The traditional procession of Holy Week takes place annually in Ayacucho, Peru. | Credit: Milton Rodriguez/Shutterstock

Jan 21, 2026 / 10:00 am (CNA).

A Pew Research Center report found Catholics remain the largest religious group across Latin America despite increases in other religious identities.

The report, “Catholicism Has Declined in Latin America Over the Past Decade,” draws on a nationally representative face-to-face survey of 6,234 adults conducted from Jan. 22 to April 27, 2024, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

The analysis was produced by Pew Research Center as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

The research released Jan. 21 found that Latin American adults are more religious than adults in many other countries Pew has also surveyed in recent years, especially in Europe where many adults have left Christianity since childhood.

Pew analyzed the changes in religion among adults in Latin America from 2013 to 2024. It found Latin Americans are about as likely to believe in God as they were a decade ago. Even among those who identify as religiously unaffiliated, most said they believe in God.

Of those surveyed, 97% of adults in Peru said they believe in God, 98% in Brazil, 94% in Mexico, 97% in Colombia, 90% in Argentina, and 89% in Chile.

Most adults are active in their faith, poll showed

Catholicism remains the largest religion in Latin America. In 2024, roughly half of Brazilians (46%) and Chileans (46%) identified as Catholic, and the majority of all adults in Peru (67%), Mexico (67%), Colombia (60%), and Argentina (58%) identified as such.

In those countries, most adults are active in their faith. In 2024, the majority of adults in Brazil (76%), Colombia (71%), and Peru (58%) said they pray “daily or more often.”

Since 2013–2014, the Catholic population in all six countries surveyed decreased. Colombia experienced the largest decline in Catholics, with a drop of 19 percentage points. Peru had the lowest drop with a 9-point decrease.

Former Catholics in Latin America tend to identify as either religiously unaffiliated or Protestant, while former Protestants tend to have become “nones.” As of 2024, there were more religiously unaffiliated adults than Protestants in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

The report noted a reason for the decline of Catholicism and growth of religiously unaffiliated populations in Latin America is religious switching by adults who were raised Catholic but no longer identify with the religion. Across the six Latin American countries surveyed, around 20% or more adults said they were raised Catholic but have since left the religion.

The research found that Brazil is the only country surveyed where former Catholics are more likely to have become Protestant (13%) than to be religiously unaffiliated (7%). It also found that in Peru there is a roughly equal number of former Catholics who have become Protestants (9%) and “nones” (7%).

Pew also found that about half or more of adults surveyed in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru said religion is very important in their lives. Prayer is fairly common, as majorities of Brazilian, Colombian, and Peruvian adults said they pray at least once a day.

Hispanic Catholics in the U.S.

Similar to the religious changes in Latin America, fewer Hispanics in the United States identify as Catholic in 2024 (42%) than they did a decade ago (58%), according to Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study.

The number of Hispanics who are religiously unaffiliated has also increased in the U.S. since 2014, with about a quarter now describing their religious identity as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.”

Of Hispanic adults in the U.S., 40% said religion is very important in their life, and 47% said they pray at least daily. A large majority (83%) also said they believe in God, according to a 2023 Pew Center survey.

Pope Leo XIV greets pilgrims at his weekly general audience at the Vatican on January 21, 2026.

Jan 21, 2026 / 08:05 am (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV said Wednesday that the grandeur of the Incarnation cannot be reduced to viewing Jesus as a mere messenger of “intellectual truths,” but must be received as God’s full embrace of the human condition — including Christ’s “true and integral humanity.”

Speaking at his general audience on Jan. 21 in the Paul VI Hall, the pope said that divine revelation is not primarily a set of abstract ideas but a living encounter in which God gives himself to humanity and invites a relationship of communion.

“We have seen that God reveals himself in a dialogue of covenant,” the pope said, “a relational knowledge, which not only communicates ideas, but shares a history and calls for communion in reciprocity.”

Continuing a catechesis cycle on Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Leo XIV emphasized that believers come to know God by entering into Jesus’ own relationship with the Father through the action of the Holy Spirit.

Wednesday's talk was part of a longer series on the documents of Vatican II which the pope began earlier this month.

“Jesus reveals the Father to us by involving us in his own relationship with Him,” he said.

