Bordering on Sainthood: The Cristero Rebellion in Texas and the U.S. Southwest

Chair

Pablo Mijangos y González, Ph.D.

Southern Methodist University and President, Texas

Presenter

Selena Aleman

Catholic Archives of Texas

The Lion and the Little Flower of the Lapland

The Most Reverend Arthur Jerome Drossaerts, the first archbishop of Texas, is often discussed as an actor of the Cristero Rebellion, aiding hierarchy across the border while resettling the influx of Mexican laity moving into his diocese. However, no biography of Drossaerts exists. Using personal correspondence between Drossaerts and Sister Margaret Mary Look, IHM, this paper compares Drossaerts’ personal words to his public actions. To categorize Drossaerts as a great man is an understatement. He was the first archbishop of Texas during the Diocese of San Antonio’s elevation to an ecclesiastical metropolitan in 1926. He managed the transfer of the Spanish missions in San Antonio from diocesan ownership to the National Park Service and oversaw the Franciscan Fathers’ return to Mission San José. Continuing the humanitarian work started by his predecessor, Bishop John W. Shaw, he oversaw a temporary seminary in Castroville to help Mexican exiles continue their education. During the 1930s, he celebrated the Texas Centennial and the bicentennial for the city of San Antonio. In death, the archival footprint of Drossaerts expands beyond Texas, a testament to his influence on the transnational twentieth-century Church. Countless historians, including Anne Martínez, Timothy Matovina, and Julia Young, have written on Drossaerts in their accounts of Catholic San Antonio and its Mexican diaspora. Despite his contributions to providing asylum for the Mexican Catholic hierarchy, clergy, religious, and laity, Drossaerts remains a mystery, as this brief paper is the only article-length biography, aside from a brief entry in the Handbook of Texas and one in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library’s subject files. But who was Arthur? What motivated him? Analyzing hierarchy’s administration is not unusual today, as lay Catholics continue to question decisions, good or bad, made by their local bishops. To what extent can we identify reasons for actions made by those called to serve in the human institution of God’s word? When is hierarchy influenced by personal motivations, or acting as a spiritual shepherd who protects his diocesan flock from the wolves? Using selected personal correspondence, written entirely by Drossaerts and republished through this article as excerpts, this paper will attempt to answer these questions for San Antonio’s prelate.

Presenter

Raquel Torua Padilla

University of Texas at Austin

A Bishop across Borders: Juan Navarrete, Religious Exile, and the U.S.-Mexico Southwest, 1914-1929

Before the Cristero Rebellion pushed Mexican Catholics into exile in the United States, revolutionary anticlericalism had already transformed the U.S.–Mexico borderlands into a space of refuge for Mexican clergy. Juan María Navarrete, later bishop of Sonora, was among them. Forced from Mexico during the Revolution, the young priest spent years in Galveston and Castroville, Texas. A decade later, as conflict between the Catholic Church and the postrevolutionary state intensified, Navarrete again found his ministry entangled with the United States, this time across the Arizona-Sonora border. This paper uses Navarrete’s trajectory to examine the U.S. Southwest as a recurring space of refuge, religious activity, and political surveillance during Mexico’s revolutionary and postrevolutionary conflicts. It traces his early exile in Texas and his later experiences as bishop of Sonora during the religious persecution of the 1920s, when Mexican authorities closely monitored Catholic activity north of the border and increasingly portrayed Navarrete as a political threat. His pastoral relationship with the Yaqui people became particularly controversial during the Yaqui uprising of 1926–1927, as officials attempted to connect Indigenous rebellion in Sonora with Catholic activists and other Mexican exiles operating in the United States. Drawing on ecclesiastical correspondence, Mexican intelligence and diplomatic records, U.S. judicial sources, and newspapers, the paper argues that Navarrete’s experiences illuminate a longer transnational geography of Mexican Church-state conflict. From revolutionary-era clerical exile in Texas to Catholic resistance and surveillance along the Arizona-Sonora border in the 1920s, the American Southwest was not peripheral to Mexico's religious conflicts. It provided refuge from persecution while simultaneously becoming an extension of the political and religious struggles unfolding across the border.

Presenter

Matthew Butler, Ph.D.

University of Texas at Austin

Hebbronville's Cristero War? The Jalisco Franciscans in South Texas

The Hebbronville Franciscans—fugitive religious from Jalisco who trained a cohort of 250 priests for the Mexican Church between 1926 and 1952—still do not have the historiographical 5 kudos they deserve. Admittedly, there is no general history of the religious orders in the Cristero War that might feature them. Nor, to my knowledge, did any of them write an autobiography. Nor, finally, are Hebbronville’s Franciscans mentioned in histories of the receiving diocese, Corpus Christi, despite their immense contribution to Catholic life in Texas. The last omission— one hopes it is not erasure—may reflect an assumption that Hebbronville was exclusively the preserve of the Franciscan order, hence unconnected to the general work of the diocese. This paper argues that the Hebbronville Franciscans’ work was not separate from the pastoral work of Corpus Christi—it was part of it—and that the Hebbronville mission which started in 1926 should be seen not just as a transnational phenomenon connected to Mexico’s Cristero War but also as an expression of Texan pastoral politics and imperatives. Of course, the Hebbronville Franciscans would never have been sent north from their convent in Zapopan in Jalisco—a state that became a major theater of hostilities in the Cristero War—without the onset of Mexico’s religious crisis in July 1926. However, if Mexico’s twentieth-century Passion explains why the friars were forced to abandon their province in Mexico it does not explain, really, why they ended up in Hebbronville, let alone why they stayed for generation, long after Mexico’s revolutionaries had abandoned religious radicalism. These, ultimately, were pastoral, personnel, political, and economic matters for the Texas Church and Friars Minor. Indeed, recognizing the interrelationship between the Franciscans and the Texas secular Church is key to understanding developments at Hebbronville over the medium term. As I will suggest in this paper, a tense, ultimately negotiated and fruitful, collaboration developed at Hebbronville between the Franciscans and Corpus Christi’s erstwhile bishop, Emmanuel Ledvina (1921-1949). Several explanatory factors should be stressed. One was the slow, arduous, process of rechurching south Texas. A second was interreligious competition: the Texas Church’s attempt to counteract aggressive Protestant proselytism. On both counts, Ledvina was desperate to develop a missionary strategy that worked. He might himself have deemed the Cristero War providential, for it gave him new, young, well trained, Spanish speaking pastors who could do the work. The seriousness of Ledvina’s efforts to embrace his Mexican flock, the paper will further argue, refutes the Chicano calummny of wanton neglect and racist contempt for “greaser” priests and flocks in South Texas. The effort to build a mission Hebbronville almost finished the fifty-something Ledvina. 6 Two powerful realities thus met at the Texas-Mexico border, a pastoral abyss in Corpus Christi and an unprecedented crisis in Mexican Church-state relations. As these collided, a third series of underlying or spin-off factors were also felt: the demographics of Texan development; the contrasting desires of the secular clergy and religious orders; ecclesiastical competition for territory and Ledvina’s mission strategizing; personality clashes, which could run rampant in a cloistered world; the nationalism and wanderlust of the Mexican priests versus Ledvina’s hope that they would stay forever; Mexican religious high politics, which for a time threatened to wreck the mission at Hebbronville, and so on. It is, then, no simple exodus story.