Joel Morales Cruz

The Mexican Reformation: Catholic Pluralism, Enlightenment Religion, and the Iglesia De Jesus Movement in Benito Juarez's Mexico (1859-72) Joel Morales Cruz

Common wisdom holds that Latin America is a uniformly Roman Catholic continentand Protestant churches only entered as a result of British or U. S. expansionism followingthe Spanish-American independence movements. Closer inspection, however,reveals a far different and more exciting reality. As The Mexican Reformation reveals,the Catholic Church in the colonial era was far from monolithic, exhibiting a diversityof expressions and perspectives that interacted with and were sometimes at odds withone another. In the mid-nineteenth century, one such group sought to reform theCatholic Church in line with some of the policies set forth by the government of BenitoJuárez. This movement, eventually known as the Iglesia de Jesús, would lay the foundationfor the emergence of Protestant churches in Mexico. Its roots in the worldview ofthe baroque and in the challenges of the Catholic Enlightenment provide an insight intothe evolution of a distinctly Mexican Protestantism within its social and politicalcontexts as well as a window into the processes underlying the development of religiousexpressions in Latin America.