标题：PROTECTING OR UNDERMINING THE CONSTITUTION? DISCUSSIONS ON THE ROLE OF RELIGION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN GUARANTEEING CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER DURING MEXICO’S FIRST FEDERAL REPUBLIC (1824-1835)
其他摘要：This paper analyses the role of religion and the Catholic Church in Mexican constitutional thought in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Its principal hypothesis is that Independent Mexico's political thinkers considered the promotion of the Catholic faith was necessary to ensure successful government and social order. In accordance with this idea, it argues that the debates which raged in the 1820s and 1830s over the questions of patronage and church property cannot be understood in terms of a confrontation between liberal and conservative ideas as has generally been the case in Mexican historiography. Rather, it contends that the division of opinion amongst the political elites on this matter was grounded in the debates that took place in eighteenth-century Spain in order to define the correct relationship between the Crown and the Church.
