Secularized education in schools.
Article Five: Monastic orders outlawed.
Article Twenty-Four: Illegal to worship outside the confines of churches.
Article Twenty-Seven: Restrictions on rights of religious organizations to own property.
To Catholics, the most offensive portion of the Constitution of 1917 was Article 130 – an article that was basically designed to completely erode the power of the Roman Catholic Church and the clergy to interfere in state matters. As shown below, article 130 pretty much deprived members of the clergy of what we consider today to be basic rights.
Neither in public nor private assembly, nor in acts of worship or religious propaganda shall the ministers of the religions ever have the right to criticize the basic laws of the country, of the authorities in particular or of the government in general; they shall have neither an active nor passive vote, nor the right to associate for political purposes.
While these laws were enacted in 1917, it would take a decade for the Cristeros Rebellion to erupt. This was mainly because under Obregon’s leadership the laws were laxly enforced or not at all – this was particularly true in any area with large numbers of Catholic faithful. His predecessor Plutarco Calles would be determined to enforce these laws, setting off the deadliest religious rebellion in Mexican history. Adding fuel to the Cristeros rebellion fire, the archbishop of Mexico “Declared Roman Catholics could not support the Constitution because of its anticlerical provisions” (Bolton 1). Calles, beginning what would be a reaction-and-response relationship between the clergy and the government, closed monasteries and churches and disbanded religious processions. We will now examine the Calles government and the Cristeros Rebellion in more detail.
As lax in his efforts to enforce the anticlerical provisions of the 1917 Constitution as Obregon had been, Calles was just ...