Firmissimam Constantiam. Le Mexique dans la « Pâque des trois Encycliques »

[Autom. eng. transl.] Many times overlooked by a historiography that in the diversity of its orientations has often been marked by a certain Eurocentrism, Mexico represents a fundamental element for understanding the basic lines and global perspectives of the policy of the Holy See in the years of Pius XI, particularly in the second mid-thirties. Of this the content and the editorial process of the encyclicals of March 1937 - which constitute both individually and above all as a whole a fundamental moment of the Magisterium - offer an illuminating testimony. The Mexican case, at the center of the encyclical Firmissimam constantiam but also present in the Divini Redemptoris, seems more than others to place itself at the crossroads between different interpretations of the challenges posed to the Catholic Church by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. If the condemnation of the communist ideology - in which above all the Jesuits identify the true "compass" of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas - is without appeal, the need for a profound rethinking of the ways of presence and intervention of the Church in the social as well as pastoral ambit. The Spanish civil war and the diplomatic approach of the Holy See to the United States (with the private visit of the cardinal secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli to President Franklin D. Roosevelt) constitute the international political horizon in which Mexican events are taken into consideration by the Pope and from the Roman Curia between 1936 and 1937.