Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez's Revolutionary Church

by Matthew Butler

Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest brings to life a classically misunderstood pícaro : liberal soldier turned Catholic priest and revolutionary antipope, "Patriarch" Joaquín Pérez. Historian Matthew Butler weaves Pérez's controversial life story into a larger narrative about the relationship between religion, the state, and indigeneity in twentieth-century Mexico.

Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest is at once the history of an indigenous reformation and a deeply researched, beautifully written exploration of what can happen when revolutions try to assimilate powerful religious institutions and groups. The book challenges historians to reshape baseline assumptions about modern Mexico in order to see a revolutionary state that was deeply vested in religion and a Cristero War that was, in reality, a culture clash between Catholics.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2023

Reviews

[Jim Gulley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of the founding of the Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church (ICAM) in 1925 by Joaquin Perez as a schism denomination of Catholicism. It is also a biography of Perez who began his career in the Mexican military, took Holy orders in the Roman Catholic Church, and eventually left it to found a new church with reformist principles. Perez and ICAM gained traction with the indigenous class of Mexicans in the country’s southern hinterlands. They arrived at a time in Mexican revolutionary history when they received tacit support from the new Calle government. ICAM’s bedrock support, though, was CROM, the official Mexican labor union.

Matthew Butler argues that ICAM was more than just a CROM proxy. It was a “popular, prorevolutionary church, that connected reformist critiques of Roman Catholicism with an indigenous constituency.” Central to his thesis is the outsized personality of Patriarch Perez and his leadership of the revolutionary church. He assembled a rag-tag group of priests and stepped into the rural voids where the Roman church had failed to establish a viable ministry.