The Mysterious Sofia - University of Nebraska Press

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It’s May 2005.

I feel like a man drowning in the dark subterranean sea that is Rome’s subway system. The Metropolitana di Roma.

The underground sea foams with tourists, slick-­suited Italians, nuns in full habit, priests in cassocks. This human wave buoys me to the surface and finally to fresh air.

I look up. A sign reads Via Ottaviano. The street will take me straight on to St. Peter’s Square and to the colossal basilica that looms in the distance. Lingering doubts poke at me. You’re a historian of Mexico.

Why are you studying in Rome?

Caught in a meandering flotsam of humanity, I push onward to Vatican City. The smallest national territory in the world, Vatican City is a 109-­acre Catholic island anchored in the heart of Rome. Before I reach the Bernini Colonnade that rings St. Peter’s Square I see a gate, the Porta Angelica. A detail of Swiss Guard—­six feet tall and decked out in pantaloons designed by Michelangelo—­protects the entrance to Vatican City. They salute priests and bishops who splash out of the human surf on the street and into the gated world beyond. Thinking I’m just another curious tourist, a Swiss Guard points me toward St. Peter’s Square.

“The basilica is that way,” the blue-­eyed blockade tells me in perfect English.

I shake my head and show my passport, imploring in labored Italian. “Archeeve-­oh Segree-­toh Vatican-­oh.”

The guard smiles wryly and diverts me to a kind of border checkpoint. At last I stagger into Vatican City—­one step closer to the Vatican Secret Archive. xvii

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I was a young graduate student then, working on a master’s degree in history. It was my first experience in an archive. I was sweating.

Dan Brown’s novels be damned, entrance to the Vatican Secret Archive is open to all researchers. “Secret” is perhaps one of those unintentionally provocative words that give an aura of mystery to the archive. It simply means private or reserved, not clandestine or inaccessible. There are ancient documents stretching back a millennium, but also documents of modern vintage.

I came to Rome for one reason. I wanted to be among the first scholars to look at recently declassified files held in the Vatican about Mexico’s national revolution and the religious conflict that followed in its wake (ca. 1910–­40).

In the archive I entered a marble-­floored index room. There, scholars and students find the precise file name and number they need to call up the documents from storage. Some of the indexes give an exact idea as to what the folders contain. Some do not.

Often only miscellaneous is listed. For these unidentified files, an act of faith is required. Requesting them might reveal a momentous find, some newly unearthed document, or, perhaps nothing: an irrelevant list or a dull note.

“When doing research in the archives, always look under miscellaneous.”

My academic advisor gave me this nugget of wisdom before I embarked on that first research trip. I have always remembered it, even now more than a decade later. It turned out to be good advice.

I made several return trips to the Vatican archive over the next ten years. I figured looking under miscellaneous probably meant also looking at similarly neglected headings like appendix. And so it was that I encountered a dossier of letters written by a Mexican woman named Sofía del Valle (born, 1891; died, 1982). Her file was in the appendix.

Traces of Sofía del Valle’s story had shown up before, but only as one of the many active Catholic women during the period.

Or so I thought . . .

My view changed as I read Sofía’s Vatican file. She was the daughter of European immigrants to Mexico. As a devout Catholic, a single woman, neither nun nor mother, she resisted religious persecution in an era of xviii Prologue

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revolutionary upheaval. She became a labor activist in a time of class conflict. She founded an educational movement, toured the United States as public lecturer, and raised money for Catholic ministries—­ all in an age dominated by economic depression, gender prejudice, and racial discrimination. During the Cold War, she campaigned for development in an era of revolution and anti-­Americanism. Sofía del Valle’s Vatican letters reveal a history that reaches far beyond Mexico.

Following Sofía’s archival footprint I discovered thousands of pages of her correspondence and oral memoir. I soon found material not only in Rome, but also in Mexico and the United States. The sources describe Sofía del Valle’s remarkable, though relatively unknown, life of activism.

But who was she?

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The only way I know how to begin is with Sofía’s life in sketch. Sofía del Valle lived through most of the twentieth century, from her birth in 1891 to her death in 1982. She was the daughter of immigrants: a Spanish father and a Mexican-­born mother of French and English heritage. Sofía was birthed into a world where large Catholic families were common.

The del Valle family had eight children. Sofía was second in birth order.

Of six daughters two would become nuns, two would marry and have children of their own, and two—­including Sofía—­would never marry.

She wasn’t a nun. She never married and she never had children. Even so, she devoted her life to work for the Catholic Church.

