Ecuador's 1869 constitution makes Catholicism the religion…

Ecuador's 1869 constitution makes Catholicism the religion of the State and requires that both candidates and voters be Catholic.

Gabriel García Moreno is the father of Ecuadorian conservatism and no doubt the most controversial figure in the nation's history, condemned by Liberal historians as Ecuador's worst tyrant but exalted by Conservatives as the nation's greatest nation-builder.

In the end, both appraisals may be accurate; the man who possibly saved Ecuador from disintegration in 1859 and then ruled the nation with an iron fist for the subsequent decade and a half is, in fact, an extremely complicated personality.

Born and raised under modest circumstances in Guayaquil, he had studied in Quito, where he had married into the local aristocracy, then had traveled to Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutionary uprisings and studied under the eminent Catholic theologians of the day.

García Moreno’s successor had been deposed by the Liberals in 1867, but two years later he is reelected.

While the politics of his age are extremely convoluted and murky, that he is elected to a second term clearly indicates his popular appeal, both with the Catholic Church and with the masses.

His vigorous support of universal literacy and education based on the French model is both controversial and bold.

Personally pious (he attends Mass, daily, as well as visiting the Blessed Sacrament; he receives the Eucharist every Sunday—a rare practice before Pope Pius X—and is active in a sodality), he makes it one of the first duties of his government to promote and support Catholicism.

Catholicism is the official religion of Ecuador, but by the terms of a new Concordat, the State's power over appointment of bishops inherited from Spain is eliminated at García Moreno's insistence.