In the 1960s, as the Cold War was heating up, Mexicans of all walks of life experienced the tensions and conflicts of the time in a variety of ways. Prompted by social protest, the rekindling of old battles in Church-state relations (especially in the realm of education), and the growing tensions between progressive and traditionalist sectors of the lay and clerical Church, Catholics grappled with a shifting political, social, and cultural environment and partook in the broader landscape of mobilization and polarization during that stage of the Cold War in Mexico.
Amid renewed and rising anxieties about the threat of communism, the decline of public morality, and the loss of the Catholic Church's cultural primacy, the Jesuit priest Joaquín Sáenz Arriaga warned Catholics in Mexico and abroad of an even greater danger:
“One of the most pressing phenomena of our times is the falseness, the hypocrisy, and the deceit with which evil disguises itself, taking over even the healthiest institutions. These are silent, imperceptible infiltrations that expand, dominate, and corrupt. These are las falsas derechas [the fake Right] lurking everywhere to destroy from within, to deceive and paralyze the legitimate means of defense available to those of us who struggle to preserve our spiritual patrimony. These infiltrations—Jewish, Masonic, and communist—are all part of a whole and span the entire living organism of the Church.”Footnote 1
By the time he published this ominous analysis (1969), Sáenz had built a global reputation as a vocal detractor of Catholic modernism and progressivism and a dissenting voice within the Mexican clergy. Printed originally in the Spanish magazine Cruzado Español and disseminated through global traditionalist channels, Sáenz's denunciation of the falsas derechas stands as an example of how traditionalist Catholics (those who contested the aggiornamento proposed by John XXIII and the reforms of Vatican II) dealt with the profound divisions within their own camp. It also reveals how some sectors of the Mexican clergy perceived the Church to be under siege by the forces of secularism, liberalism, and the Left, and their Catholic collaborators. Sáenz's struggle against these forces led him to speak out against the growing presence of “progressives” inside the Church, and to accuse Pope Paul VI of acting as an agent of a Judeo-communist plot to destroy the Church from within. Sáenz was an advocate of sedevacantism, that is, the claim that the Holy See under John XXIII and Paul VI was a sede vacante, or an “empty seat,” due to their support for the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Because of his controversial views, the Jesuit priest was excommunicated in 1971, an event that shook the traditionalist Catholic camp in Mexico and beyond, and sparked ardent public debates about the role of Catholics in public life and how they should act in the face of growing Cold War polarization.
While conspiratorial and extreme, Sáenz's diatribes signaled a distinctive moment for the postconciliar Church. On the home front, conservative Catholics mobilized to disavow communism and the influence that counterculture and the Cuban-inspired “New Left” were exerting on Mexican society, especially the youth. This critical juncture was an opportunity to reignite a sense of Catholic national identity, galvanize support, and activate old and new social bases around a platform shaped by decades-long grievances with the postrevolutionary state. However, as I argue in this article, this sense of urgency and the broader context in which the debates over sedevacantism took place also exacerbated existing tensions within right-wing Catholicism and produced a clash among opponents to conciliar reformism. These Catholics quarreled over matters of tradition and orthodoxy, the meanings of Catholic dissidence in Mexican history, and their positions vis-à-vis the political and cultural shifts of the time.
As illustrated by the conflict and convergence between the sedevacantist Sáenz Arriaga and Catholic activist-intellectuals René Capistrán and Salvador Abascal, the post-Vatican II clash between traditionalists and progressives and the reaction of conservative sectors of Mexican society to the 1968 student movement failed to provide the ideological cohesion sought by traditionalists.Footnote 2 These derechas (right-wing forces) shared a post-Cristero identity of resistance in the face of revolutionary nationalism and a view of “progressivism” as another expression of the Judeo-communist threat to the Church. However, they had no uniform approach to these perceived challenges and engaged in bitter disputes that were ideologically and politically impactful beyond the spheres of lay and clerical Catholicism.Footnote 3
Sáenz's notion of falsas derechas was a symptom of the entropy within the Catholic Right. Their conflicts were made apparent in the writings of these activist-intellectuals, in the Catholic publications they wrote for, and in the wider national and local press. Their collective attack on “progressivism,” coupled with their internal disputes reflected unsolved contentions over the political role of Catholics and the historical memory of Catholic dissidence, and their manifold interpretations in light of the changes in global Catholicism, the unfolding of the Cold War, and the conflicts between Catholics and the postrevolutionary state.
Recent scholarship has stressed the centrality of the Cuban Revolution and the student movements of the 1960s in the emergence of the “New Left” in Mexico. Historians have associated these processes with the crisis and exhaustion of revolutionary nationalism, the country's insertion into the political and cultural Global Sixties, and the projection of Cold War polarizations onto Mexican society.Footnote 4 These were catalysts for new forms of activism and rebellion, linking the contested meanings of the Mexican Revolution with the rise of a new generation of activists, artists, and intellectuals who, as Jaime Pensado has noted, merged their dissenting views with their desire for aesthetic exploration and liberation.Footnote 5 Yet, the right-wing equivalent of those collective experiences remains comparatively understudied, with many fewer inquiries about similar shifts among the Mexican derechas during this period.Footnote 6
While Mexicanists are increasingly attentive to progressive Catholicism—including, but not limited to, liberation theology—the historiography of right-wing Catholicism has remained, for the most part, focused on the years preceding the Cold War. This literature revolves around Catholic resistance to early revolutionary transformations, including the Cristero War (1926–29), the opposition to the reformist presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), and the modus vivendi reached by Church and state under president Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46).Footnote 7 Owing to Jean Meyer's landmark study of the Cristeros, a renewed literature on Catholic mobilization during and after the Cristero War has revisited the strategies, motivations, trajectories, and aspirations of Catholics, both urban and rural.Footnote 8 Robert Curley, for instance, highlights the modern character of religious practice, especially in the interweaving of religion and citizenship, and the plight of Catholics as they placed themselves front and center in broader processes of contestation of revolutionary nationalism and state-making. For Curley, the Cristero War left a strong legacy of challenges to secularism, even if “paradoxically, religious rebellion destroyed political Catholicism as a movement with national aspirations.”Footnote 9 A noteworthy body of scholarship has focused on the political ramifications of this post-Cristero aftermath, placing the National Synarchist Union (UNS, founded in 1937) and the National Action Party (PAN, founded in 1939) as the two most significant representatives of the political Right, and as visible, albeit constrained interlocutors to the postrevolutionary state.Footnote 10
