The Cristero War and Anticlerical Constitutional Legacy in Mexico

Mexico's 1917 revolutionary constitution imposed some of the most stringent anticlerical restrictions adopted by any country, banning religious orders, forbidding clergy from voting or criticizing the government, prohibiting religious education in schools and stripping churches of legal personality and property rights, provisions rooted in nineteenth-century Liberal anticlericalism and the Catholic Church's historical alliance with colonial and conservative political power. These restrictions, enforced with particular severity under President Plutarco Elias Calles in the 1920s, provoked the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929, a bloody Catholic uprising in central and western Mexico fought under the banner Viva Cristo Rey, that killed tens of thousands before a negotiated, informally tolerated truce ended most active persecution without formally repealing the constitutional restrictions themselves. These anticlerical provisions remained on the books, if loosely enforced, for decades until a 1992 constitutional reform under President Carlos Salinas formally restored legal personality to churches, permitted religious education in private schools and reestablished full diplomatic relations with the Holy See, ending nearly seven decades of formal church-state estrangement even as Mexico remains constitutionally a secular state with no official religion.