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Like the precarious colonial state demeaningly referred to as "Espana la Boba," the Dominican Catholic Church of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries endured the Caribbean ramifications of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This onslaught included the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, the protracted and bloody revolution in St. Domingue, disruptions in international trade, and invasions by Haiti in 1801 and 1805.(1) Both the colonial state and the colonial church were further undermined by the declaration of Dominican independence in December 1821. Only weeks into Dominican independence, twelve thousand troops under the command of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the island, fulfilling the long-held Haitian goal of unifying the island under Haitian rule.(2) Although considerably weakened, the Dominican church survived as the single truly national institution in the sense that it retained influence throughout the Dominican territory. The church was also national in providing a central element in Dominican elite culture: fervent Catholicism. Thus it was not coincidental that clerics gravitated to the heart of the Dominican struggle for liberation and that the church continued to play a major role in defining political alignments during the forty years following Dominican independence.
This article will examine the complex relations between the Dominican clergy and the state during three distinct phases: the First Republic (1844-1861), the period of Spanish annexation (1861-1865), and the first decade and a half of the Second Republic (1865-1879). My contention is that while the political leadership (mainly caudillos Pedro Santana and Buenaventura Baez) flip-flopped in their political stances according to which way the geopolitical winds were blowing, the Catholic Church remained a bastion of Dominican nationality, which it sought to define on the basis of religious purity, anti-Haitianism, and Europhilia. Hence close ties with the church became critical for the survival of any political regime during the convulsed middle decades in the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic.
HAITIAN OCCUPATION AND THE FIRST REPUBLIC
Perhaps no sector of Dominican society endured deeper losses during the twenty-two-year Haitian occupation (1822-1844) than the Catholic Church.(3) Boyer nationalized land belonging to the church and its religious orders and abolished censos and capellanias to which Archbishop Pedro Valera had been personally entitled.(4) The new Haitian regime also stopped paying...