A project of catholic modernity: Ecuador in the times of García Moreno

Abstract

When the revolutions of Independence in continental Latin America ended, in the 1830s, the new governments faced the problem of constructing states and nations on the ruins of the ancient regime, after destroying what Halperin Donghi called the “spoil of the winners”. These processes happened in different ways across the whole continent. In this paper we focus on the particular case of the ecclesiastical reforms, in the process of independence of local churches, the invention of the Church as an institution and its subsequent secularization; such events were closely related to each other, and they became part of the construction of the states. We will examine the case of Ecuador in the 1860’s, when Gabriel García Moreno became the head of a conservative Catholic government that ended up applying Gallican and even anticlerical reforms through an alliance with the Holy See.