisco.82 Self-consciously, Mexico City’s would-be martyrs now re-baptized themselves cristeros83 and prayed they were being sent to join the ranks of a spiritual elect. While his cellmate wept bitterly, Refugio thanked God when told of his coming transportation (“I said, God be praised”);84 he was “contentísimo, because a dream was being realized.” Deportation proved that God was working through him: “I always saw deportation as a privilege of the Almighty, and for me the conjectures, doubts [concerning his own spiritual worthiness] ended.” “Just before . . .,” Refugio confesses, “. . . different ideas had clashed within me.”85 Even so, given this clash and the unknown terrors awaiting the deportees on the islands, we should not suppose that trusting to Providence was facile or that the tests of deportees’ faith were on occasions anything but traumatic. Some of the deportees had to be convinced, to judge from Refugio’s efforts to calm them as the train started westward. As the locomotive left Tlalnepantla behind for the war-torn Bajío, the cristeros were tied by the neck like slaves and left in darkness. Refugio sensed a despondency in the others that he tried to dispel: “I said to my compañeros,” —Courage, my friends, does this not seem to you a great privilege of God Our Lord? Of fifteen million Mexicans, it is we who were chosen to suffer a little for the Lord’s name. What did the Lord see in his servants? What have we done to merit such honor? Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing, and . . . yet, here we are heading towards destiny. Why? . . . because we are Christians. How sweet the name! Christ Our Lord in his infinite goodness has given us this distinction.86 Next Refugio describes an extraordinary moment of illumination in the darkness: “It seems that we heard his voice, which said—If I am with you, who could be against you?87 And this consoled us, comforted us, strengthened us . . .” Refugio then assured the others that their guards could “only do with us what God allows them to do,” because the deportees were “in the hands of God, [going] at His account and at His risk.”The islas were “the nearest doorway to heaven,”therefore, “because He will not be surpassed in generosity and will give us what is most apy hasta cantábamos contentos para no manifestarles tristeza.” He asked his daughter, “Pidan a Dios que todos nos conformemos con su santa voluntad.” Archivo de la Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa (ALNDLR), c. 8, leg. 33, exp. 2, inv. 4848, J. Refugio Padilla to María Padilla, Manzanillo, 10 Mar. 1929. 82. No éramos bandidos, 53. 83. Ibid., 83. 84. Ibid., 32. 85. Ibid., 35. 86. Ibid., 37–38. 87. My emphasis. Cf. Romans, 8:21: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” 292 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos propriate for us.”88 Perhaps the most interesting thing here is how the notion of a providential hand sits comfortably in his mind alongside the idea of a loving God enamored of humanity. Refugio claims to hear God— though he suggests others did also—and interprets fragments of divine speech in accordance with his understanding of Providence. But his idea of God was not some distantly omniscient being—a puppeteer moving blank figurines across an earthly tableau from the heavens—but a ubiquitous, compassionate deity, watching over real creations and lighting the way. His apparent ability to project this vision also gave Refugio some authority among Catholic deportees. Given such human vacillations, however, it is clear why Refugio scrutinized passing incidents for signs of divine favor and why putatively providential acts—from small mercies to those that safeguarded deportees’ lives—were among the things deemed most worthy of record. That the man thrown into his cell in Mexico City turned out to be devout (“God gave me a good friend in prison, who accompanied me. At night we prayed, we spoke happily, we had the same ideas”);89 that people brought food to the half-starved deportees on the quay at Manzanillo (“Grateful for the providence of God Our Lord, we blessed his Holy Name”);90 and that the Washington rolled the waves instead of going down in a storm (“We spent the time commending ourselves to God, since we believed that our little ship would sink”).91 Refugio at once interpreted episodes such as these as evidence of divine intent. Experience thus reinforced or preempted faith in showing that the colonos were being preserved purposefully. Hymns to Cristo Rey were thus sung out of gratitude (“We did not know how to give thanks for his providence”), not—as at Tepeyac—out of desperation.92 At other times, too, the nature of God’s purpose came into dazzling focus, Refugio claims. Twice he marvels that the deportees were instrumental in saving the souls of others: he was amazed how the soldiers’ abuses stopped once the cristeros had prayed over the body of a captain who was shot dead in a barracks quarrel in Manzanillo (“It seems we were received into the arms of Providence. Everything had changed. The soldiers, our tormentors, had become our friends”):93 likewise, when a colonel flung coins at the deportees as they boarded the Washington, pleading with them to pray for his soul.94 For Refugio, it was axiomatic 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. No éramos bandidos, 37–38. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 111–112. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 58–60. Ibid., 60. