Enemies of “Excessive Liberty”: The Madero Revolution, Flexible Philosophy, and the Decline of the Partido Católico Nacional

Abstract: This article challenges longstanding binary explanations for the collapse of Mexico’s most important Catholic party, the Partido Católico Nacional (PCN). Most scholarship attributes the collapse either to the persecution of its democratic faction by Victoriano Huerta (1913–1914) or to longstanding political contradictions within the party itself. This article uses the party’s official paper, La Nación to argue that neither the PCN’s embrace of parliamentary rule nor alleged internal contradictions fully explain its fall and continued irrelevance after the Huerta dictatorship. The article elaborates on the guiding vision of ordered liberty shared by its various factions, a vision which justified both its embrace of Francisco I. Madero and its later embrace of Huerta. The PCN’s Catholic-infused vision of liberty made it open to democracy but also skeptical of Madero’s attempts to bring together a broad coalition which included culturally anticlerical elements of society. The importance even the allegedly “anti”-Huerta faction placed on ordered liberty shows through in its initial embrace of the Huerta regime well into 1913 when persecution and the PCN’s presidential aspirations soured the relationship.