Mora y del Río, José (1854–1928)

José Mora y del Río (b. 24 February 1854; d. 22 April 1928), archbishop of Mexico, 1908–1928. A native of Pajcuarán, Michoacán, Mora y del Río studied in Rome and rose rapidly to become bishop of Tehuantepec (1893), a poor rural area. As bishop, he supported Catholic Social Action to benefit the peasantry. He was sympathetic to the presidency of Francisco Madero (1911–1913), the collapse of which threw Mexico into a period of civil strife in which the Catholic Church became identified with conservatism.

After five years in exile, Mora y del Río returned to Mexico in 1919 to confront growing anticlericalism. In 1926 he openly rejected the restrictions on the church in the Mexican constitution which President Plutarco Elías Calles energetically enforced through closure of church primary schools and required registration of priests. The archbishop called a church strike which ended public religious services. Calles exiled Mora y del Río, who died in San Antonio, Texas, barely a year before the conflict ended through a negotiated settlement.

See alsoReligion in Mexico, Catholic Church and Beyond .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David Bailey, ¡Viva Cristo Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in Mexico (1973), esp. pp. 44, 47-75, 142-149, 198-199.

Robert Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910–1929 (1973), esp. pp. 18-19, 30-33, 50-74, 125-228.

Additional Bibliography

Butler, Matthew. Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–1929. Oxford; New York: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2004.

Krauze, Enrique. Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

                                         John A. Britton