Title: The Modern Period | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: The Modern Period
The Modern Period
The Modern Period
INDEPENDENCE
RESTORATION AND ROMANIZATION IN HISPANIC AMERICA
Brazil and Cuba
THE CHURCH'S STRUGGLE WITH LIBERALISM
Popular Piety
Catholic Action
MODERNIZATION
Medellín and Liberation Theology
GENERAL STATISTICS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Content: In spite of these difficulties, the church as a whole came out of the wars relatively intact. In Mexico, Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, and other priests who fought and died for the independence of their country were considered patriots and heroes. Liberal clergymen such as Francisco Javier de Luna Pizarro in Peru and Deán Gregorio Funes in Argentina helped to write the constitutions of their respective nations and played important roles in politics. Most of these liberal priests belonged to the secular clergy. The religious clergy, which unlike the secular clergy included many Spanish missionaries in colonial times, fared less well. The liberals associated the religious orders with the old regime, and in many countries they confiscated monasteries and enacted laws severely limiting membership in the orders. Impoverished national governments saw the extensive lands and possessions of the church as a potential source of funds with which to support their governments. For liberals especially, diminishing the power of the orders fulfilled both a political and an economic goal. As a result, the religious way of life for both men and women underwent an institutional crisis from which it did not recover until the end of the nineteenth century, when more cooperative regimes took office. RESTORATION AND ROMANIZATION IN HISPANIC AMERICA
The major post-Independence crisis, however, concerned the episcopal vacancies.