The pontiff highlighted that in Christ, God not only discloses who he is, but also reveals who we are. “In Christ, God has communicated himself to us,” he said, and “he has manifested to us our true identity as his children.”

Leo XIV underlined that the integrity of Christ’s humanity is essential to understanding revelation: “God’s truth is not fully revealed where it takes something away from the human,” he said, adding that “the integrity of Jesus’ humanity does not diminish the fullness of the divine gift.”

The pope also stressed that salvation is not limited to the paschal mystery understood in isolation, but is bound up with Christ’s whole person and presence: the Lord “who becomes incarnate, is born, heals, teaches, suffers, dies, rises again and remains among us.”

Pointing to the believer’s confidence grounded in Christ, Leo XIV said that following Jesus “to the very end” leads to the certainty that nothing can separate humanity from God’s love, echoing St. Paul’s assurance: “If God is for us, who is against us?”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.

Pope Leo XIV baptizes a child in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Jan. 11, 2026. | Credit: Vatican Media

Jan 21, 2026 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese, a lawyer and canon lawyer, recently said in an op-ed in the Irish Times that infant baptism denies children their human rights and is an act of control on the part of the Church.

Catholic clergy and laity in Ireland have pushed back on her claims, viewing it as an opportunity to share what baptism is really about.

Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan, bishop of Waterford and Lismore, explained to EWTN News that infant baptism is commonplace in most Christian denominations and has been practiced in the Church since the first century.

“Jesus gives us a command to go and baptize. So the Church baptizes in obedience to an express command that is supported by the Bible. So to baptize infants into the body of Christ is something very good,” he said.

“If we were to say we will wait until a child is an adult to make such a decision, well, then, what other decisions would we deny taking for our children? Would we, for example, not give them good food? Will we show them the beauty of exercise and would we not give them good medical care? Would we wait until they could make their own decisions?”

Cullinan added: “One of the first things that the Catholic parent does to their child is to take his little hand or her little hand and make the sign of the cross. What a beautiful thing. Why do parents do it? Because they want their child to have a relationship with a living God throughout their life and lead them into eternal life.”

Father Owen Gorman, a parish priest in the Clogher Diocese, said the Church “encourages infant baptism out of love for souls, and so that the babies of Catholic parents would receive the best start in life, that they would be plunged into the mystery of Christ and that they would be filled with God’s life.”

He continued: “And that is a great good, and it is a great good that should not be postponed. The Church wants children to experience that immersion in Christ to be part of his body, so that they may have life and have it to the full.”

In her article, McAleese stated that baptismal promises made and renewed at confirmation are “fictitious” and that infant baptism ignores children’s later rights to freely decide for themselves their religious identity, to accept and embrace Church membership, or to change religion if that is their choice.

Mahon McCann is a doctoral student in ethics who was baptized into the Catholic faith on Easter Saturday 2025. He was raised as an atheist by parents who were baptized Catholic. He told EWTN News that it should be the choice of parents whether to baptize their children and continue the tradition they inherited.

“Infant baptism does not require an ‘opt-out’ unless you truly believe you were opted into something real in the first place,” he said. “To want some kind of formal procedure to ‘opt out’ is to implicitly accept the Church’s moral authority in the first place.”

Rather than doing this as an act of power and control as McAleese asserts, Gorman said the Church does it “as an act of love.”

“As a mother, she is loving her children, and she is wise in directing parents to bring the children to the grace of God and the saving waters of baptism from a young age. It is about providing that which is best for them, so it enables them to have the best life possible, as part of the body of Christ, the Church. So the Church desires it not out of a sense of wanting to control people or exert power over them but to give as a wise and provident mother,” he said.

McCann agreed and pointed to his own experience. “My parents simply ‘canceled their subscription to the Resurrection’ in their own minds and stopped going to Mass, etc., like many Catholics today. The Church can do nothing to legally compel you to pursue holiness.”

In her article, McAleese wrote that baptism “restricts children’s rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, to which both Ireland and the Holy See — which governs the Catholic Church and is effectively the author of canon law — are state parties.”

McCann told EWTN News that rather than evaluating infant baptism through the lens of “rights,” we should ask: “Are human rights the proper ethical standard [by which] to evaluate Catholic moral theology?”