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 293 that Calles was Satan (“the chief devil”), whereas Vicente Quintana and the other detectives who caught him were demons.95 But lightning conversions revealed that evil was constrained by Providence, too, that all worked in concert for God’s glory, and, because callistas acted with divine concurrence in testing Christ’s people, they were not to be feared. In Refugio’s eyes, this knowledge allowed the cristeros to become fully realized as Christians—cognizant of God’s purpose even when faced with those that meant them harm and possessed of a liberating new capacity for forgiveness: “We all saw that those who took us prisoner . . . were our brothers,”he writes, “that they were instruments of divine justice.” Thus the cristeros “prayed for them”instead of accusing them and “gladly kissed the hand that so mercifully wounded us.” The deportees were not simply being punished in order to make good a national failing; they were being shown how to achieve a spiritual maturity that made them fitter for salvation. As Refugio describes it, “How faithful is Christ Our Lord with his children when he says: do not fear those that kill the body, fear those that consign the body and the soul to hell.”96 By adoring the unseen, edifying disposition that moved their captors, Refugio argued, the cristeros were transported to the brink of heaven. The Rosary Refugio’s memoir suggests that God was primarily apprehended by colonists through providential acts that provided an ontological safety net for people ostensibly at the mercy of revolutionary anticlericals. If they cultivated a belief that God looked after them in order to accomplish some higher purpose, however, Catholics could hardly fail to institute as dignified a form of divine worship as was possible. Yet, as we have seen, they had neither priests nor churches in which to gather, nor even permission to celebrate any kind of cult. For this reason, perhaps, colonists tried ad hoc to sacralize their environs to remind them that God was all around: people carved “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” in the wet sand as the sea rolled out;97 Refugio’s wide-brimmed guaymeño hat also bore this legend;98 and the phrase “Dios te lo pague” was adopted as a greeting.99 Some of this was symbolic, weapons-of-the-weak resistance: inside Múgica’s house, Madre Conchita displayed a china doll that, on inspection, proved to be a niño Dios;100 Catholics dubbed the refectory 95. Ibid., 32. 96. Ibid., 73. Cf. Matthew, 10:28. 97. No éramos bandidos, 83–84. 98. Ibid., 113. 99. Ibid., 46. 100. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii.29, 153. 294 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos “La Bombilla,” after the restaurant where Obregón was left dead in his mole.101 But, within obvious limits, colonists also attempted to make prochurches in marginal island places. The beach was the most accessible and popular site, and here, groups of Catholics first began gathering to pray in 1927. At this time, Barranco’s repression was such that they dared not celebrate collective devotions elsewhere, though probably most prayed alone at night.102 If nothing else, the beach provided cover (dunes, the sound of the sea) to mask the visual and oral aspects of the cult and abundant materials for making Rosary beads: “At the suggestion of Luis Ordóñez, our rosaries were made of the white pebbles that we selected on the seashore, and which we always carried in our rosary bags”.103 The devotion that re-churched the colonos—binding them together as a community—was the Rosary. Indeed, the changing ways in which colonists recited this prayer provide an index of lay efforts to transform an aggregation of believers into a congregation. With occasional reverses, a shift from private to group, even semiliturgical, praying is clearly noticeable—a fact that probably reflects the importance Catholics attached to more church-like forms of worship, the providential imperatives just outlined, and the emergence of a lay-reader elite. By default, the Rosary was soon adopted as a kind of surrogate, everyday Mass. There were some obvious reasons for this centrality. The Rosary was known by everyone; its recitation required beads not books and candles, which could be made out of almost anything and easily secreted on the person; and the devotion could be prayed alone anywhere, but was commonly prayed in church, hence was associated with parish religion and lay directorates. Yet the Rosary was democratic in that all said the same words. These mechanical characteristics added to the devotion’s appeal, because they made it ideal for priestless prayer-ins that had to be conducted with apparent informality and without attracting attention. Saying the Mass— which required more time and paraphernalia, as well as a celebrant— usually happened only on Sunday, which was a rest day. Resolving the church/believer dialectic was politically symbolic to the extent that persecution was intended to atomize religious practice by placing churches under state control. The temptation to retreat into spiritual isolation had to be resisted, therefore, but proved surprisingly alluring. When Refugio was thrown into his cell in Mexico City—number 78 in the Penitentiary’s B-wing—he prayed contentedly by himself 101. Ibid., ii.181. 