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line in Mexico’s grisly drug wars. His father, Francisco Maciel Farías, a Creole of French-Spanish descent, owned a sugar mill and several ranches. Ridiculed by his father for being a sissy and subjected to whippings by his brothers, he kept close to his mother, Maurita, who was reputedly pious. “There will be no faggots in my house,” snapped Francisco, sending his son to work with mule drivers for six months to shape up as a man. The mule drivers sexually assaulted him and another boy, according to an informant of the Mexican scholar Fernando M. González.35 The story tracks what Maciel confided to Juan Vaca, among the first Legion seminarians he abused.36 Hungry to vanquish the shame, Maciel entered the seminary at sixteen in the aftershocks of a society that had been crippled by war.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 began when Francisco Madero, a reform-minded patrician, raised a small army against the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Díaz, a former general who descended on one side from Zapotec Indians, had become a figure of Victorian pomp and ruthless power after ruling for thirty-four years. Speaking of men he had had executed for stealing telegraph wires, he told a reporter, “Sometimes we were relentless to the point of cruelty. The blood that was spilled was bad blood.”37 Porfirio Díaz gave huge land concessions to local gentry and foreign individuals and firms, driving rural masses deeper into poverty, while inciting war with the Yaqui and Mayo Indians. “He had the chieftains of the latter tribe put on a warship, chained together, and dumped into the Pacific Ocean,” writes Carlos Fuentes. “Leaders of the Yaqui rebellion were murdered, and half of the tribe’s total male population (30,000 people) were deported … Where was this barbarism coming from? From the city, from the countryside? One thing was certain, the ideology of progress overrode all objections.”38

In 1907 the American economy crashed. Drought and poverty worsened in rural Mexico. Seven months after Madero’s revolt, as bombs blew rail-cars off the tracks, Díaz fled to Paris. Madero was elected president in 1911 and murdered after a coup in 1913. The revolution erupted in regional uprisings rather than a mass rebellion, though many states saw attacks on mines and big haciendas.39 The 1917 constitution codified labor rights, state control of natural resources, and, in reaction to a powerful Catholic hierarchy, the banning of monasteries, Catholic schools, and denial of voting rights for clergy. Two more presidents were assassinated. By 1919 a wrecked economy had left 1 million of Mexico’s 15 million people dead.40 Plutarco Elías Calles gained power, a pro-labor revolutionary who prized industry over land redistribution. Calles improved public education and used the church as a whipping post.

Maciel as a boy saw men hanged in public. The Michoacán of his childhood was a hotbed of Catholic resistance. Cotija was called “town of the cassocks” for its many priests. Maciel came from “good blood.” Of his four uncle-bishops, Rafael Guízar Valencia ran a 1930s clandestine seminary in Mexico City and is memorialized in a statue in Cotija’s plaza. Father Maciel would nominate Guízar, and his mother, Maurita, for sainthood, and later anticipate his own. (“Don’t start my canonization process until I’ve been dead thirty years,” he told aides at a 1992 ceremony in Rome.)41 Another uncle, Jesús Degollado Guízar, was a pharmacist-turned-general in the Cristero uprising. In 1922 the Mexican bishops launched the Catholic Labor Confederation (CLC) to counter Calles’s manipulation of unions. That enraged Luis Napoleón Morones, the labor minister. As the CLC mushroomed to eighty thousand members, Calles and Morones sent armed thugs against priests and churches.42 The bishops closed the churches on July 31, 1926. Four hundred men bunkered into a Guadalajara church, firing at federal troops. As the revolt spread across southwestern Mexico, many bishops and priests fled. Cristeros rallied behind the slogan Viva Cristo Rey!—Long Live Christ the King! Landowners, working families, peasants,