War and revolution, global in their reach, didn’t leave the del Valle family unaffected. The family left Mexico City for Europe in 1907, before the country plummeted into revolution. Sofía’s father, a rising merchant in the Mexican capital, had the means and wherewithal to leave Mexico in a time of crisis. Most weren’t so lucky. Class would always be a pronounced feature of Sofía’s family, as was race—­Sofía had light skin and a decidedly European heritage. The tangle of class and race provided privilege and opportunity for Sofía. First among these was education.

Sofía spent her formative years in European schools, primarily Catholic, but even a Jewish school, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Sofía mastered Spanish, French, and English. She earned a teaching certificate. When Prologue xix

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World War I broke out in 1914, the family migrated back to Spain, then later to New Orleans, Louisiana. Finally they returned to Mexico City in 1922. Sofía was thirty years old at the time. As a single woman, she worked. She used her language skills as a personal assistant to the Swedish managers of the Mexican branch of Ericsson Telephones.

Sofía’s class status was subject to her Catholicism, and Catholicism was itself undergoing a social revival in the early twentieth century.

Traditional Catholic charity—­the rich simply giving to the poor—­ was no longer enough, according to the new thinking. Many Catholics had woken to the idea that the church needed to do something to fix the problems of the Industrial Revolution.2 Poverty couldn’t just be righted through alms. As Sofía surveyed Mexico in the aftermath of revolution—­some two million dead in a decade of civil war—­she threw herself into the Catholic social movement percolating in the capital. She organized women in the factories of the city. A night school followed, where she taught literacy and basic jobs skills to workingwomen. In 1926 Sofía established the first Catholic women’s liberal arts college in Mexico. Then, war came yet again.

For the next three years (1926–­29) Sofía lived through a bloody conflict called the Cristero War. It pitted the Mexican government—­ former revolutionaries turned politicians—­against a Catholic Church unwilling to accept the political and cultural changes wrought by revolution. Thousands of Catholics rebelled. They fought, killed, and died in the name of Christ, all to force the government to change its laws, which prohibited religious liberty. For Sofía, a self-­proclaimed pacifist, it meant perseverance, practicing her faith in private homes, and struggling to keep her new liberal arts college going.

Today, many Americans and Europeans have forgotten the Cristero War. But in the 1920s and 1930s the religious conflict in Mexico made international headlines.3 The Cristero War was Mexican Catholicism’s entrée to global notoriety. And in this too, Sofía del Valle would play a role.

After the Cristero War, peace visited Mexico. But the resparking of religious conflict in the 1930s inaugurated the next period of Sofía’s life—­peripatetic travel. For the next three decades she found herself in Rome, Paris, and Washington dc. But her journeys weren’t only in xx Prologue

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great capitals. She traveled through Mexico’s pueblos and cities; she visited Havana, Des Moines, and Warsaw and scores of cities and towns in between. Her job was fundraising and raising awareness of the plight of Mexican Catholics. Sofía del Valle—­not a bishop, a priest, or nun, but a single woman—­became the leading spokesperson for the Mexican Catholic Church in the United States and Europe.

When Sofía del Valle wasn’t traveling, she led a Catholic association for young women in Mexico. It had only 8 members in 1926; by 1942 it had 102,491, and by 1960 it had 110,000. Sofía seemed to show up everywhere. In Vatican circles several popes over her lifetime knew her by name. For a time, she served as Latin America’s sole member on the leadership council of the International Union of Catholic Women’s Leagues, an organization that, by 1939, represented 25 million women. In the United States millions heard information she provided about Mexico on a well-­known radio show, hosted by Father Charles Coughlin, America’s first right-­wing radio personality. She appeared on the front page of the New York Times as a supposed secret agent of the Mexican clergy in the United States. Her female friends and acquaintances were on the A-­list of famous Catholics, including Dorothy Day and Maria von Trapp (of Sound of Music fame). There’s even some evidence that she met Mother Teresa. Catholic women like Sofía were developing a global vision at the same time as literary, feminist, socialist, and civil rights movements. The collective portrait reveals a new model of piety and activism for Catholic women: publicly confident and culturally up-­ to-­date, intellectually driven, professionally trained and accomplished.

And more important still, these Catholic women developed careers as individuals. They weren’t merely complements to famous men.

By the 1950s and 1960s Sofía’s work went in new directions, in education and economic development primarily, with the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (unesco) and the Alliance for Progress. Sofía’s work, she believed, was always Catholic, even if, increasingly, her work took her outside of Catholic organizations. In retirement, after 1972, she devoted her time to social service organizations, many of them interfaith groups, and some with feminist leadership. Sofía died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1982.