102. Navarrete, En Las Islas Marías, 75. McCullagh (Red Mexico, 265) concurs: “Sunday is a day of rest . . . The Catholic ‘politicals’meet, however, on that day to say the rosary, and, so far, they have not been prevented from doing so.” 103. Ibid., 79. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 295 (“Without retiring from my cell, alone, unknown . . . I spent the afternoon, happy moments in which the soul surrenders to God and being with Him is overcome by complete tranquility”). Though he tried imaginatively to establish a rapport with the other detainees, his prayerful solidarity reads like an after-thought (“After meditating in that solitude, I took my rosary and prayed . . . I felt happy, and the memory that my wife and other Catholics were there made me more content”).104 At this point, Refugio did not know he would be deported. When he did find out, however, his awareness of others’ suffering broke his solipsism. When some of the men broke down upon seeing the prison cars, Refugio formed a prayer circle (“Ramón Alvarez ‘El Chato’ went close to me, on my left, and on the right went general Sosa. We formed a little group and we started to recite the Rosary”).105 Once on the train, the men said the Rosary again (“In small groups we prayed the Holy Rosary. Meanwhile, the train rolled and time with it”);106 next day, as the train boiled under the Colima sun, the Rosary was repeated (“When we passed Cuyultán, we had already prayed the rosary as on the day before”).107 Likewise, the Rosary was recited in prison in Manzanillo (“We formed groups to recite our rosary, with some on one side, some on the other”).108 The Rosary thus allowed Catholics to reach out to each other. The devotion’s semiliturgical usefulness became even clearer during the captivity at Manzanillo, when they recited it in lieu of an official Mass after a captain died in a barracks shooting. Here Refugio writes that the Catholics who saw the captain’s body lying in a rough coffin wanted to pray (“I stepped forward, asked permission of the one leading the cortège, and I said to him: —Will you allow me to pray a little over the body?”). Refugio then improvised a rite consisting of fragments of the Catholic burial Mass interspersed with mysteries of the Rosary (“I called to my cristeros, we knelt down, and in a loud voice recited a rosary, saying at each mystery . . . ‘Requiem eterna dona is Domine [sic].’I finished and then Señor Suárez followed, and afterwards Luis Ordóñez”). Later, the Catholic women organized a collection to buy candles, adorned the body with a funereal crown, and prayed over it until it was taken away for burial.109 It was his display of initiative, Refugio later claims, that led to his being chosen as the group’s leader and that allowed the group to em104. Ibid., 28–29. 105. Ibid., 37. 106. Ibid., 38. 107. Ibid., 49. 108. Ibid., 51. 109. Ibid., 58. Refugio incorrectly notes the opening of the Introit of the funeral Mass (“Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,” “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord . . .”). See Gil (La tumba del Pacífico, ii.150) for Conchita’s version of this event. 296 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos bark for the islands with more self-confidence. Out to sea and on the Washington’s deck, Refugio writes, the Catholics felt an exhilarating sense of freedom and gave full vent to their religion in a way that they had not been able to do at any point during the persecution. “I was designated to recite the holy rosary,”he writes, “almost shouting at the top of my voice because one couldn’t hear due to the sound of the engines and the waves.” Surrounded by the Catholics from Jalisco, Refugio continues, “I gave full dimension to my spirit. Now, without shackles . . . alone, just us and Christ the King. Now we could recite and pray with liberty.”110 Note that Refugio’s sense of solitude is now collectivized, though he cannot resist highlighting his ascendancy over Jalisco Catholics as ad hoc minister. His jubilation proved transient, nonetheless, as the colonists were all cowed by Cano’s order, mentioned previously, to desist from practicing their religion. Probably Catholic insecurity on arrival at the Islas Marías was such that this threat was taken at face value: as Refugio confesses, Catholic oneness suddenly faltered and the group divided (“That night we did not pray in common. Everyone recited their rosary in isolation”).111 In view of Refugio’s prior exhortations about Providence and elevating the needs of the soul above those of the body, this inward retreat—resulting in the Catholic community becoming invisible even to itself—was a demoralizing blow. Next morning, however, the Catholics met for a session of soul-searching and swore not to disown their faith again. On the beach, Refugio describes how more than twenty of us gathered together . . .Together we talked about the subject of Cano, and deliberated, and we resolved to keep on with our pious practices, but stealthily and with more fervor, because, we said, these people wish to cool our faith. By contrast, our families in Mexico City want us to leave this Island sanctified . . . Shall God Our Lord say that we do not recognize our sins even in the middle of the storm? Shall we say, like Gestas, “if you are God then liberate yourself and liberate us?” No, we here must be more pious, we will recite our rosary in the mornings as if it were Mass, together, alone, or however we can. We, like Demas, will say to the Lord: “We are wicked, we are only receiving just punishment for our sins, but Lord do not forget about us.”112 Refugio used the crucifixion story here to deliver a stinging biblical rebuke to the colonos. Distinguishing between persecution’s faithless and 110. No éramos bandidos, 62. 