Carlos Martínez García: Fernández de Lizardi, precursor of religious tolerance

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Jose Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi (November 15, 1776 – June 21, 1827) should be revalued as a precursor of freedom of belief in Mexico. He was the initiator of several periodical publications, one of them ( The Mexican Thinker) became the pseudonym by which the prolific writer was best known.

Fernández de Lizardi was a keen observer of the events and transformations in the life of the Mexican capital, where he was born and died. We can access the abundant Lizardian corpus thanks to the rescue of Rosa María Palazón, a researcher at the Institute of Philological Research at UNAM. In addition, he has sponsored two essential anthologies for those who wish to obtain an overview of the breadth of topics on which he wrote. The Mexican ThinkerThe aforementioned researcher is the author of a work that, in novel form, narrates the life and adventures of Fernández de Lizardi.

In September 1813 Fernández de Lizardi published On the Inquisitiona piece in which he called Pharisees those who regretted the cessation of the Holy Office, since the repressive body was “a court odious in its principles, criminal in its procedures and abhorrent in its purposes.” […]. A court that was always unjust, illegal, useless in the Church and pernicious in societies.” Fernández de Lizardi pointed out that the secrecy with which the Inquisition acted and the excommunications They were the shields that protected the iniquities and injustices of this gloomy and mournful court.. His central argument for disqualifying the Holy Office rested on the fact that the court is not only detrimental to the prosperity of the State, but contrary to the spirit of the Gospel that it seeks to defend.His audacity earned him a denunciation before the Inquisition, which no longer had the power it once had and The Thinker was able to avoid serious penalties.

Only three days after the murder of the Protestant Seth Hayden due to religious intolerance, Fernández de Lizardi addressed the matter. He did so on September 1, 1824, in one of the conversations between the payo and the sacristan, under the title In three months we will see how independence goes (https://acortar.link/VseAPp). The crime took place on the then Empedradillo street, now Monte de Piedad, when the Holy Viaticum Seth Hayden was reprimanded A man was told to kneel down, but not wanting to do so (so they say), he ran him through with his sword and fled.Through one of his characters, the sacristan, Fernández de Lizardi argued for the need to stop what he called acts of fanaticism. José María Luis Mora agreed with Fernández de Lizardi, who on September 2 denounced the case of intolerance in a session of the Constituent Congress of the State of Mexico.

Virtually the day after the national independence was achieved, debates about the future of the country in religious terms increased slowly but steadily. The conservatives sought to keep the Catholic religious identity of the nation unchanged. To achieve this goal, they created a legal body that prohibited the public practice of any religion other than Catholicism. They feared the possibility of Protestantism making inroads in Mexico.

The proposal for opening was strongly and increasingly defended between 1813 and 1827 (the year of his death) by Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. The new revolution that is expected in the nationwritten in 1823, he advocates the establishment of a republican government. He stresses that under the republican system religion [católica] of the country must be not the only one but the dominant one, without excluding any otherHe comments that, faced with what he calls religious tolerance, “only in Mexico are they frightened by it, the same as by the Masons. But who are frightened? The very ignorant, the fanatics, who affect great zeal for their religion that they neither observe nor know, the superstitious and the hypocrites with more relaxed customs. […]. No ecclesiastic, cleric or friar, if he is wise and not deluded, if he is liberal and not a trickster, if he is virtuous and not a hypocrite, abhors the republic, tolerantism or ecclesiastical reforms.”

The Thinker He dared to refer to Martin Luther in positive terms, which earned him a harsh disqualification from Juan Bautista Díaz Calvillo, a doctor of theology and member of the Senate of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. The critic warned that the ecclesiastical reform advocated by Fernández de Lizardi and his support for religious tolerance placed him very close to Protestantism, since If one does not recognize the authority of the Church, one is obedient to Luther’s doctrines..

Fernández de Lizardi confronts religious intolerance in the realm of ideas, and also notes that there were a few Protestants living in Mexico, who represented the possibility of a very incipient religious diversification. He visualized that the Mexican nation would have to open itself to freedom of belief and leave behind the clerical domination that caused so much damage to the country and its inhabitants.