The Independence of Jose Maria Morelos September 15, 2022
In late 1815, Jose Maria Morelos faced his executioners near the capital city of Mexico. His seminary teacher, Miguel Hidalgo, suffered a similar fate four years before, but with hurried dispatch, far from prying eyes. The condemnation of Father Morelos, however, would be a public affair. Together, these two Catholic priests managed to instigate Mexico’s liberation from the Spanish Empire. Here in Oaxaca de Juarez, Calles Jose Maria Morelos and Miguel Hidalgo are the only through-running streets in the city, surrounding, of course, the main boulevard of Independencia, which crosses the heart of the Zocalo and Cathedral.
Morelos is considered the founding father of all the southern coastal states: Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan, and as far as the frontier of Chiapas. In colonial Valladolid (now the city of Morelia), Michoacan, an impoverished muleteer gained improbable admission to the College of San Nicolas. He managed to pass himself off as legitimate Criollo, that is, of pure European ancestry, even though he had an indigenous grandparent. In short order, Morelos was ordained as a holy man in the Catholic Church, only to be called by Father Hidalgo in 1811 to raise 3000 ill-armed troops and march to Acapulco. The port city was Spain’s primary connection to the Philippines, and Don Miguel Hidalgo, the rector of San Nicolas, was wise to see its strategic importance.
Nevertheless, onceHidalgo had uttered his seminal call-to-arms, El Grito from Dolores, he essentially became a fugitive on the run. Morelos immediately accepted the commission from his ecclesiastic mentor, turning from padre to warrior, and he proved remarkably adept in battle. In Cuautla, in the present-day state of Morelos, the padre and his men were outnumbered by the royalist army, yet they managed to hold out for 73 days. After this siege, the liberators rebounded and marched victoriously south into Oaxaca before finally taking Acapulco and the port to Asia.
The capital city of Estado Guerrero is not Acapulco but Chilpancingo, further inland, and it was there in late-1813 that the newly formed Congress of Independence gathered to honor the martyred Father Hidalgo, whose excommunication was hastened at the time of his execution when he resisted absolution before the firing squad. (Instead, it is alleged, he simply pointed to his heart.) The Congress declared in writing that “dependence upon the Spanish Throne has ceased forever and been dissolved,” while also reaffirming commitment to the Catholic Church, “the purity of the Faith and its dogmas.”
For Jose Maria Morelos and his forces, meanwhile, the fighting continued, with many setbacks. He returned to his native Valladolid, where his second-in-command, Matamoros, was captured and executed. This was followed in 1814 with the brief recapture of Oaxaca by the royalist army. Soon the entire Congress of Independence was forced to flee Chilpancingo. Morelos secured the evacuation, only to be captured himself and promptly delivered in shackles to Mexico City.
He faced charges of treason before the military court, as well as heresy before a Catholic tribunal. Not only a cleric and a soldier, Morelos proved an able lawyer in his own defense, arguing, for instance, that failing his fealty to the King of Spain was no crime because Ferdinand VII was sitting in a French prison. Indeed, in a cunning move, he maintained that the Chilpancingo declaration was made on the assumption that the captured King would never return to Spain. As for accusations of battlefield crimes such as summary executions, he disingenuously claimed he was only following orders. For the Catholic Inquisition, Morelos’s major moral lapse was not so much that he was seditious and murderous, nor even that he was secretly married, but that he had sent his sons to protestant colleges in the United States. The tribunal’s baroque decision proved devastating to a man of the Church:
“…that the priest Don José Morelos was a formal negative heretic, a favourer of heretics, a persecutor and disturber of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, a profaner of the holy sacraments, a traitor to God, the king, and the pope, and as such was declared forever irregular, deposed from all offices and benefices, and condemned to be present at his auto in the garb of a penitent, with collarless cassock and a green candle, to make a general confession and a spiritual retreat; and that, in the unexpected and very remote case of his life being spared, he was condemned for the remainder of it to confinement in Africa at the disposition of the inquisitor general, with the obligation of reciting every Friday in the year the penitential psalms and the rosary of the Blessed Virgin, and to have his sambenito (penitential inscription) placed in the cathedral church of Mexico as that of a reconciled formal heretic.”
Jose Maria Morelos was not sent to Africa. He was shot by firing squad on December 22, 1815, just north of Mexico City in the town of San Cristóbal Ecatepec. His excommunication was later rescinded when he was apparently seen praying on the way to his death. But his ultimate life-ever-after is not in Heaven but beside his teacher and among his brothers in the struggle, replayed every September 15th, at exactly 11 pm, without fail, by the President of Mexico from the balcony of Palacio Nacional—El Grito de Dolores, which concludes triumphantly: “Viva Hidalgo! Viva Allende! Viva Matamoros! Viva Morelos! Viva Mexico!”
On nearly every street corner, from Calle Colon north to Calle Constitucion, wagons teem with tricolor paraphernalia—flags, hats, pinwheels, wooden toy cars (30 pesos), plastic guitars and drums and horns—on sale, for an Independence Day celebration to beat all. Oaxaqueños are exceedingly proud of their inheritance and more than ready for the party to come. The Chiles en Nogada are being served in all their Poblano-green, walnut-white, and pomegranate-red glory. Shouts of “Viva!” are accompanied by teeth-rattling explosions over Calle Independencia, forever to be surrounded by Hidalgo and Morelos.