111. Ibid., 66. 112. Gestas and Demas were the thieves crucified with Christ, unnamed in the gospels but named in apocrypha such as the Gospel of Nicodemus. Apocryphal writers have Gestas, crucified to the left of Jesus, tempting Christ to reveal his divinity by saving himself; Demas—crucified on the right—repented instead and was saved. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 297 faithful victims, he reproves the deportees that they have failed the providential chance that they have been granted to honor their religion. Placed on the islands to suffer alongside Christ like the thieves on Calvary, the cristeros made the wrong choice in electing to follow Gestas and tempt God, rather than following Demas and trusting in God’s mercy. These deliberations, Refugio adds, prompted all present to agree “every day to recite the rosary instead of the Mass on the seashore after roll call,” as proof of their faith’s constancy.113 Again we sense the colonists struggling to find, rather than simply sheltering behind, impregnable faith. They seem to have congregated with more success after this. Refugio records that daily meetings were held at 5 a.m. by the shore, with participants reciting the Rosary and “hearing that enchanting murmur as the waves broke”. On other occasions, Catholics knelt down behind sand dunes to pray the Rosary and then assumed a cruciform posture while reciting the litany.114 Before long, prayer groups began assembling outside the Padillas’ shack in Durango camp in the evening: here Refugio used planks to improvise pews, and visitors sat in the shade of banana trees praying (“If a stranger passed we simulated conversation and so nobody suspected that we were saying prayers”).115 In such alfresco churches, the cristeros developed a surprisingly constant rhythm of religious observances. Mass On Sundays, this religious cycle expanded to include the Mass. The lay lector was often Agustín de la Silva, who was indispensable if only because he had managed to smuggle a missal on to the islands. “This good friend called often,” Refugio writes, “because he was the only one who had a cuadernito or book for hearing Mass, and when he came we said the Mass at home or on the sea’s edge.” Whereas the prayer-ins on the beach were hurried, sunrise affairs—said between the toque de diana and the start of work, Refugio’s description of a lay Mass suggests a socioreligious event structured to remind the faithful of parish life: men and women walking to a service, simple amusements (collecting shells, eating together), and decorating house altars with flowers. Watching the Catholics leave Balleto one Sunday, Refugio writes: [Their] garb consisted of denim trousers, guaraches or shoes, a short-sleeved shirt, and the broad-brimmed hats here called guaymeños. Often I would see 113. No éramos bandidos, 67. 114. Ibid., 68, 74, 98. According to Madre Conchita, Catholics “gathered almost always on the beach, where they praised God together” (Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii.178–179). 115. No éramos bandidos, 88. 298 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Agustín approaching: but if the frame was bulkier, with a mushroom-like sombrero, then I knew it was Silva or Faudiño . . . [This Sunday] I saw that they were coming towards us in more or less large groups. All the women were in their typical island dress; their sombreros were also broad-brimmed, and they walked with staffs, making a bustling caravan. The damas protected by the cristeros. All chatting happily, they arrived and went straight to the beach to amuse themselves on the shore by collecting seashells and seasnails . . . My wife and I were preparing the beans, throwing in more water and salt. When it was time, the eighteen monjitas . . . visited us in our humble house. We made them sit down on chairs, boxes, and planks in the middle of the street, because the heat inside is excessive. Some brought chains of flowers, others green branches, and others bunches of purple flowers; one carried a pink fish on a big stick, which was so curious that we said it was Saint Rapahel’s when he accompanied Tobias.116 Then, when the coast was clear, Refugio states, “. . . back we went to our old ways. The house . . . filled up with señoritas and they said the Mass.”117 Unfortunately, he does not describe in detail how the Mass was said, except to note that the words of the rite were on this occasion spoken by women—certainly damas católicas, and very probably some religious women—with people sitting on rough pews. The fact that he was watching over the path from Balleto, however, and had learned to identify his friends at a distance suggests that this was an illicit, and regular, act. Where Refugio claims to recite verbatim is in recording the text of a sermon (“the preaching of a layman”) that he delivered one Sunday in late June 1929. This sermon is worth following because Refugio articulates his vision of the persecution using biblical texts of his choosing. He is not reading from an episcopal text, but mixing passages from the first and last gospels with images of holy war and emotive exhortations, all in an attempt to make his congregation glimpse God’s Providence more clearly. “One day,” he writes, “we gathered on the beach in the morning and prayed the rosary sitting beside the sea’s edge[;] then they chose me to explain the Gospel to them.” Taking his surroundings into account, like any decent preacher, Refugio explores a passage from John (21:15–17) in which Jesus, arisen from the dead, hails Peter and Thomas from the shores of the sea of Tiberias, instructing them on where to cast their empty nets to haul in a large catch. Sharing fish and bread with the disciples, Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves him. Refugio replays this dialogue (“I began: ‘In those days, Jesus Our Lord said to Saint 116. In the apocryphal book of Tobit, the Archangel Raphael assists Tobias, his travelling companion, in catching a fish that leaps from the Tigris. 