Yet, as Ben Fallaw has shown, other Catholic actors contributed palpably to shaping the policies and politics of the postrevolutionary state through civic action, without abandoning their fight against government anticlericalism.Footnote 11 Historians have also tackled Catholic Action initiatives going back to the revolutionary period, such as the Catholic Association of the Mexican Youth (ACJM, founded in 1913), stressing the tensions between lay and clerical Church. Lay groups gave continuity to the Church's concern with “the social question,” promoting interactions between clergy and laity based on notions of Catholic discipline, militancy, and even heroism and martyrdom. This brought to the fore questions over the muted autonomy of lay organizations and their apprehensions about reconciling with an anticlerical state.Footnote 12
Mostly downplayed in the English-language scholarship, the itineraries of the Catholic Right in the postwar era have been analyzed in greater detail by Mexico-based historians. Following the regional focus of scholarship on the Cristeros, these scholars have pointed to the durability of Catholic resistance and the preservation of spaces of Catholic socialization in places like Puebla and the Bajío region, particularly within Catholic Action organizations and the sinarquista movement. This literature has pushed the chronological boundaries of post-Cristero Catholic dissidence far beyond the 1940s, noting the continuities with past experiences of Catholic mobilization and examining civic Catholicism, the role of Catholics on university campuses, and the mobilization of anticommunist sentiment into and past the 1960s.Footnote 13
Actors operating on the “fringes” of the Catholic Right, such as Fr. Sáenz, occupy a much more modest place in this historiography, appearing often as reactive agents of “moral panic,” or as accomplices in state efforts to delegitimize and repress the Left.Footnote 14 More recently, Mexican historians such as María Martha Pacheco, María del Carmen Ibarrola, Fernando M. González, and Austreberto Martínez, among many others, have located expressions such as Sáenz's sedevacantism in a broader constellation of lay and clerical actors with a significant impact on Mexico's Cold War experience. Martínez's work, in particular, richly explores a wide range of right-wing doctrinal positions and political expressions, distinguishing, for instance, between conservative and traditionalist Catholicisms, their various methods for exerting influence on public opinion, and their tendencies toward internal conflict.Footnote 15
In light of these contributions, what follows is an examination of the conflictive plurality of the Catholic derechas, tackling them as a heterogeneous field of ideas and strategies. Among these groups, notions of “tradition” and “orthodoxy” held conflictive meanings linked to the historical memory of Catholic dissidence and running discussions about the Church's mission in the face of social, political, and cultural change. My aim is to partially reconstruct this field of contention by examining the debates surrounding Sáenz's sedevacantism as a catalyst for division among traditionalists, and the impact his position had on the broader public sphere as concerns about social unrest grew. The analysis centers on Fr. Sáenz's sedevacantist quarrels with progressivism and the falsas derechas, while also tackling the positions held by former Cristero René Capistrán Garza and former sinarquista Salvador Abascal regarding the infighting among traditionalists. All three had an activist past and played a role as public intellectuals of the Catholic Right into the 1960s. They weaponized both anticommunism and anti-Semitism to castigate their perceived enemies, including those within the Right, while holding the Cristero conflict as a common point of reference—even though they differed, sometimes profoundly, on the meanings of that past and its actualization for their ongoing struggles.
First, I address the process that led to the excommunication of Sáenz and his denunciation of enemies within his own camp, as well as the extension of debates about the threats of progressivism into the sphere of public opinion. Then, I examine the endorsement of Sáenz's sedevacantism by former Cristero René Capistrán, whose views on the compatibility between Catholicism and the Mexican Revolution, coupled with his prominent militant past, placed him in an unusual middle ground among post-Cristero traditionalists. Last, I analyze the confrontation between Salvador Abascal and the sedevacantists over the question of Paul VI's legitimacy, which included the deployment of mutual anti-Semitic attacks intended to disparage opponents as accomplices to a global anti-Catholic conspiracy. These conflicts prompted Abascal and his collaborators to read the national and international Cold War in a Catholic cypher, and to attempt a revival of “true” militant traditionalism via the founding of a new civic movement.
A Rupture in the Catholic Right
In the turbulent context of the 1960s, Sáenz's confrontation with the Mexican hierarchy and his condemnation of the falsas derechas were symptomatic of a larger conflict within Catholic traditionalism. This conflict was informed by an accumulation of doctrinal positions regarding the social doctrine of the Church and the Vatican's condemnation of liberalism and communism, most notably, the encyclicals Syllabus Errorum, Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Divini Redemptoris. Also highly significant were the reactions to conciliar reformism and, later, the conservative uproar against the embrace of a “preferential option for the poor” by the 1968 conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) in Medellín. Traditionalists defined themselves in opposition to Vatican II's endorsement of ecumenism (which included a dialogue with Judaism), its liturgical reforms (such as abandoning the Latin mass), and the use of mass media, among other changes. The council also debated the long-standing doctrine of papal infallibility and consented to plurality among the global clergy—two aspects that, ironically, aligned with Sáenz's own position as a dissident to the new modernist consensus.Footnote 16
Traditionalists feared that the attempts to modernize or “update” Catholicism threatened the continuity of the Church's sacred mission. Their responses to Vatican II were remarkably varied, even if they were, at least nominally, united by their outright rejection of the reforms. Acknowledging this plurality of responses, María M. Pacheco has referred to Saénz as representative of the “fundamentalist” take on postconciliar traditionalism: one that, rather than incorporate change, clings to an immanent concept of “tradition” as a defense against the disorder of modernity and sees the incorporation of “the new” as the path for the destruction of the Church.Footnote 17 On the other hand, Austreberto Martínez identifies Sáenz's sedevacantism as a specific subdivision within traditionalism, separate from and often at odds with others (such as Lefebvrism and what he calls “radical anti-progressive traditionalism”), given sedevacantism's direct attacks against the papal authority of John XXIII and Paul VI.Footnote 18
Typological distinctions aside, Sáenz's life trajectory was marked by his integrism (the belief in the exclusive prevalence of Catholic principles in structuring society, in contraposition to secular modernity), his intransigence, and an early familiarity, through his Catholic Action work, with the idea of “resistance” as a trait of postrevolutionary Catholicism. Born in 1899 in Morelia, Michoacán, Sáenz studied theology in Spain (1916–24 and 1926–27), from where he followed the events of the Cristero War and became involved in disseminating information about the conflict.Footnote 19 Sáenz returned to Mexico in the aftermath of the war and partook in various initiatives of Catholic activism, from the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth (ACJM) to the emergence of Mexican Catholic Action (ACM) in 1930. Among the main aims of the ACM were combatting the ills of modernity, the defense of Mexico as a Catholic nation, and the promotion of the key role of the laity in “restoring all things in Christ”.
