Description

The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenthcentury transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicisms significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a selfconscious intercontinental network of likeminded Catholics For its central protagonists the eras crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle Drawing on ecclesiastical archives pamphlets sermons and tracts For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church