The Guadalajara Reporter

A film about a Jalisco-based anti-cleric leader who lead the Catholic rebellion against an attempt to destroy the Church

The United States-Mexican film, “For Greater Glory” (Spanish title: “Cristiada”), which opened in Mexico April 20, and is scheduled for U.S. release June 1, has special meaning for the people of Jalisco — however it may be judged as cinematic fare. That’s because it revives a valorous and bloody past. “Glory” recounts a special moment in history (1926-1929) when Jalisco become the center of a furious, ambitiously dispersed post-Revolution rebellion involving 13 states.

The Cristiada rebellion was a war of religious freedom and faith in the Mexican Catholic Church — a rigidly frozen and unperceptive bureaucracy — versus a new, unexperienced, openly corrupt government made up primarily of generals who had won Mexico’s 1910 revolution —  men with the battlefield habit of killing opponents.

Many Mexicans, it is said, do not know much about the Cristiada, and you won’t find it in government school books. The Church doesn’t mention it. The benchmark text examining this war is “The Cristero Rebellion” (1973), by Jean A. Meyer. Born in Nice, France, in 1942, Meyer obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Sorbonne. He taught at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, Colegio de Mexico, the Colegio de Michoacan, and the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas. He has written books on the Cristiada for the University of Cambridge and the Universidad de Guadalajara, and founded France’s University of Perpignan’s Institute of Mexican Studies.

“When I arrived in Mexico in 1965, the armed stage of the religious conflict ... was still a recent event,” Meyer has said. Guerrilla remnants of the movement, and well-organized parties of government “avengers” were still active into 1942. That was “when the Church delegitimized all armed uprising for religious (and political) reasons.” Thus, historically minded North Americans arriving in, say, 1963, who explored Los Altos, the northeastern, cattle-raising sector of the state, home of the fiercely committed Cristeros, found the rebellion a highly sensitive subject.

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