“The answer would be no,” he said. “Catholic moral theology is teleological, aims at the holiness of the person, and therefore whatever brings one to holiness is ‘good’ and whatever takes one away from holiness is ‘bad.’ Human rights ethics are not concerned with achieving holiness and therefore are not the right ethical framework to evaluate Catholic sacraments or practices.”

McCann explained that he didn’t fully understand infant baptism before becoming a Catholic but disagrees with the idea that it is like a legal contract between two parties.

“That is a very superficial modern understanding of the rite of baptism and really of tradition as such, he said.

“A tradition, by definition, is intergenerational — a tradition that isn’t passed on from one generation to another isn’t a tradition,” McCann said. “Infant baptism is primarily a decision of the parents, who are gifting their offspring membership into the life of the Church and the traditional Catholic way of life that leads to their salvation,” he said.

“The idea that babies and children should ‘consent’ to be part of a particular tradition is as ridiculous as saying that they should choose what language they are going to speak,” McCann said.

Pope Leo XIV greets Kiko Argüello on Jan. 19, 2026, at the Vatican. | Credit: Vatican Media

Jan 21, 2026 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV received the leaders of the Neocatechumenal Way — including Kiko Argüello, who along with the late Carmen Hernández founded the apostolate — and members of the international team, María Ascensión Romero and Father Mario Pezzi, in an audience at the Vatican on Monday.

In his Jan. 19 address, the Holy Father highlighted the missionary zeal of the families that make up this ecclesial movement of Catholic initiation, founded in Madrid, Spain, in 1964, which, as the pontiff recalled, invites people “to rediscover the meaning of baptism.”

He also praised their charism, as well as their evangelization and catechetical work, which, according to the Holy Father, represents “a valuable contribution to the life of the Church.”

In this context, he emphasized that the members of the Neocatechumenal Way have “rekindled the fire of the Gospel wherever it seemed to be dying out” and have accompanied many people and Christian communities in “rediscovering the beauty of knowing Jesus.”

He also emphasized that living the experience of the Neocatechumenal Way and carrying out its mission requires “inner vigilance and a wise critical capacity” to discern certain risks that are always lurking in spiritual and ecclesial life.”

Pope Leo XIV stressed that charisms “must always be placed at the service of the kingdom of God and the one Church of Christ.” In this regard, he noted that “no gift of God is more important than others — except for charity, which perfects and harmonizes all of them — and no ministry should become a reason to feel superior to our brothers and sisters or to exclude those who think differently.”

He therefore invited them to be witnesses of unity and reminded them: “Your mission is unique, but not exclusive; your charism is specific, but it bears fruit in communion with the other gifts present in the life of the Church; you do much good, but its purpose is to enable people to know Christ, always respecting each person’s life journey and conscience.”

The Holy Father also exhorted them to live their spirituality “without ever separating themselves from the rest of the ecclesial body, as a living part of the ordinary pastoral care of parishes and their various realities and in communion with your brothers and sisters and in particular with priests and bishops.”

“Continue forward with joy and humility, without closed-mindedness, as builders and witnesses of communion,” he counseled them.

At the end of his address, the Holy Father added that catechesis and various forms of pastoral action must always be free from constraint, rigidity, and moralism,” so that they do not give rise to “feelings of guilt and fear instead of inner liberation.”

Finally, Pope Leo thanked them for their commitment, witness, and service to the Church in the world.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.

Pro-life advocates march through Washington, D.C., to protest abortion during the 2025 March for Life on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025. | Credit: Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images

Jan 21, 2026 / 06:00 am (CNA).

With tens of thousands of pro-life Americans gathering for the 53rd annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Jan. 23, EWTN will provide live coverage of the event.

The yearly national pro-life event marks the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, drawing together thousands to protest abortion and advocate for life. This year’s theme is “Life Is a Gift,” which the March for Life official website says emphasizes the “unshakeable conviction that life is very good and worthy of protection, no matter the circumstances.”

Thursday, Jan. 22: March for Life prayer vigil

5 p.m. ET: EWTN’s National March for Life coverage kicks off before the march with a night of prayer at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The National Prayer Vigil for Life is held annually on the eve of the March for Life, bringing thousands of pilgrims across the nation together to pray for an end to abortion.

