The Case of the Wayward Priest: Gender, the State, and the Catholic Church during the Mexican Revolution

In 1923, six-year-old Casilda Pérez Cadena told her mother the following story. While running an errand, Casilda and her friend took a short-cut through the San Sebastian church in Mérida, Yucatán’s capital. There they encountered the local priest, who sexually molested the girls after taking his "virile member out of his trousers" and showing it to both of them. The police chief ordered an immediate investigation of these serious accusations and arrested the priest, supposedly on direct orders from no less than the revolutionary governor of the state, Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Despite the priest’s adamant pleas of innocence, he was sent to prison for the crime of "indecent assault." Although it is impossible to know if the girls or the priest were lying, this court document aptly illustrates the centrality of gender within the political culture of the Mexican Revolution. My paper utilizes court cases like the “Wayward Priest” to analyze the interaction of the revolutionary state and the Catholic Church, especially over the control of women’s bodies, families, marriage, divorce, and burials. While at first glance religious conservatives and revolutionaries appear to have been diametrically opposed, this paper examines the ways that both religious and secular officials argued for women’s limited and carefully delineated roles in society, as well as the proper roles of women as wives and mothers. Church and state representatives clashed when it came to specific policies, but they did so within a shared worldview that maintained the primacy of men over women. Ultimately my presentation compares the ways in which religious leaders and revolutionary officials promoted the sanctity of the patriarchal family where women were to be moral wives and mothers, either devoted to the church and priest or to the Mexican nation and (male) leaders.