In the 1930s, Sáenz joined a group of priests and lay activists who founded the National Union of Catholic Students (UNEC), a Catholic Action entity that served as a confederation of student organizations to promote the “Christianization” of public universities.Footnote 20 In that same period, Sáenz collaborated with the University Student Federation of Jalisco (FEJ), which led the local resistance against the federal government's push for socialist education. In 1934, the FEJ helped found the Universidad de Occidente (later known as the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, or UAG) with the support of local civic and business groups, including former Cristero leaders such as Agustín Navarro Flores, who became the “rebel” university's first rector. According to Sáenz's biographer Antonio Rius Facius (himself a traditionalist of stature in Catholic circles), Sáenz became an advisor to FEJ leader Carlos Cuesta Gallardo.Footnote 21 Cuesta's shadow organization, the secret society known as Los Tecos, enabled the FEJ to function independently of the vertical structures of Catholic Action and maintain influence over student affairs at UAG.Footnote 22 Indeed, after its founding in 1930, the ACM struggled to regulate the functioning of lay organizations, especially pre-existing ones such as the ACJM. Sáenz's work with the ACM, however, did not push him away from the defiant Tecos. Hence, despite what Rius Facius calls “disagreements of form, but not of substance” over the autonomy of the UAG student council, Sáenz remained close to the mission of UAG in deeming the youth as the most important target of the mission of “re-Christianization” taken up by lay groups, whether subordinated to the ACM or not.Footnote 23
In the 1940s Sáenz continued his work with Catholic youth groups, first as head of the National Confederation for Marian Congregations, which he incorporated into the ACM, and later as a key figure, along with fellow Jesuits Jorge Vértiz and Manuel Figueroa, in the recruitment and indoctrination of Catholic students from secondary and higher education institutions in Puebla and Guadalajara.Footnote 24 At the request of Fr. Figueroa, in 1954 Sáenz became an advisor to the University Anticommunist Front (FUA), a newly minted student organization that fought against “communist infiltration” at the University of Puebla following the anti-socialist path established by FEJ and Los Tecos in Guadalajara from the 1930s.Footnote 25
By the early 1960s, in an environment of perceived communist agitation created by the 1958–59 railroad workers’ strikes and later by the impact of the Cuban Revolution in Mexico, the Church-led campaign “Cristianismo sí, Comunismo no” became a catalyst of mass mobilization of religious sentiment with an anticommunist and nationalist bent. Through effective propaganda and public rallies with thousands of attendees, the campaign galvanized Catholic students, grassroots organizations, and intellectuals in what became a watershed moment for Catholic activism on the eve of Vatican II.Footnote 26 Nonetheless, despite traditionalists’ desire to unite forces against a perceived communist onslaught, this was also a moment of rupture within Fr. Sáenz's closest circles. Sáenz clashed with the leadership of FUA over matters of “method”—namely, FUA's use of street violence—and broke with FUA leader Ramón Plata Moreno, founder of the long-standing far-right Catholic organization known as El Yunque, and of another nationwide anticommunist student group, the University Movement for a Renewed Orientation (MURO).Footnote 27
The rupture between Sáenz and Plata Moreno happened during the early sessions of the Second Vatican Council, just as Sáenz was becoming a leading voice of global sedevacantism. Between 1962 and 1963, Sáenz traveled to South America and the Vatican to meet fellow traditionalist clerics and lobby against conciliar reforms. In Rome, he disseminated the book The Plot Against the Church, a rabid anti-Semitic treatise allegedly written under a pseudonym by a member of Los Tecos. Reacting to the council's initiatives to tackle Catholic anti-Semitism and improve Catholic-Jewish relations, the book accused the council of being manipulated by Freemasonry and Judaism (“the secret driving force of communism”) and of giving in to a “Jewish revolution” within the Church. Sáenz also penned a leaflet warning the bishops of Iberia and Latin America against an ecumenical rapprochement with “the Jewry.”Footnote 28
In these travels, and at the behest of Plinio Corrêa, leader of the Brazilian ultramontane organization Tradiçao, Familia e Propriedade, or TFP, Sáenz was accompanied by members of MURO, including Ramón Plata Moreno. A decade later, Sáenz accused Plata Moreno of sabotaging his mission by widely distributing the inflammatory materials that Sáenz had planned to share with a small circle of traditionalist clerics. For Sáenz, Plata Moreno's indiscretion was a “dark maneuver” to advance communist subversion and benefit the enemies of the Church, though he still acknowledged the shared mission of Los Tecos and MURO to fight the “worldwide Jewish secret society” behind communism.Footnote 29
Sáenz's writings against Vatican II also created tensions with Cardinal Darío Miranda, the archbishop of Mexico City. In 1966 Sáenz published Con Cristo o contra Cristo, which doubled down on his criticism of Catholic progressives for their complicity with communism, and at the same time stressed their links to a Jewish conspiracy to “demolish” the Church: “The attack comes from [the Jews]. There is no defense without an attack. Judaism's attack against the Church has been secular, permanent, sometimes underhanded, insidious, cautious, sometimes violent, incendiary, bloody, and destructive.”Footnote 30 Sáenz claimed he had the authorization of the archbishop of Hermosillo, Juan Navarrete, to publish the book, but he nonetheless earned a verbal reprimand from Cardinal Miranda, which Sáenz snubbed by avoiding meeting with him in person to discuss the matter.Footnote 31 Similarly, tensions between Sáenz and the young militants from MURO peaked when, on January 9, 1966, MURO leader Luis Felipe Coello made a threat on Sáenz's life at his own home in Mexico City (ostensibly because of the priest's attacks on the papacy), an incident that was reported by the national press.Footnote 32
Despite these confrontations, Sáenz did not abandon the sedevacantist campaign nor his attacks against Catholic progressives and their alleged accomplices. Published in 1971, Sáenz's The New Montinian Church argued that the modernist consensus that emerged from Vatican II—the acceptance of religious freedom and plurality, and the “modernization” of liturgy, for instance—was, in reality, a mortal blow by Judeo-Masonic-Communist conspirators led by Giovanni Montini (Paul VI) to hand the Church over to its enemies. Notably, and despite Sáenz's Catholic Action background, The New Montinian Church did not significantly reference or engage with Catholic social doctrine as laid out in the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891).Footnote 33 Instead, Sáenz focused on the anticommunist aspects of Pius XI's encyclicals—mainly, his condemnation of “atheistic communism” as intrinsically perverse in Divini Redemptoris (1937) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), which revisited “the social question” posed in Rerum Novarum (1891) and reiterated the incompatibility of Catholicism with communism's class warfare and the destruction of private property.Footnote 34 Also, as he had done since the 1960s, Sáenz insisted on denouncing crimes of the Jews against the Church, including the betrayal and killing of Jesus, and invoked the specter of Judaism as the main force behind Vatican II. In turn, Sáenz accused Paul VI of being a “crypto-Jew” charged with destroying Catholicism and imposing a world government with “a single homocentric religion of universal brotherhood” inspired by the occult mysticism of the Talmud and the Kabbalah.Footnote 35