At 5 p.m. ET, EWTN will stream the opening Mass followed by the Holy Hour of the National Prayer Vigil for Life at 7 p.m. as pro-lifers pray and prepare for the upcoming march.

Friday, Jan. 23: March for Life

8 a.m. ET: The all-night prayer vigil will conclude with the closing Mass of the National Prayer Vigil for Life at the shrine, televised live by EWTN.

9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET: EWTN will air coverage of the March for Life, featuring a keynote by Sarah Hurm, a single mom of four who went through a chemical abortion reversal to save the life of her child.

JD Vance will speak for the second time at the annual event as vice president of the United States. Other speakers include Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana; Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey; and March for Life President Jennie Bradley Lichter. The march will also feature pro-life entrepreneurs including Shawnte Mallory, founder of Labir Love And Care, and Debbie Biskey, CEO of Options for Her, as well as student activist Elizabeth Pillsbury Oliver, a convert to Catholicism who heads Georgetown University’s Right to Life group.

Rev. Irinej Dobrijevic, a Serbian Orthodox bishop of the Diocese of Eastern America, and Cissie Graham Lynch, spokesperson for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, will also speak at the event.

In addition, the Christian band Sanctus Real will perform at the rally and the Friends of Club 21 choir — a chorus of young adults with Down syndrome — will perform the national anthem.

3 p.m. ET: EWTN will broadcast the second annual Life Fest Mass, sponsored by the Sisters of Life and the Knights of Columbus as part of the Life Fest Rally. The Life Fest Rally begins the evening before the march with live music from Matt Maher and other Christian bands.

Saturday: Walk for Life West Coast

2:30 p.m. PT: The 21st annual Walk for Life West Coast will begin with a rally followed by the walk. EWTN will livestream coverage of the walk.

5 p.m. PT: EWTN will televise highlights from One Life (Una Vida), a one-day event centered on witnessing human dignity with a focus on the pro-life issues as well as other issues such as human trafficking and homelessness. The coverage will be hosted by Astrid Bennett and Patricia Sandoval, along with EWTN producers, during the march.

8 p.m. PT: EWTN will televise a pro-life Mass from Los Angeles, concluding the weekend’s pro-life coverage.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Leo XIV blessed two lambs in the Urban VIII Chapel at the Vatican Jan. 21, the feast of St. Agnes, a Roman martyr who is often depicted with a lamb. Agnes also is a derivative of the Latin word for lamb, "agnus."

The lambs are raised by Trappist monks outside Rome, and they are bound and placed in baskets to prevent them from running away during the blessing. They are decorated with red and white flowers and blessed in a formal ceremony at the Basilica of St. Agnes and by the pope at the Vatican. 

Benedictine nuns at the Monastery of St. Cecilia in Rome will use wool from the lambs to make the pallium worn by archbishops; the pallium is a symbol of the archbishop's authority and unity with the papacy.

In fact, the woolen bands, which are worn around the neck, have long strips hanging down the front and the back, and are tipped with black silk to recall the dark hoof of the sheep the archbishop is symbolically carrying over his shoulders. Lamb's wool is also used to symbolize Christ, the Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd.

The woolen palliums are kept by St. Peter's tomb right before the pope blesses and distributes them to new archbishops during a special liturgy in Rome on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. 

By personally placing the palliums on the archbishops, the pope underlines their bond of unity and communion with the successor of Peter.

Members of the cloistered Benedictine community at Rome's Basilica of St. Cecilia have been entrusted for more than a century with preparing the palliums.

The nuns once produced the palliums from scratch, hand-weaving pure-white lambs' wool into bands that they would then sew together and decorate. But then, the nuns started commissioning a textile company outside of Rome to supply the unfinished wool strips.

The June 29 Vatican Mass is the only time archbishops wear the palliums together. Once bestowed, liturgical rules require that the pallium be worn only in the metropolitan's own see, and then only during important liturgical occasions like ordinations. 

Because of the cloth's territorial character, an archbishop who is transferred to another metropolitan see receives a second pallium.

Under current church practice, if a newly named archbishop cannot travel to the Vatican to receive his pallium from the pope, it is given to him by a papal representative in his country.
 