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Between these boldly sketched lines there are the finer details that often don’t make it into the historian’s portrait. There’s a story of family and heartache; of memory and misremembering. There’s a story of love and celibacy and what it felt like to choose. There are missions and tests, voyages and returns.

Sofía’s life in sketch is not enough. Her story demands a retelling.

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Unearthing Sofía del Valle’s documents in the Vatican sparked my imagination. I knew that the Catholic Church experienced momentous transformations during the twentieth century. Many of those changes bracketed Sofía’s own story, shaping the contours of her life. In the same year of Sofía’s birth (1891), Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, the Catholic Church’s first clear articulation of a mission to help solve working-­class poverty through organized activism. The document represented a “call-­to-­arms” against both state socialism and laissez faire capitalism. It motivated the laity to develop a Catholic “third way,” a middle path between the two systems. The century saw Catholic activists become increasingly involved in missions to peasants, urban workers, and the poor. Women like Sofía took on a pronounced role as leaders in social and missionary work—­not just in Mexico, but around the globe. The Catholic Church responded—­perhaps reacted might be a better word—­to revolution, communism, and fascism. Incipient ecumenical relations with Protestants, Muslims, and Jews developed, albeit slowly, resulting in increased introspection, especially in postwar Europe. A landmark council, known as Vatican II (1962–­65), retooled the very definition of what characterized the church. It had been conceived as an unassailable hierarchy of men; the council redefined it as the Pilgrim People of God, composed of all the faithful.

De te fabula narratur . . . about you the story is told.

Through Sofía’s life we can see a world. And women like Sofía stood at its center. Women like Sofía carried the Catholic faith through the Cristero era, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the building of a new world order. Her biography is a prism for the transformations in twentieth-­century Catholicism. xxii Prologue

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Sofía’s story uncovers how Catholic women became creative agents in shaping twentieth-­century Catholicism. Worldwide, ordinary Catholics—­especially women—­led the church in new ways in the twentieth century. An increased focus on social justice, lay organizing, and female activism didn’t suddenly appear in the 1960s. Catholics like Sofía del Valle seeded these transformations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Sofía’s life shows the remarkable rise of Latin America onto a global stage. The twentieth century saw a shift in population, and eventually power, from the Global North to the Global South.5 Almost half of the world’s Catholics now live in Latin America. The election of Pope Francis in 2013, the first pope from the region, reveals the surprising inversion of power. North America and Europe were at one time the center of global Catholicism. That is no longer the case. There are now more Catholics in Latin America than the total population of Western Europe combined. Catholicism in Latin America has become a sustaining force for the global church. Latin American activism, devotion, and charisma define the church of the present and will shape the church of the future.

Bridges and borders both make appearances in our story. Religion was a bridge connecting people and ideas across borders. Shared religious devotion, gender norms, and organizational networks linked activists across national frontiers. What Sofía’s story evokes is the search for home amid rapid social and cultural change. She was a devout Catholic seeking a place in a revolutionary society, a single woman searching for a role in a male-­driven religious institution, a Mexican looking for solidarity with American and European Catholics. She lived at a time when—­even in the 1920s and 1930s—­technology and communication were challenging the borders nations constructed. Travel, migration, culture, business, and even religious activism were just some of the transnational (or border-­challenging) features of that century. Understanding how a Catholic woman such as Sofía del Valle encountered those features before the 1970s provides a greater perspective on our own increasingly interconnected world. International links were changing Catholicism long before our own digital age.

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And yet, for all the important cross-­border interconnection, nationalism still mattered. A key supporting cast member in our story is the Mexico Sofía knew and experienced. Her Mexico was in a process of reconstruction in the aftermath of the twentieth century’s first great social revolution. At the very core of Sofía’s motivation for action lay a love for that Mexico, to see Catholicism vindicated as a true wellspring of Mexicanidad, Mexican identity. Told through her eyes, the story of Mexico-­in-­the-­world was always a Catholic story, one of hope, trial, and redemption, despite the winding roads that Providence seemed to have marked out for her nation.

And Sofía’s journey says something about America’s own religious evolution. Mexicans, and those of Mexican descent, have always been a part of America’s religious landscape. Today, Latino Catholics in the United States have come to make up a growing majority of the most active and dynamic faith communities in the country. The vibrancy of these communities—­just like the vibrancy of Sofía’s life—­was made richer through cross-­cultural exchanges. If America is an immigrant nation, and all the better for it, then Christianity, too, in America is all the better when building bridges than when guarding borders.

Sofía’s story is told not through the eyes of bishops or popes, nor prominent Catholic men from Europe or the United States, but through a little-­known woman from Mexico. History can be made in the appendix as well. Sofía’s story begins in Mexico City. The year is 1934.

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