Good Christian education in Zacatecas, 1890-1905

Abstract

This research explains the principles of good Christian education in Zacatecas from 1895 to 1905. In this period, the Church and Catholic militants assumed a liberal political stance to protect themselves from the State’s secularizing onslaught. To do this, they developed the socio-political movement of neo-Christianity. The project had several pillars: press, theater, schools, labor organizations, political groups, and associations of various kinds (e.g., pious, moralizing, literary, and so forth). A part of these social activities was focused on protecting the poor and a good Christian education; the primary purpose was to dignify the human condition with work instruction and the strengthening of perfect morality and order through religious, personal, and social civility. In this Christian model, the Catholic child is a promoter of moral change in the domestic and public environment. In Zacatecas city, the priest José Anastasio Díaz López, in the neighborhood of “La Estación del Ferrocarril,” began in 1891 the formation of the “Congregación de las Hijas del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús y Santa María de Guadalupe,” to spread the Piarists-school and good Christian education. To compensate for poverty and offer a home to poor children, he established an asylum and promoted an apostolate from 1895 to 1905. At the institution, first letters education and instruction for work were given in workshops of different trades. In methodological terms, with the historiography of the social history of education, the political and educational context that rises from the secularization and secularism of the State was addressed. Furthermore, with primary sources, the religious congregation’s creation, the Piarists-schools’ opening is described. Moreover, the asylum for children and the basis of the pedagogy of prevention and the perception of good Christian behavior in religious, personal, and social civility norms were analyzed.