The Catholic Church in the Córdoba province of Spain is helping victims and their families after a high-speed train accident on Jan. 18, 2026, left at least 42 people dead and dozens injured. | Credit: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Jan 20, 2026 / 17:07 pm (CNA).

Following a tragic train accident that occurred on Sunday evening, Jan. 18, in the Spanish town of Adamuz in the Córdoba province, the Catholic Church is providing pastoral care for those affected.

In addition to the help offered immediately after the accident by the local parish priest and the provision of diocesan resources by Bishop Jesús Fernández of Córdoba after he visited the scene of the accident on Monday morning, the diocese has assigned a team of three priests to the area.

The priests, Leopoldo Rivero, Francisco J. Granados, and Manuel Sánchez, will remain at the Poniente Sur Civic Center in Córdoba, the support center for the families of the victims, for as long as needed.

In a statement, the diocese emphasized the importance of a priestly presence in “a place where despair and uncertainty take their toll as people search for any indication as to the whereabouts of their loved ones.”

Rivero stated that with its presence, the Church is providing “the spiritual care so necessary at this time,” as rescue operations continue, given that many passengers are still missing and may be trapped in the wrecked train cars.

To date, authorities have confirmed the deaths of 41 people and the transfer of 152 injured people to hospitals, where they are receiving treatment, some of them still in very serious condition. At least 43 people remain missing.

Psychologists are referring “families who need [pastoral care] to the priests so that they can be with them, accompany them, and pray with them so that they feel warmth, closeness, and comfort,” Rivero added.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.

Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter Superior General Father John Berg (right) is accompanied to a Jan. 19, 2026, audience with Pope Leo XIV by Father Josef Bisig (center), a co-founder of the FSSP and its first superior general. | Credit: Vatican Media

Jan 20, 2026 / 16:37 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV and leaders of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), a community dedicated to the traditional Roman rite, held a “cordial half-hour meeting” on Monday, Jan. 19, at the apostolic palace.

The priestly fraternity said in a Jan. 20 statement that the Holy Father received in private audience its superior general, Minneapolis-born Father John Berg. Also present was Father Josef Bisig, a co-founder of the FSSP and its first superior general, who now serves as rector of the FSSP’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska.

The FSSP is a society of apostolic life of pontifical right founded in 1988 by priests who broke with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of St. Pius X, precisely in order to remain fully under the Roman pontiff while preserving the older liturgy.

The FSSP’s leaders, who had requested the meeting, said in a cautiously worded statement that it was “an opportunity to present to the Holy Father in greater detail the foundation and history of the fraternity as well as the various forms of apostolate that it has been offering to the faithful for almost 38 years.”

They added that the papal audience also provided an “opportunity to evoke any misunderstandings and obstacles that the fraternity encounters in certain places and to answer questions from the supreme pontiff.”

The audience came at a sensitive time for the fraternity and for those who value the traditional form of the Latin rite as a whole following Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes that imposed sweeping restrictions on parishes and communities dedicated to the traditional Roman rite.

Due to Traditionis Custodes, the FSSP is currently undergoing an apostolic visitation initiated by the Holy See in late 2024. The visitation is part of a broader process of accompanying institutes formerly under the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei but that now, due to Traditionis Custodes, fall under the auspices of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

Both the FSSP and the dicastery have both stressed that the apostolic visitation is not punitive but a normal exercise of oversight so the dicastery can “know who we are, how we are doing, and how we live so as to provide us with any help we may need.” The fraternity also underwent an apostolic visitation in 2014.

Although Pope Francis gave the FSSP a kind of protected but precarious niche, explicitly exempting it from some of the restrictions in a Feb. 11, 2022, decree, the priestly fraternity was still subjected to tighter structural control and scrutiny than under Benedict XVI. That decree arose from a prior private audience between Pope Francis and FSSP leaders.

Monday’s meeting was therefore significant, representing Leo XIV’s first clear, personal outreach to a leading traditional community and showing his willingness to listen to their concerns.

It also follows on the heels of the Holy Father granting Cardinal Raymond Burke the celebration of a pontifical Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica last October, along with the pope’s willingness to grant case-by-case exemptions to some traditional communities. The pope appears to be pursuing a policy of “pragmatic leniency” with such communities, neither willing to undo Francis’ liturgical changes but also not enforcing them with the same rigor.

