But the Church was extremely astute in its strategy. It managed to combine putting itself at the service of agrarian capitalism with retaining its social power over the masses. What it did was embark on a campaign of spiritual reconquest of the masses, launched against traditional folk Catholicism and secular ideologies alike. It rather cunningly advocated the policy of a third way' between capitalism and socialism. Though the Church Hierarchy did make serious mistakes - like welcoming the counterrevolutionary coup of Huerta - the way the Church as a whole had hedged its bets ideologically stood it in extremely good stead when it subsequently had to face a particularly strong anti-clerical post-revolutionary state in the 1920s. .
This was important, since the greatest challenge which the post-revolutionary state faced came not from the old landlord class or the military, but from the Cristero rebellion - a large-scale mass movement with genuinely popular roots which swept the country from 1926 to 1929. The Cristero rebellion reflected the fact that the Porfirian state had provided the conditions for the Church to recover its social power, so the struggle to do that had to be renewed under the post-revolutionary regime. It also reflected the substantial degree of alienation which existed between the rural masses and the post-revolutionary state élite, and the extent to which the kind of secular ideologies by which that state sought to incorporate the rural masses were rejected initially. .
Now let's turn to a second, and in many ways the crucial issue, Porfirio diaz's attempt to create a stronger and more effective central state machine. At the start of diaz's dictatorship, it was pretty evident that no Mexican government could afford to offend the landlord class in any way, and that power was effectively held by that class in a decentralized form in which whole areas of the country were effectively controlled by regional caudillos.