The New Montinian Church also offered critical commentary on the political impact of modernism and progressivism. It tackled, for instance, Paul VI's participation in the 1968 CELAM meeting in Medellín, where Latin American clerics embraced the “preferential option for the poor.” Sáenz used this as “evidence” to link the revolutionary agenda of the attendees (“those paid communist agents who cautiously militate within the Church”) with the belief that Paul VI was an illegitimate pope and an enemy acting from within.Footnote 36 Further antagonizing the hierarchy, he advanced the accusation that the Judeo-Masonic-Communist plot set in motion by Vatican II was reminiscent of the Holy See's ambivalent responses toward past assaults against Catholicism, namely those experienced in Republican Spain (1931–39) and in Mexico during the Cristero War.Footnote 37
Sáenz's last book, titled Sede Vacante (1973), appeared at a particularly agitated national and regional juncture: the radicalization of urban and rural Leftists in Mexico; the fall of Salvador Allende in Chile; and the increasing visibility of liberation theologians throughout the continent. In Sede Vacante, Sáenz reiterated the sedevacantist theses, and attributed the reigning international disorder to Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967), a “subversive document” that, he claimed, prefigured what transpired in Medellín: the endorsement of anticolonialism, religious pluralism and materialism, and the transformation of the Vatican into a center of communist activity.Footnote 38
For over a decade, Sáenz used these arguments to attack Catholic progressivism through newspaper editorials and TV appearances. His main target was Sergio Méndez Arceo, the so-called “Red Bishop” of Cuernavaca, who became an adherent of liberation theology and was a founder, along with Gregorio Lemercier and Iván Illich, of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC).Footnote 39 Sáenz also denounced the “restless, revolutionary spirit” of Fr. Enrique Maza, a progressive Jesuit and journalist, and later a founder of the renowned magazine Proceso. Sáenz's ire rose when Maza sided with Iván Illich, who publicly criticized the Church's dependence on foreign charity and called for the creation of an independent “Ibero-American church.”Footnote 40 Sáenz took his rebuttal to the newspapers, deeming Illich's proposal and Maza's endorsement as the work of “Marxist dialectics.” He also rebuked Maza for his lack of “Ignatian spirituality” in promoting the “imperialism of progressivism” and in embracing a materialistic outlook of the Church's spiritual mission.Footnote 41
Sáenz was not alone in waging this public battle against the purported enemies of the Church. He had the support of Los Tecos, who still controlled the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. According to state intelligence reports, Los Tecos worked as an extreme-right secret society with a vertical structure dedicated to the recruitment of youth and “the placement of professionals as infiltrators in the press, the PRI, and sinarquismo as a means to exert control over government.”Footnote 42 Through Réplica, a magazine published in Guadalajara under the Tecos-controlled Mexican Anticommunist Federation (FEMACO), Sáenz and his teco allies denounced Bishop Méndez Arceo's CIDOC as a center of Marxist and Freudian indoctrination to bring about “violent change” within the Church.Footnote 43 They insisted that Mexican Catholics faced a radical choice between traditionalism and progressivism, even if, as Roderic Ai Camp and others have suggested, the significance of that divide in everyday forms of popular religiosity remained limited, as did the overall impact of liberation theology in Mexico (in comparison to the rest of Latin America) throughout the Cold War period.Footnote 44
Excomulgado: The Debate over Sáenz's Excommunication
On December 18, 1971, Cardinal Miranda issued a decree against Fr. Sáenz for the “insults and heretical judgments hurled at the Pontiff and the Fathers of the Vatican II Council” and “for inciting disobedience toward the Holy Father, and aversion and hatred toward his acts, decrees and decisions,” among other charges. The document placed Sáenz in “suspension a divinis,” that is, it forbade him to exercise his priestly functions and declared him to be “automatically outside of the Church.”Footnote 45 A byzantine debate about the meaning of the decree ensued. The episcopate denied that Sáenz had been excommunicated (that is, expelled from the Church), and instead argued that he had “placed himself outside the Church through his attacks against the Supreme Pontiff and his rebel attitude.”Footnote 46 As Fr. Antonio Brambila claimed in a column for El Sol de México, Sáenz had “excommunicated himself” by rejecting the “Montinian Church” (which, wrote Brambila, “casually happens to also be the church of Christ”). Hence, for both Brambila and the episcopate, the decree was not a punitive measure but a recognition of Saénz's willful act to abandon the Church.Footnote 47 The spokesman for the Metropolitan Curia, Fr. José de Martín Rivera, went so far as to state that by attacking Miranda and other Mexican prelates Sáenz had turned himself into “a banner for a subversive minority.”Footnote 48 Conversely, Sáenz and his supporters seized the opportunity to portray the decree as the suppression of a dissident traditionalist voice, with much of the debate in ecclesiastical circles and the press treating the decree as the excommunication of a rebel priest.
Sáenz's allies took action. In immediate retaliation for the excommunication, an unidentified pro-Sáenz group (presumably members of Los Tecos) vandalized the home of Cardinal Miranda in Mexico City with graffiti reading “Miranda traitor,” “Sáenz sí, Miranda no,” and a swastika. According to press reports, similar incidents took place at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and the Pontificio Colegio Mexicano in Rome.Footnote 49 In 1972, Sáenz and a group of sympathetic clerics founded the magazine Trento, and later, the Unión Católica Trento, which, according to Austreberto Martínez, became the epicenter of dissident sedevacantist activity in the country, in contest with other traditionalists.Footnote 50 The excommunication thus revived a long-standing fault line between ecclesiastical authority and the lay Catholic base, and exacerbated tensions around questions of tradition and change.