Observers have therefore welcomed Monday’s meeting and are taking solace in the fact that the Church now has an American pope willing to listen to a fellow American superior general of a traditional order at a time when, according to one insider, “the waters are rough.” Berg also brings much experience to his role, having already served as the fraternity’s superior general from 2006 to 2018.

Like many traditional Roman rite communities and parishes, the FSSP is a flourishing community with several hundred priests and seminarians worldwide, a steady flow of vocations, and well-attended liturgies.

In its communique, the FSSP said Pope Leo XIV gave his blessing, “which he extended to all members of the fraternity.”

“The Fraternity of St. Peter is grateful to the Holy Father for offering this opportunity to meet with him,” the statement concluded, adding that it “encourages the faithful to continue to pray fervently during the 30 days novena of preparation for the renewal of its consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on Feb. 11.”

Leah Sargeant delivers the final keynote at the conference titled “The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman” at the University of St. Thomas in Houston on Jan. 10, 2026. | Credit: Photo courtesy of the University of St. Thomas

Jan 20, 2026 / 16:07 pm (CNA).

“We have the good news that our culture needs to hear: that men and women are ordered to the good and made for amity for each other. Our embodied, sexed nature has been ordered for our salvation.”

So said Leah Sargeant, a former atheist and author who delivered the final keynote at a recent conference in Houston titled “The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman.”

At the conference, sponsored by the Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of St. Thomas on Jan. 9–10, Sargeant suggested that our culture’s view of sexuality is premised on two lies. First, that “women’s equality is premised on being interchangeable with men,” and second, that “autonomy is foundational to a fully human life.”

To the first point, she noted that “it’s been common for people who advocate for women to minimize differences [between the sexes].”

Based on this lie, women, she said, are seen as “defective men.”

However, she continued, “the fundamental asymmetry between men and women is how we engender and bear children.”

It is based on this premise that the second lie, that individual autonomy is fundamental to being fully human, gets its strength, she said.

‘Forming a society open to dependency’

Sargeant said that when a woman is pregnant with another human being, the baby’s dependence and fragility does two things: It makes the baby’s life seem less valuable to those who believe autonomy is required to be fully human, and it makes the woman less-than when compared with a man, who never biologically has to enter into such a dependent relationship.

“The idea of having our lives upended by someone else [the baby’s] is a blow to women’s equality. This is the original argument for women’s access to abortion,” she said.

“The right to privacy wasn’t good enough because men always have the opportunity to abandon a child: that only required an act of cowardice. He could walk away, run, leave no forwarding address, and sever the connection. For a woman, she couldn’t divorce herself from her child by failing to step up: It would require outside, active, violent intervention in the form of poison or a scalpel.”

Women had to have what Sargeant called “an equality of vice” with men: namely, abortion. They had to “access to this cowardice as well or they could not be interchangeable with men and would lose political equality.”

Fundamentally, she concluded, both men and women must reject the lies of sameness and the “lie of autonomy” and be “radically dependent on God” and one another to live in the truth.

She quoted St. John Henry Newman, who wrote that “we cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property, by creation, by redemption, by regeneration … Independence was not made for man. It is an unnatural state that may do for a while, but will not do till the end.”

Sargeant reminded her listeners that we should not be afraid to “invite others into our lives or be ashamed to place demands on others.”

“We were always made to need each other,” she said. “We are not betraying ourselves when we expose ourselves as deeply human.”

Our task, she said, “is to give people reassurance that this truth is good,” reminding them that “hope doesn’t come from excesses of strength but in the midst of our frailty, and reminds us of how we are loved, and by whom.”

Sargeant's talk at the conference was based on her latest book, "The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto," which was released in October 2025.

Blessed Father Miguel Agustín Pro, a martyr during the Cristero War in Mexico, with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross before being executed by firing squad on Nov. 23, 1927. | Credit: Unknown, public domain, via Wikipedia

Jan 20, 2026 / 15:37 pm (CNA).

The Cristero War in Mexico, also known as the “Cristiada,” was not only an armed conflict but also a head-on clash between a state seeking forced secularization and a society that refused to renounce its Catholic identity. This bloody episode left a legacy of martyrs and a historical wound that has marked the complex relationship between the church and state in modern Mexico.

