The history of church-state relations in Mexico has been marked by mutual suspicion, guerrilla warfare, cautious overtures and now, after a lengthy period of glasnost, by mutual understanding.
The suspicion arose from the Catholic Church's historical backing for conservative political forces, with unconditional support given to Porfirio Diaz, a brutal dictator who ruled the country from 1874 to 1910.
The Mexican revolution swept away the Diaz regime and took revenge on the church, denying it all legal standing. Mexico's 1917 constitution guaranteed that public education would be secular, while clergy were forbidden from voting, owning property or even wearing their garments in public.
The Catholic Church rebelled against the restrictions in 1925, as bands of Catholic peasants, the cristeros, fought government troops and militia, while churches were closed and the clergy forced into hiding. The defeated church requested a truce in 1929 and the government gradually relaxed its anti-clerical restrictions.
Pope John Paul II's first visit to Mexico, in 1979, began a period of rapprochement, which was interrupted in the 1980s when the church identified itself with the opposition National Action Party, (PAN), which gained political ground against the ruling party. The popular progressive church also earned the enmity of the state, as priests and bishops organised militant social movements in Oaxaca and Chiapas, demanding social justice and an end to state repression.
The church hierarchy quietly began negotiating for a return to its privileged status in the 1990s, publicly supporting the government of president Carlos Salinas in return for reforms.
President Salinas's term (198894) coincided with a sharp decline in support for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI), which searched for new allies in an effort to restore battered credibility. The Catholic Church faced a similar crisis, as hundreds of thousands of Catholics converted to evangelical sects, lessening church influence over the nation.
President Salinas invited church authorities to his inauguration ceremony in 1988, signalling a symbolic thaw in church-state relations. By the time the Pope began his third visit to Mexico in 1993, the ruling party had approved the landmark "Law of Religious Associations and Public Cult", restoring the Catholic Church's legal status.
Seven years later, however, the religious laws are still awaiting their formal place on the statute books, a delay caused by the need for "consultation" with all Mexico's churches, according to the government's Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs, Mr Guillermo Jimenez Morales.
Leaders of Mexico's Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches expressed opposition to the constitutional changes approved by the Salinas government, fearing that the Catholic Church planned to bolster its position as the country's semi-official religious denomination.
In May 1993, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas was shot dead in a shoot-out at Guadalajara Airport, apparently mistaken for a drug trafficker. Speculation on church contact with drug-traffickers reached a high point in 1995 when Papal Nuncio Dr Jeronimo Prigione admitted that two leading drug traffickers had visited him at his home in Mexico City, supposedly looking for advice.
Improved church-state relations have had a negative impact on non-Catholic denominations: "Not being Catholic in Mexico means being an outsider and a threat to the established order," concluded one US report into church-state relations.
Church-state history is repeating itself in Chiapas, south-east Mexico, where President Zedillo denounced "theologians of violence" fomenting rebellion among the Indian people, a reference to Catholic Church involvement in the ongoing Zapatista rebellion.
Mexico's Interior Ministry has expelled a dozen foreign priests, churches have been closed by paramilitaries linked to the ruling party, while local bishop Dr Samuel Ruiz survived an attempt on his life in 1997.
The crucial difference between the prohibition years in the 1920s and the anti-clerical actions in Chiapas in 1999 is that the church hierarchy and the government speak as one, with church leaders also condemning Bishop Ruiz's pastoral work.
Mexico's evolving pattern of church-state relations has developed into an alliance at the top and alienation at the grass roots, as poor Catholics find little to cheer about in their spiritual or temporal leaders.