Our Lady of Pontmain: Marian Devotion and New Catholicism in Puebla (1876-1914)

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the diffusion, development and decline of the cult of Our Lady of Pontmain in the city of Puebla. Doing so, it tries to understand the way in which new devotions were integrated in Mexican Catholicism at the end of the 19th century and to discard the causes of the popularity of these new Marian cults in the Porfirian society. The hypothesis of this work is that the cult of Our Lady of Pontmain was the local expression of a New Catholicism that not only integrated novel cults into the local context, but served as a cult element that impelled clerics and lay people to look for new mechanisms of urban and social presence of Catholicism in a context dominated by triumphant liberalism that, nevertheless, allowed a wide confessional work to believers, allowing an active participation of Catholics in society in the liberal framework.