As reflected in the press, the polemic around Sáenz's sedevacantism shows the intensity and public salience of debates about the political role of Catholicism in Cold War Mexico. This occurred in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement and in the context of accusations about the subversive nature of progressive Catholicism, which together stoked conservative fears of communist agitation and revived government concerns about Catholicism as a latent source of political unrest. A press release of January 1969, signed by former Cristero and ACJM leader René Capistrán Garza and other anticommunist activists, is illustrative of these apprehensions. The release accused Bishop Méndez Arceo, Jesuit and Dominican priests at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the University Parish, respectively, and even the leadership of the PAN of condoning “youth terrorism” and “conspiring against Mexico, inciting violence, and applauding communism.”Footnote 51 A battle in the newspapers followed, with Méndez Arceo rebutting the accusations, just as Anacleto González-Flores Guerrero (son of a famed Cristero martyr, member of Los Tecos, and head of the Union of Mexican Anticommunist Catholics) took to the press to double down on the attacks, which he also aimed at lay activist José Álvarez Icaza, the director of the Catholic-progressive National Center for Social Communication (CENCOS).Footnote 52
In 1972, after Sáenz's excommunication, a group of anticommunist professionals, mostly lawyers, called the Frente Constitucionalista Mexicano also expressed concerns about progressivism's subversion, but from a different standpoint. Using the Cristero War as an example, they argued that the activities of progressive catolicomunismo were part of a long trajectory of victimization, treason, and subversion by the clergy, in their attempt to undermine the secular state. To them, Sáenz was simply a victim of the power wielded by subversive clerics, in contrast to honest and loyal Catholics like René Capistrán who advocated for an apolitical church.Footnote 53 These public interventions continued as newspaper editorials and columnists discussed the dangers of progressivism and its links to rural and urban guerrillas in the aftermath of 1968.Footnote 54
Traditionalists capitalized on this public attention to present Sáenz as a persecuted rebel. On August 1, 1971, just a few months before Sáenz's excommunication, the TV talk show Anatomías hosted a conversation between Fr. Porfirio Miranda, a progressive priest and author of the newly published book Marx y la Biblia, and a group of traditionalists, in which they were to debate Miranda's positions.Footnote 55 Among the latter were Sáenz and his collaborator Antonio Rius Facius, together with Prof. Celerino Salmerón, a conservative historian and former sinarquista, and Rafael Rodríguez, a prominent member of FEMACO and Los Tecos. During the show, and in reference to his sedevacantismo, Sáenz claimed: “I am not a rebel, or an obstinate person; I am a convinced Catholic!” Expectedly, he condemned Miranda's progressivism and closed his intervention by saluting those who “in Mexico as in other parts of the world are waging this painful battle . . . because we who trust the eternal truth of Christ have now become the marginalized ones, the ‘enemies.’”Footnote 56
Sáenz attached these tropes of resistance and persecution to his cause, prompting other traditionalists to criticize ecclesiastical authorities over Sáenz's legitimate right to dissent and the tolerance shown toward progressives. For instance, in a statement published in national dailies, the Pro-Orthodoxy Committee of the Diocese of Colima called out the lack of reprimand against progressives for their “insidious practice of Marxism and guerrilla violence.” They rebuked Cardinal Miranda for issuing an excomunión papólatra (an excommunication blindly aligned with the pope).Footnote 57 An article by layman Arturo Pedroza, published in the popular Impacto magazine and the daily El Universal, inquired: “Can one criticize Paul VI without running the risk of excommunication? Are progressives the only ones allowed to express freely within the Church [and] declare themselves Marxists, endorse violence, and glorify the guerrillas without reprimand?” Pedroza also criticized Paul VI's rapprochement with the communist world, arguing that the pope lacked “the right to negotiate the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the communists” and asserting the obligation of all Catholics “to fight for [their] liberation from merciless totalitarian dictatorships.” Framing the conflict in such geopolitical terms, Pedroza warned that the excommunication was a clear sign that both the pope and Cardinal Miranda had taken “a very dangerous step . . . dealing the first blow to break the unity of Mexican Catholics.”Footnote 58
In a press release after his excommunication, Sáenz himself doubled down on the meaning of this broken unity, and instead of regretting it, he embraced the resulting polarization; that is, the existence of “two opposed, antagonistic camps, called traditionalism and progressivism.” He characterized the former as “the monolithic position of faith” dating back to “the sources of Truth Revealed, through all the Popes and all the Councils, the depositum fidei . . . that the Church holds in custody, immutable, until the end of times.” For him, progressivism was “the new economy of the Gospel, the religion of dialogue, aggiornamento and ecumenism,” and between the two camps he saw no middle ground: “We are with either truth or deceit; with Christ or against him.”Footnote 59
Sáenz's sedevacantism cemented this stark division, but also shook the conservative camp, creating a dispute for the meaning of “true” traditionalism. The aftermath of the excommunication prompted Sáenz to mobilize his notion of falsas derechas, especially, and as I discuss below, against radical anti-progressive traditionalists Ramón Plata Moreno and Salvador Abascal, who he deemed to be papólatras—blind followers of the pope.
Las Falsas Derechas
For Sáenz, the presence of the falsas derechas was not a marginal issue. Besides constituting an element of the Judeo-Masonic-communist conspiracy, they were dangerous because they exposed the fissures and entropy of the traditionalist camp that he sought to unify and uphold as the guardian of truth and faith. Because they disguised themselves under the mantle of Catholicism, Sáenz regarded the falsas derechas as “perhaps more dangerous than the open, unmasked enemy . . . [They are] evidently, a Jewish tactic.”Footnote 60 As discussed above in relation to Sáenz's writings, the construction of the Jew as a deceiving, conspiratorial, and treacherous anti-Catholic foe closely associated with Masonic or communist schemers was central to the sedevacantist reading of the postconciliar moment. It was a metaphor for enemies in disguise, a weapon to be wielded also against antagonists within traditionalism, and a means to portray the dangers of progressivism in a transhistorical and global frame.
The falsas derechas were not a new problem. Going back to the time of religious persecution, Sáenz argued, they had been making secret pacts with the enemy—an allusion to the arreglos (the truce between the church and the government) that ended the Cristero War. Those “bitter days,” recalled Sáenz, were ridden with “divisions and resentments,” as “the true fighters—the heroic Cristeros, the members of the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty, the glorious ACJM . . . —were displaced, betrayed, and forgotten by the opportunists.”Footnote 61 For Sáenz, the two most notable products of the post-Cristero Right, the National Action Party and the sinarquistas, were also falsas derechas, insofar as he saw them as bound to the legacy of the revolution and inadvertently contributing to the expansion of socialism, with the panistas “playing along with democracy” and the sinarquistas performing a useless martyrdom, “resignedly suffering beatings, imprisonment, and death itself.”Footnote 62
Hinging his accusation on anticommunist and anti-Semitic tropes, Sáenz labeled his former allies from MURO equally as a falsa derecha. As noted above, the rupture with former pupil and MURO leader Ramón Plata Moreno began during the sedevacantist scandal at the Vatican II sessions, and grew worse in the early 1970s when Cardinal Miranda banned MURO's activities in Catholic schools due to its “unorthodox mystique,” its members’ work as agents of “materialist and Marxist agitation,” and their trajectory of clandestine recruitment and public violence.Footnote 63 Although a detractor of Miranda, Sáenz agreed with this negative view, and accused MURO of “betraying their origins,” turning to “organized slander and deceit,” and pushing their “noble and sincere followers” to become pawns of communism by the action of Plata Moreno's “Hebrew hand.”Footnote 64
An anti-MURO pamphlet produced years later, ostensibly by one of Los Tecos’ front groups, reflected this view. The pamphlet claimed that MURO served as “agents provocateurs,” “puppets of Christian Democracy,” and pawns of the Brazilian traditionalist organization Tradição, Família, Propriedade (TFP). The document also stressed the “lack of transcendence” of MURO's public actions (graffiti, picket lines, street fights), and the “dark interests” that supported them, which allegedly included businessmen from Monterrey, the Jesuits, the Lasallists, the National Action Party, and the sinarquistas—all falsas derechas as denounced by Sáenz.Footnote 65 MURO was thus a concrete expression of the fake papólatra traditionalism whose advocates Sáenz and his intransigent allies saw as collaborators of the Judeo-Communist conspiracy.
