of the church. She claims the priests supported the agrarian capitalists and stressed to their congregations that those blessed with land and wealth are rewarded by God, and those who have not should realize their place in society as inevitable (37). The actual church services reflected the social bias given the wealthy families sat closest to the icons of the Virgin and Jesus while the poor, both Indian and Mesitizo, were relegated to the back of the Church. Becker asserts that the Michoacan "social landscape in the 1920's [found] that the churches and the haciendas had blended into the mountainous background" (Becker 38) and that the marriage of property and piety, like the "mountains and the plains" (Becker 38) is permanent and inevitable. However unjust this rendering of life might have been to the peasant, it appears on the surface that most peasants accepted their social class and lack of mobility. Becker notes that mothers told their children there was nothing else besides Catholicism and even set their entire lives by the Catholic calendar. Women in particular took solace in the images and figurines of La Purisma as an image of redemption in hope, even in a social order which promised neither. The Cardenistas did find truth in the appropriation of the "world and its inhabitants" that the Church endlessly preached to their communities. Becker argues the Cardenistas viewed both the Church and the priests as responsible for "campesino inauthenticity" and thus sought to eradicate the existing social structure. Furthermore, they viewed the campesinos as "completely numbed by fanaticism" as such beliefs would not work well in the ordered and structured government of the Cardenas.
             In their attempts to reform the religion of the campesino, Cardenas created his own missionaries to spread his message concerning the backwardness of endless rituals, prayers, and the giving of countless alms to the Church. Cardenas began his ref...