117. No éramos bandidos, 85–86. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 299 Peter . . . Peter, do you love me?’”) and each time stresses the depth of Peter’s love.118 Refugio then splices Christ’s next command that Peter feed the sheep with the apostle’s receipt of the keys to the kingdom (“Then the Lord says to him: ‘Feed my sheep, feed my lambs,’ and so as to reward Peter’s absolute sincerity, add[s] ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.’”).119 Thus his sermon builds toward the conclusion that the deportees will win an expectation of heaven by adoring God with the fervor of Peter beside Tiberias. Refugio makes the analogy explicit by posing Jesus’question to the colonists on the beach. Again, he reassures them that God is near (“After all that has happened to us, I seem to hear Christ Our Lord, saying to us: —Christians, who are on the Islands because of my name . . . Do you love me?”). Then, Refugio writes, “We, like Saint Peter, with the full outpouring of our souls, sa[id] to him, ‘Lord . . .You know that we love you.”Refugio sets down the pious exclamations called forth from his congregation: We have much faith and we believe that you have not forgotten about us. Therefore, in the midst of adversity, we proclaim that You are King . . . do not allow our strength to become exhausted. You are Christ, the son of the living God . . . Spare us from saying what the bad thief said: ‘Save thyself and us’ . . . No, Lord, do not permit our apostasy. We are here not because you cannot save us . . . you have us here to save us. We have always said . . . Wound here, Lord, cut here, and here take life from us, so long as you forgive us in the other life. Next, Refugio’s peroration extols divine might and forgiveness: callista hordes, blind to the will of Providence, are depicted in harness to God’s chariot, war-horses unwittingly trampling a sinful Israel; finally, Refugio invites his congregation to repent, and prays that their sacrifices—their lives if necessary—will suffice for the merciful resumption of public worship, so that Mexico’s altars burn again with incense: Our enemies harass us and say to us, “Where is your Cristo Rey?” . . . and we say, “Christ lives. Christ vanquishes, Christ reigns, Christ commands! From his omnipotent arm, the flag has never been lowered! Nor his lightning extinguished, nor his sword dulled! He still smashes kings like puppets of clay! And the throngs of the wicked are yoked to his chariot. Because only He is great, the Most High, the Lord.”We finished by recognising our sins before God, anguishing over them, and saying, “Lord, let none of us who trusts in you be lost. We know that whenever Israel sins, God chastises her . . . but his justice satisfied . . . Lord, who is bold enough to oppose you? You will content yourself with us in your great mercy. And then shall we burn incense on your altars. If not in this life, in the 118. Ibid., 90–91. Cf. John, 21:14–17. 119. No éramos bandidos, 91. 300 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos next we will be able to say to you without hindrances or fears. ‘Lord, You know that we love you!’” Having sketched out a path to heaven from the islands, Refugio was pleased that his flock understood: “I heard from my companions, among them Madre Conchita, this expression: —‘Heaven is as near to us if we die on this island as it is to Mexico.’”120 Holy Communion The fact remains that, without priests, island Catholicism under persecution was stripped of its central element: holy communion. Unlike other problems facing the deportees, however, this dilemma was solved in a way that would have infuriated the clergy. Rescue came from a notorious religious figure who, if she did not break the taboo on consecration, acted as self-appointed mediator of the sacred: Concepción Acevedo de la Llata (“Madre Conchita”), spiritual mentor of the tyrannicide José de León Toral.121 The colonos worshipped Conchita and, on this count, were seriously out of step with the episcopate. The Madre was so saintly, Refugio writes, that she allowed a Guadalajara anticlerical to taunt her, insinuating she had sold her sexual favors to the Mexico City police chief in exchange for new shoes.122 When Refugio met the “beautiful” Conchita on the Washington, he was “enchanted by her way of being”and easy authority—“at a signal from her, we fell silent”. On the islands, Conchita soon became a mother confessor (“She kept an eye on each and every one of the cristeros . . . we told all our troubles to Madre Conchita),123 while her unexpected rapport with Múgica allowed her to intercede on Catholics’ behalf. As a result of her petitions, Múgica permitted conjugal visits and relieved ailing Catholics of forced labor. Grateful Catholics gave Conchita sugarcane and fruit and viewed her in sacralizing (but, surprisingly, non-Marian) terms: their “guardian angel,”a Joseph beside Pharaoh, placed by God. To Refugio, “The Madre was everything.”124 Such admiration was not universal: even disregarding her sensational trial, Conchita’s brand of freelance mysticism—she claimed to answer only to the angels for her actions—had angered the clergy on numerous occasions.125 During the cristero revolt, Conchita’s unduly proprietor120. Ibid., 92–93. 