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Pablo Mijangos y González, Matthew Butler. Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 355–356, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae508
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On February 21, 1925, a hundred men backed by the CROM, the most powerful labor central in postrevolutionary Mexico, seized the Church of La Soledad in Mexico City and entrusted it to an obscure priest named Joaquín Pérez, head of the so-called Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church (Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana [ICAM]). Cromistas expected to start an uprising of Mexico’s lower clergy against the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but they only succeeded in scandalizing parishioners and prompting the emergence of the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty (LNDLR), which soon would play a decisive role in the outbreak of the Cristero War (1926–1929). Most accounts of Mexico’s religious conflict have focused on the cristeros and their anticlerical foes, disregarding Pérez and ICAM as no more than puppets of CROM and President Plutarco Elías Calles. In this outstanding and thoroughly researched book, Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest, Matthew Butler takes Father Pérez seriously and explores whether his movement mattered or was a religious charade. By looking beyond Mexico City and into Indigenous rural areas, Butler uncovers what was “the second religious denomination of its day” (6), an impressive network of 285 churches spread throughout Indigenous serranías and central-southern states, closely following the geography of popular liberalism. He estimates that, between 1925 and 1938, ICAM provided a spiritual home for two hundred thousand faithful and siphoned off 5 percent of the thirty-six hundred Roman Catholic clergy.
