anticlerical

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Anticlerical policies were those that opposed the political, economic, and social power of the Catholic Church. Nineteenth-century liberal leaders in Mexico, such as Benito Juárez, sought to curb the political power that the Catholic Church traditionally held by breaking up Church landholding and money-lending practices. Quite often, anti clerical politicians professed the Catholic faith but they believed that a separation of church and state was needed to allow the Mexican nation to prosper.