Background: The 1917 constitution

The conflict did not erupt overnight. Its roots lie in the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which incorporated anticlerical articles designed to subject the Church to the absolute control of the state.

Article 3 prohibited religious corporations and ministers of religion from operating primary schools. Article 5 banned the establishment of monastic orders and the taking of religious vows. Article 24 limited public worship to the interior of churches, always under government supervision. Article 27 stripped churches of their legal capacity to own property, transferring such property to the nation. Article 130 denied legal personality to churches, barred ministers of religion from participating in politics, and empowered individual states to limit the number of priests. These provisions formed the legal basis for the anticlerical enforcement that culminated in the “Calles Law,” which intensified the restrictions and sparked the Cristero War.

In 1926, President Plutarco Elías Calles escalated the situation with the “Law on Crimes and Offenses Related to Religious Worship and External Discipline,” also known as the “Law of Religious Tolerance” or simply the “Calles Law,” which amended the penal code by establishing severe penalties.

Among its harshest restrictions, the new law prohibited priests from wearing cassocks or any other religious symbols outside of churches, subjecting violators to fines and imprisonment. Priests who were not born in Mexico faced fines and deportation. The establishment of monastic orders or convents was banned, and existing convents were dissolved. Additionally, ministers of religion were forbidden from criticizing the fundamental laws of the country, the authorities in particular, or the government in general.

The Catholic Church’s response was drastic, unprecedented, and disciplined among all the Mexican archbishops and bishops: On July 31, 1926 — with the Holy See rejecting the “Calles Law” and “any act that could signify or be interpreted by the faithful as an acceptance of the law itself” — public worship was suspended throughout Mexico.

The outbreak

“It is indeed the suspension of religious services that may mark the beginning of the Cristero War, states the Franco-Mexican historian Jean Meyer in the opening pages of the first volume of his work “La Cristiada.”

Meyer quotes a letter from some Cristeros to their parish priest, who had been arrested by the authorities and urged the Cristeros to surrender: “Without your permission or command, we threw ourselves into this blessed struggle for our freedom, and without your permission or command, we will continue until we win or die.”

Thus, in different parts of the country, Catholic faithful spontaneously rose up in arms.

The willingness to engage in armed resistance against the government was not unanimous. “The bishops undoubtedly preached resistance,” Meyer notes, but at the same time, “they specified that they wanted no resistance other than passive and peaceful resistance.”

Although many prelates provided pastoral support to the Cristeros in some way, “the enemies of armed action were more numerous,” he points out.

Nor was the situation uniform among the priests. A list compiled by the Franco-Mexican historian indicates 100 “priests were actively hostile to the Cristeros,” while 40 were “actively favorable to the Cristeros.” Five priests are recorded as “combatants,” while 65 were considered “neutral.”

The number of priests “who abandoned rural parishes and priests from cities” totaled 3,500, while the priests “executed by the government” numbered 90.

It was “the people, ‘the Indian,’” who reacted, the historian says, and they did so “violently” because “the Church was more than just a building of piled-up stones, and popular sentiment had been struck to its very core, since the profane and the sacred are inextricably intertwined.”

“The people, the vast majority or many peasants — who were the ones who fought the guerrilla war most fiercely in the states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Colima, and other central states — didn’t have much theology ... nor did they make many distinctions between things, but rather it was something, let’s say, of the heart and of religious feeling ..., of love for their faith,” that motivated them, the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Cancún-Chetumal, Bishop Pedro Pablo Elizondo Cárdenas, told ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News.

Some key figures

It is difficult to compile a specific list of the key figures and those who lost their lives at the hands of the anticlerical federal troops, especially considering that the Mexican Bishops’ Conference estimates that there were “more than 200,000 martyrs who gave their lives defending their faith."

But to understand the magnitude of the Cristero War, it is necessary to identify some of the actors who spearheaded the movement, as well as the figures who embodied the spiritual resistance against federal persecution.

The Cristero resistance was coordinated by the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty — known as “The League" — which, although it managed to secure 2 million signatures in an attempt to reform the 1917 Constitution (an effort that ultimately failed) and organized a relatively successful boycott, threw itself into war effort without being “prepared to face the situation," according to Meyer.

