Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The pastoral project of the bishops in 1875, which stimulated the political participation of Catholics as Mexican citizens, allowed the restoration of ecclesiastical power and authority in Mexico. In 1902, a new generation of bishops promoted a social Pastoral with greater social and political emphasis, known as social Catholicism. The masterpiece of this period was the formation of the National Catholic Party in 1911. Long desired, this party was born in the midst of a domestic political crisis marked by the end of the government of Porfirio Díaz and the triumph of the democratic political movement headed by Francisco Madero. Political conditions in Mexico changed dramatically in 1913, after the coup by General Victoriano Huerta and the armed reaction by the followers of Madero. The defeat of General Huerta in 1914 led to a long exile of the hierarchy, the clergy, and some leaders of the Catholic party that had supported Victoriano Huerta. Despite the seriousness of its politics and its electoral successes of 1912, which predicted a long future to the Catholic party, the party ceased to exist in 1914. It had a short life.

During the three centuries of the Viceroyalty-era, the Church in New Spain was established and developed under the regime of Royal Patronage. The independence of the former American Kingdom (1821), although it did not imply an immediate rupture with the past, it created tensions between the tradition of a royal patronage regime and the new modern political culture. This implied the rearrangement of the Patronage in three ways. From being a legal authority in the practice of providing benefits, consensually accepted, to becoming an element of diplomatic negotiation, giving way to another means of intervention in provision by the civil authority, exclusive. Secondly, it went from legal literature to public opinion and the political and ideological projects of ecclesiastical reform. Finally, the Patronage passed from the practice of providing benefits to the political ceremony.

The process of identity reconfiguration of the parish priests was a crucial element of the social, political and religious dispute in the transition from the monarchy to the republican regime in Portugal. The State laicization led to a profound change in the identity, roles and institutional framework of the parish priests, who until then were both ecclesiastical and civil agents. This article, resuming from new sources a subject disputed by the protagonists and never satisfactorily addressed by historiography, aims to measure the impact that the sustenance model proposed by the Law of Separation – pensions – had on parish activity. It is intended to consider this dispute in a broader chronological scope which allows to: understand the relationship between the ecclesiastical identity and its sustenance; clarify the diversity of motives presented by the parish priests to accept or decline the pension; determine the consequences of those attitudes in the context of the identity transformation of the Portuguese State and of the Catholic Church in Portugal, which occurred simultaneously.