Mexican Constitution of 1857

The Mexican Constitution of 1857 stripped the Catholic Church of power in Mexico and became a defining point in the country’s long conflict with the Vatican. Its effects unfolded against an earlier transfer of Church property and endured in the form of an uneasy, unofficial accommodation between Church and government.

Church and State

The constitution followed the 1856 Ley Lerdo, which seized Church-owned haciendas and other lands and sold them. In response to the constitutional settlement, the Vatican excommunicated Mexicans who took the constitutional oath. Formal relations between the Vatican and the Mexican government were not resumed; instead, an uneasy truce persisted for more than a century, alongside restrictions such as a ban on clerical garb and a grudging accommodation between the institutions.

The Unfinished Return

The constitutional rupture remained a political issue long after its original settlement. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had governed Mexico since 1917 through a one-party system described in the novel as pseudo-democratic, did not formally restore relations with the Vatican. Yet even its most ardently socialist politicians stopped short of trying to abolish the Church altogether in a country of deeply religious peasants, leaving accommodation in place without resolving the question of the Church’s official standing.

That unresolved status shaped the Vatican’s later efforts to regain a formal position in Mexico. Girolamo Antonucci had been sent from Rome eight years before the scene in which the history is recalled, with the mission of bringing the country back into the Church’s fold. A politician from the Church’s conservative wing, he pressed the bishops to resist losing Mexican believers to communism. The constitution thus figures not only as a past legal break but as the starting point of a continuing contest over institutional recognition and political influence.

Historical Memory in the Present

The constitutional rupture enters the narrative through Juan Parada’s reflections on Girolamo Antonucci, whose appearance strikes him as birdlike. That shift from a small, immediate impression to the history behind Antonucci’s mission makes the past feel active in the present: the constitution is not treated as a self-contained legal episode, but as part of the institutional inheritance shaping the Church’s current political ambitions.

The Limits of Legal Rupture

The constitution’s legacy is marked by a gap between a formal break and the institutions that remained in place afterward. The Church lost legal and political power, but the government’s reluctance to abolish it left its public standing unresolved. In the novel’s account, that tension makes the constitution less a final settlement than a boundary around what either side could accomplish: the state did not restore formal relations, while the Church continued to seek recognition and influence.