121. Assassin of president-elect Alvaro Obregón in the summer of 1928. 122. No éramos bandidos, 43–44. 123. Ibid., 61. 124. Ibid., 74–76. 125. Conchita took her vows in Querétaro at age eighteen in 1914. Ex-cloistered by revolutionaries, she entered a Tlalpan convent where her devotions reached mortifying Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 301 ial attitude to the sacraments violated Church protocols and aroused the clergy’s ire. In March 1928, Melesio Rodríguez—a canon of the metropolitan chapter—surprised her at home and delivered a rebuke of “funereal seriosity,”according to Conchita’s autobiography. She choked on reading a letter brought by Rodríguez accusing her “of removing the Blessed Sacrament in person from the sacrarium and distributing it among my religious, with the purpose of their carrying it to different prisons.” As a result of such impropriety—possession of the sacrament was a privilege—Rodríguez threatened to take the Sacred Deposit away. Three more priests arrived later that month threatening to dissolve her convent if she persisted in opening the doors to lay Catholics and celebrating illicit masses.126 But Conchita clearly ignored these commands since León Toral’s visits—he served her as an acolyte during Mass— continued into July;127 and he, by Conchita’s admission, was only one of hundreds who came for Mass and blessings with the santísimo.128 Conchita was thus unafraid of using her custody of the sacrament to satisfy the spiritual yearnings of Catholics unable to receive communion elsewhere. What she did was not licit, from the hierarchy’s perspective; yet she had supporters among the lower clergy, which meant she possessed a near constant supply of consecrated matter. Even in prison, she persuaded two government employees who visited her (in August 1928) to find a priest, José García Luna, to consecrate for her. The sacred specie arrived the next day in an envelope, leaving Conchita weeping in gratitude. This mercy was repeated daily: Conchita’s “enigmatic smile”during her trial, which journalists remarked upon, was due to “el pan de los fuertes,”she claims. In her cell, she accumulated stashes of wafers in a locket and her bureau; and before deportation, she writes, García Luna sent her another thirty consecrated hostias.129 Conchita thus had enough sacramental contraband to supply a small congregation; this meant that she could control access to the sacred and decide who should have holy communion. Conchita hints in her writings at her role as bearer of the sacraments, likening herself aboard ship to an oyster bearing pearls. But guessing extremes: crucifixions chained to the bed, flagellation, sleeping in a coffin. An Italian confessor said that she was possessed by the devil. See Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii. 9, 80– 85, 92–93, 98–99, 112, 128–131; Memorias de la Madre Conchita, ed. María y Campos; Concepción Acevedo de la Llata, Yo, la madre Conchita (Mexico City: Océano, 1985); and Jaymie Heilman, “The Demon Inside: Madre Conchita, Gender, and the Assassination of Obregón,” MS/EM 18, no. 1 (2002): 23–60. 126. Acevedo de la Llata, Yo, la madre Conchita, 26–28. 127. Ibid., 29. 128. Gil, La tumba del Pacífico, ii.10. 129. Acevedo de la Llata, Yo, la madre Conchita, 38–39, 57, 67–69, 72. 302 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos what the “particles of happiness”in her possession were is not difficult.130 In any case, we can pick up the story by rejoining Refugio’s narrative for May 27, 1929, when he and select deportees received “the greatest consolation of our lives.”“That day,”he writes, as Catholics finished their prayers, he and Simón Suárez were standing at the water’s edge when they saw Luis Ordóñez running toward them across the sand: We stopped and Luis said: “Do you want to see el huerito?” I replied: “Who is el huerito?” He responded: “We have had the fortune of being visited by God Our Lord in the Most Holy Sacrament,” and he showed us a reliquary. We looked at one another and were astonished upon seeing such fortune. The God of Heaven had deigned to visit us!131 Only Refugio and Simón were admitted into Conchita’s circle. Her involvement is made clear, initially, from the sacrament’s cryptic designation as “el huerito” (sic: “el güerito,” meaning the “little white man”), because we know that this epithet was part of Conchita’s religious lexicon.132 We also know that the wafers had arrived the previous day and that Conchita put them into circulation, once she and her coterie had taken communion on the beach. “Luis explained to us,” Refugio writes, “that the Santísimo had come from Mazatlán”by sea the day before, and that a “pious person”on board had given it to Madre Conchita. Luis then pointed to a stretch of sandbank by a wall where “the monjitas and other people had already taken communion.” “There,” Refugio was told, “in the presence of God and hidden from men, they received the Bread of Heaven.” Now that they held the reliquary, “we went, like other Tarcisiuses. Suárez clasped that gift of Heaven to his breast and I, with respect and emotion, accompanied him.”133 Simón, whose courage had faltered in Mexico City when told that he was being sent to the islands, was chosen as “priest”in the San Angelín house.134 Refugio next describes the clandestine rite: We could have taken communion alone, but we wanted, or rather God wished, other women to participate in this celestial happiness. We called all the most pi130. María y Campos (ed.), Memorias de la Madre Conchita, 219. “Permit me, my God, to be the bearer of those small particles of happiness . . . [and] what my name [Conchita] denotes: a shell which overflows and enriches with its pearls.” 