Becoming Saintly: Practical Piety and Mexico’s National Catholic Women’s Union c. 1938

Printed in December 1937, the eleventh issue of Acción Femenina Catholic women’s magazine embraced a new kind of Catholicism. As the official publication of Mexico’s National Catholic Women’s Union (UFCM), the magazine embraced popular sainthood and personal spirituality while empowering individual workingwomen in their journey toward spiritual “enlightenment.” Printed on the back of the magazine, an advertisement by La Buena Prensa Jesuit press announced the publication of two different biographies about widely regarded popular saints. They included Padre Miguel Pro and María de la Luz Camacho, a 27-year-old religious educator revered as “Catholic Action’s first martyr” after being slain outside a Mexico City parish.

The narratives developed around the figures of Camacho and Pro revealed that Catholic Action had grown more flexible toward popular martyrdom and folk religion. At the same time, Camacho’s veneration spoke to UFCM’s new embrace of the individual woman—a recurring theme in the Buena Prensa’s new book series. Aside from the biographies, the press published two manuals designed to “teach” female domestic workers about the sacrament of Communion. It also printed a spiritual guidebook intended to impart workers with religious values. Along these lines, the contents of the magazine spoke to a new kind of religious experience. Acción Femenina embraced a “do-it-yourself” attitude and regularly published articles devoted to teaching indigenous workingwomen “how to become saints.”

This paper examines how Acción Femenina’s embrace of popular sainthood reflected larger currents within Mexican Catholicism. Contrary to its prior activism, the UFCM now preached indigenous workingwomen’s personal empowerment. I argue that this shift embodied a response to decades of Protestant missionary activity. At the same time, the magazine’s nod to popular sainthood spoke to socias’ emerging sense of compromise with popular religious practices.