Blessed Anacleto González Flores, known as “Maestro Cleto” and also nicknamed the “Socrates of Guadalajara” in reference to his origin in the state of Jalisco, was a layman who led peaceful efforts to confront the persecution by the government and was martyred on April 1, 1927. He is the patron saint of the Mexican laity.

St. José Sánchez del Río, affectionately called Joselito (“dear little José”), was martyred at the age of 14. He joined the war assuring his mother that “it had never been so easy to gain heaven as now, and I don’t want to miss the opportunity.” He was captured, tortured, and killed. Before dying, he asked that this message be delivered to his parents: “Long live Christ the King, and we will see each other in heaven.”

The photograph of the execution of Blessed Father Miguel Agustín Pro on Nov. 23, 1927, shows the Jesuit priest with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross in front of the firing squad. It is one of the most powerful symbols of the brutal religious persecution suffered by Catholics during the first half of the 20th century.

Among those murdered out of hatred for the faith during the religious persecution unleashed by the federal government, six priests who were members of the Knights of Columbus stand out. This fraternity played a leading role, both economically and socially, in supporting religious freedom during that tragic period in Mexico, even to the point of offering their own lives.

The six priests, canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000, are Luis Bátis Sáinz, José María Robles Hurtado, Mateo Correa Magallanes, Miguel de la Mora de la Mora, Rodrigo Aguilar Alemán, and Pedro de Jesús Maldonado Lucero. All of them were canonized on May 21, 2000, along with 19 other Mexican martyrs, including St. Cristóbal Magallanes.

‘Agreements’ of 1929 and the end of hostilities?

Officially, the Cristero War ended on June 21, 1929, with the so-called “Agreements” between Mexican Archbishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores, as apostolic delegate of Pope Pius XI; the bishop of Tabasco, Pascual Díaz; and the then-president of the country, Emilio Portes Gil, successor to Plutarco Elías Calles.

However, the “Agreements” did not entail any changes to the 1917 Constitution or the “Calles Law” but rather established a “modus vivendi” in which the federal government committed to not applying the laws to persecute Catholics, while the bishops resumed religious services and the Cristeros laid down their arms.

But the persecution was far from over. Meyer writes that “for the Cristeros, the ‘modus vivendi’ (a way to peacefully coexist) very quickly became a sinister ‘modus moriendi’ (a way to die), suffered as a trial worse than the war itself and borne like a cross, an incomprehensible mystery which they underwent out of love for the pope and for Jesus Christ the King.”

Meyer notes that “all the former Cristeros say: ‘More people died after the “Agreements” than during the war.’”

“In the capital of the republic, the party line was to assure and repeat that everything was over, but in the records of the Ministry of War, there are reports of campaigns up to 1941 and the generals discussing the means of subduing the rebels, who were sometimes very dangerous, here and there,” Meyer writes in another part of the first volume of “La Cristiada.”

This period is commonly considered the “Second Cristero War,” but Meyer points out that “if the first stage (1926–29) of the Cristero War was already a war [fought by] the poor, the second was a war of the destitute, without resources, without support.”

Long road to religious freedom in Mexico

It would not be until 1992 — after two visits to Mexico by Pope John Paul II, in 1979 and 1990 — that relations between church and state would be formally reestablished in the country with a reformed 1917 Constitution and the new and current “Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship,” which allows for the recognition of the legal personality of the Catholic Church.

Only since 1992 has the Catholic Church been allowed to own churches in Mexico, but all those built before that year — including the Guadalupe Basilica (completed in 1976) — are the property of the nation.

However, current law still prohibits both religious associations and ministers of religion from owning or managing “radio or television stations or any type of telecommunications” as well as “managing any of the mass media.” In fact, the law only permits the publication of “printed materials of a religious nature.”

A call from the Mexican bishops on the centenary

In their most recent message to the faithful, the Mexican bishops called for “honoring the memory” of the “Cristero resistance.”

They warned that this centenary “cannot be a mere nostalgic commemoration. It must be an examination of conscience and a renewed commitment.”

“Our martyrs ask us today: Are we willing to defend our faith with the same radical commitment? Have we lost our sense of the sacred? Have we become complacent in a culture that wants to relegate faith to the private sphere?”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.