131. No éramos bandidos, 77. 132. This term appeared in Conchita’s letters to León Toral: “In his overcoat they found papers, some with no signature: these spoke of this güerito. They believed that this was a son that we had had . . . Such ironies of life! I address Our Lord as Güerito, out of affection.” María y Campos, Memorias de la Madre Conchita, 189. 133. No éramos bandidos, 70. Tarcisius was a Roman martyr killed carrying the sacraments to jailed Christians; Suárez was an active Adoración Nocturna member. 134. Ibid., 35, 37. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 303 ous and recollected señoras. We told them what it was that we were carrying, and filled with joy they quickly formed an altar [with] two lighted candles [and] some little bunches of flowers. [We were] advised to tell no-one else: Sr. Suárez, a serious, pious, and good person, was designated to give us holy communion. He broke the two sacred forms into pieces and we communed by Suárez’s hand. Refugio is brutally honest in his admission that the Eucharist was taken exclusively, making some island saints more equal than others (there were only two wafers, hence “we didn’t want to alert everybody, because if the particles were too few to go around people would take offence on not receiving the Holy Communion”).135 Pragmatically, Refugio justifies a perhaps unchristian decision to differentiate deportees, restricting the wafers to women deemed most pious and a few men: de facto excommunicates were not told when others took communion, presumably because Refugio knew he had no grounds to deny them their share. Reaching sainthood was a competitive business, therefore, when it came to laying claim to a precious, diminishing resource. Some subjective, potentially hurtful, divisions emerged within the community. Still, the exultant prayers of the happy few predominate in Refugio’s account: Those moments cannot be described. Our hearts, filled with divine love. Oh! . . . What happiness . . . how our hearts grew . . .! We didn’t know what to do, what to say, at the sight of that marvel. We gave adoration to God and with tears in our eyes we prayed for our Holy Mother Church, for each and every one of those many saintly souls that did not have the happiness that we did. We thought of our families, of our benefactors, of each and every one of those for whom we had the obligation to pray. We said: “Lord, remain with us. We shall say to you like Peter, James, and John: —It is good that we make here three tabernacles: one for you, another for Elias, and another for Moses. We shall say to you like the disciples of Emmaus:—Stay with us, because night is falling! That is to say, our strength without your help fails. The night of sadness shall cover us and we will perish. Stay with us because with you we are strong; that is to say, Lord, that man is exhausted and that you remain.” Here Refugio evokes the Transfiguration—the dazzling, mountaintop revelation of Christ’s divinity to three of the disciples136—and Christ’s sharing of bread with two disciples outside Jerusalem at Emmaus,137 to stress the happiness of this hurried ritual and, perhaps, to justify the exclusion of other cristeros at this key juncture. Again, he writes that Jesus seemed 135. Ibid., 78. 136. In Matthew (17:4), Peter, James, and John witness Christ transfigured by an interior shining of divinity. Moses and Elias also appear. Peter says, “Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.” 137. Luke (24:13–31), in which two disciples travelling to the village of Emmaus near Jerusalem meet the resurrected Christ on the road and ask him to remain with them. 304 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos to touch those present at this moment (“It seemed to us that you had come close to us, in order to ask us, like you did Peter: ‘Peter, do you love me?’”) and that they fell to offering praises. “Our hearts answered . . .,” Refugio continues, “. . . Lord, may you be blessed for us by the earth, the heavens, by men, and by the angels, may your name be blessed and adored.” Afterward, “we prayed in common the acción de gracias and each of us retired to our labors.”138 Conclusion Refugio’s account is valuable partly because of the unusual circumstances in which it was produced, but more so because it gives us rare and suggestive insights into the emotively christocentric Catholicism and de facto churchmanship of lay believers involved in the Cristiada. Anticlerical revolutionaries—for whom it was axiomatic that Catholicism and clericalism were historically indivisible in Mexico—expected Catholicism to wither on the vine once the clergy was driven out of church in 1926 and to disappear