These accusations held a broader significance: the bitter struggle for the control of Mexican representation in the World Anticommunist League (WACL), a global conglomerate of governmental and private organizations that, since its founding in 1967, had rejected Cold War détente and sought a violent escalation of the global anticommunist struggle.Footnote 66 The conflict between the sedevacantist Tecos and MURO reached the highest levels of the Taiwan-based WACL leadership, as attested by correspondence remitted by both sides. According to Los Tecos (who controlled the Mexican Anticommunist Federation, or FEMACO, inarguably the main Mexican organization in the WACL), MURO's subordinate alliance to the Brazilian TFP was “antinationalist.” FEMACO considered MURO and TFP as accomplices to Zionism and functional allies of international communism, due to their rejection of sedevacantism and their attempts to undermine FEMACO's own reputation.Footnote 67 Conversely, TFP accused FEMACO of sidelining them from the 1974 WACL Conference in Washington, DC, and of harboring “a Nazi movement with the characteristics of a secret society, which usually lies, smears, and provokes dissension everywhere.”Footnote 68 The clash over sedevacantism became intimately linked to the geopolitical aspirations of these belligerent groups and their presence in these larger circuits of anticommunist activism.
In this context, Sáenz's notion of falsas derechas played a crucial ideological function: it allowed the sedevacantists to portray themselves as the keepers of Catholic and anticommunist orthodoxy, and enabled them to call out certain forces, both transhistorical (such as Judaism) and concrete and contextual (such as MURO), that allegedly contributed, consciously or unconsciously, to the actions of anti-Christianity. Sedevacantists overlooked what they shared with their fellow traditionalists—the anticommunist struggle, and the rejection of “modernism” and the conciliar church, for instance—and actively distrusted and attacked them as yet another arm of an anti-Catholic conspiracy, with virulent anti-Semitism as a potent weapon to deride their enemies, at home and abroad.
Voices of the Post-Cristero Right: Redeeming the Revolution
These conflicts brought to the fore other Catholic voices, some of which took seemingly unorthodox paths to defend their views of the Catholic nation and of Catholics’ relation with the postrevolutionary state. One of these voices was René Capistrán Garza (1898–1974), a founding member of the ACJM and a key figure of Catholic resistance during the Cristero War. After returning from exile in the United States in 1937, Capistrán worked for La Prensa Gráfica, became editor of the daily Novedades, and later founded his own newspaper, Atisbos, in which he gathered a notable group of collaborators, such as José Vasconcelos, the tireless anticommunist activist Jorge Prieto Laurens, and other right-wing nationalists, under the slogan “Primero México, después México, siempre México” (Mexico first, then Mexico, always Mexico).
While linked to it by a shared Cristero genealogy, Capistrán did not join the emerging sinarquista movement, and instead developed a critical position toward its political and social project. “Those who still breathe the air of 1926 . . . are nothing but anarchists in religious attire,” Capistrán wrote in 1951. “They want to destroy everything, raze everything, until there is nothing left. They want to build, for themselves and through their own means, their own mystical Catholic City.”Footnote 69 Like Sáenz, Capistrán also criticized the sinarquista obsession with heroism and martyrdom, and their “silent nostalgia” for the regime of Plutarco E. Calles, which he saw as a longing for conspiracy and rebellion, and thus as a functional equivalent of Leftist subversion.Footnote 70
Capistrán could qualify as one of Sáenz's falsas derechas, as he had “converted” to embrace the post 1940 modus vivendi between Church and state, and abandoned the hard intransigence of his earlier years in the ACJM. In fact, in his newspaper Atisbos, he promoted an anticommunism that aligned with the doctrine of mexicanidad of the Miguel Alemán administration (1946–52), while still questioning secularism, especially in public education, and appealing to national unity and Catholic civic engagement.Footnote 71 In Capistrán's view, Catholic social justice was compatible with, and in fact the source of, the socioeconomic goals and anticommunist orientation of the PRI regime. This realization was common among Catholics who rebuked the radical legacies of the revolution but, by virtue of their resistance, accommodated to and participated in the making of the postrevolutionary order.Footnote 72
Without abandoning a position of dissidence, Capistrán made amends with the revolutionary past in terms that he deemed consistent with his Catholic beliefs. For him, Catholicism was both “the religion of resignation and conformity with divine will,” and “a doctrine of virile and heroic resistance, even rebellion, against human will.”Footnote 73 This duality of obedience and resistance informed his view of the revolution, which he saw as a necessary stage of violence and destruction, a revolt of popular Catholicism that “cut down the tree” of a liberal dictatorship (the Porfiriato) and prevented the coming of communism. The revolution was thus the “first prophetic precedent against communism,” and a moment of redemption with “the highest Christian purpose.”Footnote 74 Catholicism and the revolution were “two historical realities inexorably embedded in the soul of our people. . . . They are co-constitutive of national life.”Footnote 75 Hence, the revolution was of divine design, and Catholics should “embrace it, forgive it, and be forgiven by her.”Footnote 76 In turn, the Cristero War furthered the Revolution's “divine content.”Footnote 77 The war was “a thesis, not just an event”; that is, it was an ideal and a lens through which Capistrán and other post-Cristero political Catholics understood their role in the global fight against communism, now in a Cold War context: “It is impossible to plan any struggle without the magnificent precedent of that crusade.”Footnote 78 Mexico was, in his view, a nation founded in and sustained by the struggles of the Catholic people against liberalism, atheism, and international communism.
Like other traditionalists, Capistrán rejected the conciliar reforms, progressivism, and any dialogue with the Left, which he equated to “drinking poison to show one is in perfect health.”Footnote 79 He also aligned with other conservatives in denouncing the student movement of 1968 as “pure demagoguery” and “not a conflict, but pure subversion,” and in supporting the government's repression as a necessary measure against communism.Footnote 80 Standing firmly in the traditionalist camp, in 1971 Capistrán joined Sáenz's sedevacantist crusade, defending the priest in a number of newspaper columns and writing the prologue for his book Sede Vacante. There, Capistrán noted the lack of legal-canonical and moral grounds for Sáenz's excommunication and, like other commentators, derided the double standard of the high clergy in reprimanding the controversial cleric while tolerating the “blasphemy” and “heresy” of catolicomunismo. Footnote 81 Moreover, according to Capistrán, Cardinal Miranda's alleged lenience toward the Left made him a heretic without the authority to excommunicate.
Like Sáenz, Capistrán also dismissed the idea that traditionalism and progressivism were two extremes on equal standing. For him, progressivism was the destroyer of civilization, family, and morality, and the cause of public violence (“the one spawning los Tlatelolcos and los diez de junios”).Footnote 82 Traditionalism was simply the “redemptive reaction” against these ills: “the adherence to incontrovertible and transcendental truths” without which men would turn into beasts. In short, traditionalism was “the only acceptable extremism: the extremism of truth, order, and justice.”Footnote 83
Voices of the Post-Cristero Right: Competing Traditionalisms
Capistrán's anti-progressivism and his negotiation of Catholic national identity through a sacralized view of the Revolution had implications for how other fellow activist-intellectuals understood a divided Catholic Right. Among them was former sinarquista leader Salvador Abascal, whose trajectory of unwavering rejection of the postrevolutionary state had made him a protagonist of the post-Cristero Right.
