Agio, clero y bancarrota fiscal, 1846-1847

This article analyzes the loans made by the Mexican Church to the national government between 1835 and 1846, and especially in the years 1846 and 1847. It relates the significant increase in the loaned amounts to the government's growing indebtedness, while pointing out the clear tendency, beginning in 1842, for loans from suffragan dioceses to dry up. By 1846 and particularly 1847, the burden of providing ecclesiastical loans to the federal government fell mainly upon the Archbishopric of Mexico. As a result, diocesan authorities increasingly condemned usury, considered as undermining their own position, and parallel symptoms of crisis within ecclesiastical institutions.