Church behind the scenes:

...These provisions, and the anticlerical measures taken to implement them, provoked furious reactions from Mexican Catholics, culminating in the virtual civil war of 1926-29 known as the Cristero Rebellion...

...Indeed, the right to do so was the one political privilege church leaders have always assumed to be part of the understanding arrived at in 1929...

...Neither man, however, denied that negotiations are underway, and neither foreclosed the possibility of change further down the road...

...On the one hand, church leaders once again have displayed the old partisanship in recent elections disputes, carefully refraining from commenting on the left's claims to victory in the contested states of Michoacan and Oaxaca, while praising the government for acknowledging defeat to the PAN in Baja California, where that party took the governorship in the first loss of major office for the PRI since its founding in the 1920s...

...The Constitution of 1917 renewed and codified the liberal nineteenth-century Reform Laws most closely associated with the name of national hero Benito Juarez...

...To the government of Salinas, it appears, the continued vitality of the church in Mexico seems to demand the removal of unworkable and unrealistic laws...

...REPORT FROM MEXICO CHURCH BEHIND THE SCENES RENEGOTIATING HISTORY The delicate relations between the Mexican Catholic church and the government are once again on the agenda, after nearly sixty years of uneasy truce and a decade of bickering and catcalling...

...But the notion that constitutional provisions, won after a long struggle with the most conservative forces in Mexican politics, should be altered has raised old fears of clerical dominance...

...Parties of the left, including Cardenas's recently formed PRD, have been actively wooing these activists...

...Thus, when the party claimed fraud in the 1986 gubernatorial elections in the northern state of Chihuahua, it was openly supported by the Catholic hierarchy, who solemnly called upon the government to respect the vote...

...the law expressly forbids clerics the right to vote...

...But behind the scenes the pressure seems to be intense, especially as the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari struggles to develop new bases of support for a severely crippled PRI...

...The PAN, which until last year's presidential election was the leading opposition movement, was founded in the 1940s by Catholic lay people, and it has maintained quiet ties with the church leadership since then...

...And church people have become increasingly outspoken in politics...

...Though opposition politicians on the left began increasingly to find themselves allied with lower-level church people, and even a few bishops, in the 1970s and 1980s, the hierarchy's ties to the right-wing National Action Party, or PAN, aroused the ire of both the left opposition and the left wing of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, as it is called in Mexico...

...On the other hand, the church's efforts to influence electoral outcomes in Michoacan by identifying Cardenas's Revolutionary Democratic Party with "communism" seem to have fallen on deaf ears, with Cardenas's people drawing even or better against their PRI rivals in this most Catholic of Mexico's states...

...All of this does not mean, however, that the Catholic church in Mexico will not push for constitutional reform...

...The wave of criticisms that greeted rumors of change provoked immediate denials, first by PRI president Luis Donaldo Colosio, then by Interior Minister Fernando Gutierrez Barrios...

...These fears may not be particularly realistic...

...According to key provisions of the Constitution, no ecclesiastical body may own real estate, run schools, or enjoy juridical recognition (Article 130...

...But if even Cardenas's Revolutionary Democratic Party supports reforms, as some predict it will, the old anticlericalism may fast fade from sight...

...The latter provision also prohibits churches and their leaders from participating in any way in politics...

...Today, though the Mexican government formally owns virtually all church buildings, the Catholic church (and to a lesser extent various Protestant churches) has a more or less free hand in administering them...

...With a viable opposition candidate on the left in the person of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, as well as on the right, the church's efforts to encourage people to vote and the government to respect the vote were perceived less as unwanted interference than as a contribution to the democratization of the political process...

...The presidential elections of 1988 seemed to have changed all that...

...The bishops have pledged not to resort to public pressure...

...The Catholic church runs some thirty-six hundred schools, 7.5 percent of the total, including a number of universities, under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Public Education...

...The announcement that Pope John Paul II plans a second trip to Mexico some time in 1990, together with the papal nuncio's unguarded remark that church-state relations were under discussion at the highest levels of the government, provoked a storm of editorializing in Mexico City this summer, suggesting that the anticlerical tradition enshrined in Mexico's Constitution is still alive and well in intellectual and political circles, despite recent signs of a thaw...

...A 1929 accord signed by the archbishop of Mexico City and then-President Jose Portes Gil institutionalized a truce between church and state which left the offending principles on the books but allowed the church considerable room to maneuver around them...

...Supporters of the government, especially on the left, cried foul, angered by the partisan character of the church's pronouncements and by the close links among conservative business interests, PAN leadership, and the hierarchy...

...The new outspokenness certainly accounts for some of the heat in recent reactions to the rumor of constitutional change...

...MICHAEL w. FOLEY Michael W. Foley is an assistant professor of politics at The Catholic University of America.ity of America...

...To those who still see the institutional church as a threat, however, its vitality is a clear sign that the Constitution should not be tampered with...

...The church, moreover, is internally split, with an intensely conservative hierarchy struggling to control independent-minded lower clergy and lay people associated with the sometimes radical "base community" movement...