Born in 1910 in Morelia, Michoacán, Abascal had condemned the Revolution from the 1930s onward as a godless movement directed from Washington that lacked real representation of the Mexican people.Footnote 84 Although his term as head of sinarquismo was brief (1940–41), Abascal later credited himself with giving the organization a militant anti-revolutionary identity through paramilitary training, resulting in “a stronger mystical force [and] a greater trust between the soldiers and their leaders.”Footnote 85 Abascal also led the utopian sinarquista experiment that was the María Auxiliadora rural colony in Baja California, which he abandoned in 1944 after breaking with the movement's leadership for their attempted reconciliation with the state and for twisting the “anti-revolutionary struggle” of the movement.Footnote 86 After Vatican II, Abascal expectedly sided with the traditionalists, chastising Méndez Arceo's and Iván Illich's “Marxist indoctrination and heresy,” and the alleged infiltration of progressivism into Catholic Action organizations.Footnote 87
With over two decades of experience in publishing (he worked for the conservative Editorial Jus and later founded Editorial Tradición), in 1967 Abascal began editing the magazine La Hoja de Combate, which became a platform to attack progressivism and settle scores in the traditionalist camp. From La Hoja, Abascal reiterated his adherence to papal authority and rebuked the sedevacantists as cismáticos (fomenters of schism), given Sáenz's “unhinged” accusations against Paul VI. Abascal defended himself from the personal attacks hurled by Sáenz, who accused him of being a falsa derecha, a crypto-Jew, a “false traditionalist” and a collaborator with the “disguised enemies of the Church.”Footnote 88 Abascal also criticized Capistrán's seemingly contradictory positions—his professed Catholicism, his pro-PRI stance, and his defense of a “Jewish, Masonic and anti-Mexican” revolution.Footnote 89 “We have forgotten about la Bola, the violent Revolution,” wrote Abascal; “it is good to remember it, because to lose memory is to lose judgment. The wounds of the revolution have not healed. Its mutilations are perpetual, and its destruction was never compensated.”Footnote 90
Clashing over the historical memory of Catholic dissidence, the conflict between these traditionalists peaked in 1973, when Abascal became the target of a smear campaign and his home was attacked with stones and graffiti that read “Jews, mercenaries, papólatras.” His attackers (presumably members of Los Tecos) also distributed a pamphlet signed by Anacleto González-Flores Guerrero, who, as heir to the Cristero intransigence of his father, was also one of Sáenz's most fervent defenders. The pamphlet accused TFP and MURO, as well as Abascal and his collaborator Celerino Salmerón, of being Jews, and chastised Abascal for not siding with “the Truth Revealed” and for “rabidly defending the Jew occupying the papacy.”Footnote 91 In a rebuttal published by La Hoja, Salmerón reversed the anti-Semitic charge, pointing out that “the anti-pope Joaquín I” (Fr. Sáenz) and “Anacleto II” were “perfect Jews,” given their tendency for intrigue and slander.Footnote 92 Before the incident, Abascal and González-Flores had built an amicable relationship: Abascal published some of the writings of Anacleto's father, while González-Flores helped distribute La Hoja. According to Abascal, they shared the view of “international Judaism” as the “Synagogue of Satan,” but conflict arose when, in light of sedevacantism, Abascal sided with the pope.Footnote 93 Anti-progressivism (and, in this case, a shared open and virulent anti-Semitism) proved insufficient to bracket their ideological discrepancies, their conflicting readings of the postconciliar juncture, and the sharp divide over the legitimacy of the sitting pope.
Like Sáenz and Capistrán, the group behind La Hoja (which included two of Abascal's sons, José María and Juan Bosco) invested much energy railing against Marxism, Christian Democracy, and progressivism. Akin to Los Tecos’ magazine Réplica, La Hoja published abundantly on the moral decay of the nation, represented by counterculture, “sexual progressivism,” the disintegration of traditional gender roles, and the proliferation of “terrorist” guerrillas.Footnote 94 La Hoja collaborators also took advantage of the public exposure given to the traditionalist-progressive divide, and participated, for instance, in the TV show Anatomías in which, exactly a week after Fr. Sáenz's appearance, José María and Juan Bosco Abascal, together with Salmerón, debated progressive priests Porfirio Miranda and Miguel Concha Malo.Footnote 95
Besides concerns for public morality, another point of ideological affinity between Abascal's group and the sedevacantists was their vision of history and its projection onto the present. Together with best-selling philo-Nazi journalist Salvador Borrego, Salmerón (who was a history teacher, former sinarquista, and Abascal's closest collaborator) embraced a revisionist take on Mexico's past, decrying secularism as the legacy of the anti-Mexican forces of Judaism, liberalism, and Freemasonry.Footnote 96 Like Capistrán's diagnosis regarding 1968, Salmerón saw the influence of these forces in the educational system as the cause for the “failed subversion” of the student movement. He equated student protests to a cancer or virus spreading through the social body, a trope also used recurrently by Borrego in his column in La Hoja.Footnote 97 These anxieties about leftist infiltration facilitated by the loss of morality remained a significant point of convergence between these two competing groups of traditionalists. In fact, as Austreberto Martínez has analyzed, prior to the rupture, sedevacantists Antonio Rius Facius (Sáenz's biographer) and Gloria Riestra (a Catholic poet and a pupil of Sáenz) often collaborated with La Hoja de Combate, turning it into a space of joint traditionalist denunciation against progressivism.Footnote 98
Capistrán's views on the revolution and Sáenz's defiance of papal authority allowed Abascal's group to situate themselves as bearers of traditionalist anti-revolutionary orthodoxy. A significant move in that direction took place in 1971, when Abascal and Salmerón participated in the founding of the Traditionalist Civic Movement (MCT). The MCT sought to reclaim the contested field of the Catholic derechas to combat what they saw as the growing cultural hegemony of progressivism and the Left, and to promote Catholic morality, patriotism, and obedience to the papacy.Footnote 99 With chapters across central and northern Mexico, the MCT claimed to represent a “strong current of public opinion” that rejected both progressivism and the “false traditionalism” of those who held “a satanic hatred toward the Pope.”Footnote 100
One of the pillars of the MCT was the magazine Integridad, founded in 1968 in the northern city of Monterrey. Integridad became a point of tense coexistence between traditionalists, showcasing anti-progressive pieces from MURO members, sedevacantists such as Sáenz and Riestra, and an array of traditionalists from Spain and Latin America (including Los Tecos’ nemesis, Plinio Corrêa of the TFP).Footnote 101 Prior to the rupture over sedevacantism, Integridad represented the possibility of a united traditionalism, bound by the militant rejection of progressivism and the intransigent legacy of the Cristero War, which also held a transnational resonance. “Tolerance is claudication,” wrote Fr. Jesús Urteaga, an Opus Dei priest and TV celebrity from Spain; “tolerance toward blunder is the fornication of truth! . . . We admire the redemptive blood of our martyrs . . . but oh Lord, martyrdom is too great a reward for us . . . We, the Christians of today do not have the vocation of martyrs, but that of warriors . . . Christ lives, Christ rules, Christ prevails . . . ¡Viva Cristo Rey!”Footnote 102
As exemplified by Integridad's broad traditionalist scope and international reach, the participation of Abascal and Salmerón in the MCT did not limit their outlook to the shifting terrain of Mexico's Catholic Right. Both addressed the broader Cold War context, and as Louise Walker has noted for Mexican middle-class conservatives, they paid special attention to the rise of Salvador Allende in Chile and the lessons it provided for Mexican Catholics.Footnote 103 In 1970, for instance, Abascal wrote about a “double victory for Marxism”: “the deification” and “Masonic canonization” of former president Lázaro Cárdenas (who had passed away in October); and “the treason of the Christian Democrats against the Chilean people” (that is, the election of Allende).Footnote 104 As events unfolded in Chile, Salmerón lamented the rising cost of living for Chileans, the exacerbation of class struggle, and the complicity of Christian Democracy and the progressive clergy with the tyranny of “a Marxist Jew.” Salmerón found parallels in Mexico: notwithstanding president Luis Echeverría's own anticommunist views and repressive policies, he blamed the rising cost of living and the growing distrust toward the PRI on the president's supposed “socialist orientation” and pro-Allende stance.Footnote 105
In the wake of the Chilean coup, Abascal and Salmerón extolled the patriotism of the Chilean military, but saw little potential for a similar anticommunist putsch in Mexico, where, they claimed, the success of the atheist state had undermined the “moral reserves” of Catholics and their willingness to engage in an armed rebellion similar to that of 1926.Footnote 106 Given these circumstances, wrote Abascal, only the punishment and martyrdom of living under a Marxist tyranny could shift the scale for Mexican Catholics. Their understanding of Mexican reality in light of the Chilean juncture gave them a blueprint for the battles that lay ahead.