rapidly in hellish settings like the Islas Marías, where recalcitrant mochos would finally realize that God and the clergy had tricked them. Unless seriously disingenuous or distorted through a filter of pious hindsight, Refugio’s testimony argues against such secularist fallacies: here, we should note, no evidence exists that Refugio intended to publish his memoria; furthermore, when he sat down to write, the persecution was clearly not over, making his providential optimism ongoing, not safely retrospective. We can never be sure, but from all internal angles, the memoir shows cristeros such as Refugio to have spoken the language of—and at least to that extent to possess—an interiorized, three-dimensional Catholicism. This religion was based on christological devotion and gospel truth, fleshed out with historical or apocryphal tales of sainthood, and expressed most fully through social, especially sacramental, forms of worship. In Refugio’s universe, Divine Providence, Cristo Rey, the biblical Jesus, and the santísimo loom largest. His saints are historical abstracts, inspiring personages, not iconic helpmeets with alabaster stares: the apostles come alive in his imagination and speak to him. Refugio’s lack of references to guadalupanismo is equally striking; and his anxiety to receive the sacraments and his need to feel God near at hand led both to him joining Conchita’s illicit (and exclusive) communion circle and to his imaginative readings—even ventriloqual expressions—of divine rhetoric. Given the extreme environment to which Refugio was attempting to adapt his Catholicism, these do not seem like major indiscretions, and no record exists that he was ever called to account for them. 138. No éramos bandidos, 78–79. Butler, The Apostleship of Refugio Padilla, Cristero 305 For historians, Refugio’s memoir is also interesting because it highlights the subtle interpenetration of religious and revolutionary developments, and of clerical and lay outlooks, in Mexico. The Revolution’s leveling impulse was mirrored, for instance, in the disappearance of a mediating clergy and the development of a neoprimitive Catholicism through which Catholics learned to experience God directly. Here we need to remember that most parishes in Mexico had Refugio Padillas, even if their activities generally leave few evidentiary traces. The islands’ flower-covered hillsides, Refugio tells us, became altars;139 and in these natural churches, he adds, “the soul reache[d] sublime dimensions . . . [and] without hindrance or misfortune communicate[d] with God.”140 Resisting secularization effectively thus required the enlisting of Mexico’s layfolk, men and women alike, as a kind of demi-clergy, managing their own spiritual business and helping with that of others. People like Refugio seem to have been the embodiment of this, in that they became responsible for delivering sacred oratory, reciting prayers and white masses, sometimes administering communion, and—on the mainland— celebrating marriages and baptisms. The wider participation of Catholic women, seen here in the shape of the Madre Conchita and elsewhere in the likes of Matilde Narváez and Concepción Cabrera, was also part of this devolution of religious prerogatives, as Refugio recognizes.141 Not for nothing, then, does Jean Meyer argue that the Church developed an “immunological” response to revolutionary anticlericalism, vaccinating itself with the secular “bug” so as to produce an effective antibody.142 Catholics in the catacombs thus formulated an emergency religion as their circumstances dictated, with occasional instances of spiritual license. There was little anticlerical about this, however, and at the conclusion of the revolt, the cristeros, in almost all cases, were reintegrated into the religious modes of before. For Refugio, the final part of the story was the shortest. The cristeros were told that they would be freed in late June 1929 and sailed back to Manzanillo shortly afterward. By the time they arrived, on 5 July, the Church and state had agreed the modus vivendi and clergy could return to their parishes. As this happened, lay preachers like Refugio disappeared from view: no official thanks was given to these auxiliaries, and, though some were praised by priests in private correspondence, the lack of recognition meant that others were 139. Ibid., 72. 140. Ibid., 73. 141. For Narváez, see Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism; Javier Sicilia, Concepción Cabrera de Armida, la amante de Cristo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001). 142. Jean Meyer, El conflicto religioso en Oaxaca, 1926–1938 (Oaxaca: CIESAS, 2006). 306 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos criticized as meddlers. Yet these were not lay rebels or zealots in the mold of Yáñez’s Luis Gonzaga, who removed himself from church out of pride after rowing with the cura and was left “imagining the Mass of the Presanctified” by himself.143 We see this for a final time when the train carrying the freed Nicodemites stopped at Guadalajara en route to Mexico City and local people helped the bedraggled cristeros, still dressed in ragged prison fatigues, to church: when Refugio heard the prayer Tantum Ergo, he burst into tears.144 His memoir closes with a reference to the Te Deum he attended in Mexico City in San Cosme.145 143. Agustín Yáñez, Al filo del agua (1947. Mexico: Porrúa, 2004), 112–124. 144. No éramos bandidos, 124–125. 145. Ibid., 130.