After the Mexican Revolution the Catholics of Mexico went through multiple hardships spreading from prejudice to attempted genocide to looser morality in the western culture. According to Catholicism using makeup is a sin that can be forgiven as long as it is for the correct reasons. Mexico’s consumer culture grew after the revolution, causing temptations for primarily catholic women, such as cosmetics.
One of the solutions to these problems was to accommodate it to Catholic values. When the revolution ended, power in Mexico switched over and the modernity of Mexico progressed. The elite class members became entranced in the brand new trends greatly influenced by the american twenties. Women of the elite started to dress as flappers and go out dancing at night.
The women of catholicism both in the elite classes and lower classes expressed that it was okay to take in the new found modernities of Postrevolutionary Mexico as long as you were able to do it with good taste and with strong moral rectitude. As morals became looser and temptations became stronger, nuns in convents began getting involved in social issues in the city and around their neighborhoods. They helped in charity organizations such as the Casa de Cuna or Founding Home and created the standard for the women of faith in catholicism. This became to be known as “Social Catholicism”. Social Catholicism was further developed by a jesuit priest named Alfredo Mendez Medina.
He used third way ideas as model for Social Catholicism. It can easily be explained as something between capitalism and socialism. Social Catholics were weary of the laissez faire market. They said that it created hostility between owners and their employees as well as further separated the classes in mexican society. The views of the Social Catholics provided solutions to many problems with in Mexico’s post revolutionary society such as, harsh labor conditions, long work days, unjust salaries, illiteracy, and poverty.
Mendez Medina argued that peace amongst the classes would return if society were to run state machinery, civil institutions and economic practices that were guided by Church- inspired values. Mendez MEdina was on the more progressive side of Social Catholicism. Where his fellow social catholics stayed promoting only charity groups and traditional mutual societies