Illustrative of this moment of right-wing radicalization, in 1974 the MCT gave birth to the Falanges Tradicionalistas Mejicanas, an organization that claimed to carry the torch of Catholic Action to infuse it with the sense of urgency created by progressivism, leftist agitation, sedevacantism, and the events in Chile. With the Virgin of Guadalupe, Agustín de Iturbide, and the Archangel Michael as their main symbols, these self-designated traditionalist and anti-revolutionary Falanges aimed to combat “international Masonic Jewry” at the grassroots and prepare for “the imminent coming of a Marxist tyranny” by instilling truth, faith, and tradition among an informed, united, and active Catholic public.Footnote 107 Operating under the shadow of the MCT, the Falanges were not a numerous group, but remained active as a militant and intergenerational paramilitary group at least throughout the 1980s.Footnote 108
The claim to an authentic anti-revolutionary traditionalism was a reflection of the struggles within the camp of las derechas. These struggles renewed lay Catholics’ faith in the power of civic (and, in the case of the Falanges, potentially violent) mobilization, and the recruitment of active followers (especially young people) to nurture new movements, with the expectation that the embers of Mexico's religious conflict were on the verge of being rekindled.
Conclusions: Conflict and Convergence among las Muchas Derechas
Occurring at a moment of heightened tensions in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco massacre and the debates over the postconciliar church, the excommunication of Fr. Sáenz was a watershed for Mexican traditionalists. It also carried great political significance for other sectors of Catholicism and the broader Mexican society. Mexico's Cold War polarizations gave traditionalists an opportunity to close ranks and wage battles against the threat of Judeo-communist progressivism, using the defense of tradition, orthodoxy, and truth as their banner. Yet, the plurality of competing views in the broader constellation of the Catholic Right stood in the way of a cohesive response to these challenges.
While divisions among Catholics were not new, these internecine struggles hold broader implications for the history of how Catholics experienced and shaped Mexico's Cold War. Since the revolution, lay and clerical conservative Catholics had developed a range of discursive and active strategies to reassert the role of Catholicism as the core of national identity and defend it from its purported enemies. With the Cristero War as a shared point of reference to legitimate their positions, the figures I have discussed here used a variety of public platforms to air their differences and identify friends and enemies across the spectrum of Catholicism. Notably, their virulent anti-Semitism was a key component in the identification of, and engagement with, such enemies. This, coupled with their anti-communism, accentuated their intransigence and conspiratorial outlook, and exacerbated their sense of besiegement by multiple global forces.Footnote 109
In their own right, Saénz, Capistrán, and Abascal were heirs to different strands of the post-Cristero Right, which was the shifting ground from which they confronted the perceived leftist threat, and navigated both the ambivalent relationship with the postrevolutionary state and the polarization between traditionalists and progressives. The case of Capistrán—a former Cristero who made amends with the postrevolutionary state—defied the default identification of traditionalists as anti-revolutionaries (an identification that Abascal and Sáenz fully embraced). It also illustrates the complexities of post-Cristero Catholic identity in the wake of Vatican II and in relation to the PRI's own contradictory revolutionary legacies and anticommunist policies.
Traditionalists constantly policed and redefined the boundaries of their imagined communities around issues of tradition and orthodoxy in response to their context. Notions such as Sáenz's falsas derechas are revealing of how unstable these boundaries could become in moments of crisis, and the degree to which enforcing them could be as important as—or in fact, integral to—combatting the Jewish-Masonic-communist enemies. While operating in relatively small circles and often in secrecy, traditionalists also partook in the public sphere, where they articulated their positions, criticized their opponents, and sought to build alliances. Besides their activist trajectory linking the contested memory of the Cristero past to their present, Sáenz, Capistrán, and Abascal had the ability to bring their anti-progressivism to broader audiences by airing their views and settling their scores in the local and national press and on television. This highlights their role as public intellectuals, a status too often denied to spokesmen (and spokeswomen) of the Right.Footnote 110 It also brings to the fore the social forces they represented (small or large) and how they contributed to shaping ideas about the intersections of religion, politics, and the idea of the Catholic nation.
As Pensado and Walker have suggested, a more robust picture of Mexico's Cold War, especially in the aftermath of 1968, requires more thorough studies of conservative action and reaction to critical junctures, both national and international.Footnote 111 In the conflicts analyzed here, the traditionalists’ reading of the battle against secularism, atheism, and anticlerical violence as a global phenomenon—not merely local or national—was rooted in enduring narratives of the Cristero War as a struggle with implications beyond borders. The Cold War outlook contributed to this blurring of distinctions between local, national, and international conflicts. The traditionalist-progressive divide and the scuffles over Sáenz's sedevacantism were part of broader debates about the methods and orientation of global anticommunism.
These former Cristeros, frustrated sinarquistas, and fervent sedevacantists shared a sense of Catholic purpose, made connections between national and international arenas of conflict, and cultivated animosity and even enmity among themselves. They imagined and inhabited a shared but contentious and contradictory political world, where the urgency of Cold War polarizations struck a familiar chord with the unsettled history and memory of their past struggles to defend religion and nation.
