 Though liberals and conservatives could agree on the need to protect freedom of religious worship, as sometimes they did, they held opposing views regarding the sorts of institutional supports, if any, that the State ought to provide to the dominant Catholic Church. Liberals favored the abolition of the church’s privileges and immunities in the name of legal equality, various degrees of exclusion of the church from official schooling, the establishment of a civil registry and civil matrimony, the possibility of divorce, and the secularization of hospitals and cemeteries. In the name of economic progress and freedom, liberals sometimes advocated the confiscation of church property not directly related to religious worship in order to make it available for in the market. In places where the conflict with the church was most profound liberals pushed for the complete separation between church and state as well as the “neutrality” of the state in religious matters. The latter meant that the state should not explicitly favor or disfavor religion as such. This liberal position, though clearly anti-clerical, did not necessarily entail hostility to religion. Though some liberals undoubtedly held anti-Catholic sentiments, the attack against the church was political insofar as it aimed to place the latter under the authority of the state. Conservatives, in turn, defended the privileges traditionally enjoyed by the church, which included establishment and the church’s alleged duty to spread religious morality through official schooling. They also opposed the confiscation of church property. Though some conservatives favored the church from authentic conviction (such as Miguel Antonio Caro in New Granada, the most prominent conservative intellectual there), many of them did so from instrumental considerations. Conservative politicians did not wish to antagonize what could be a useful ally in the maintenance of order. This pragmatic view was Diego Portales’, the architect of Chilean political stability (Collier 2003), and apparently also Lucas Alamán’s, who famously referred to Catholicism as “the only link that binds all Mexicans when all others have been broken” (Safford 1987: 100). In the long run, those regimes that contemporized with the church indeed proved to be more stable than the liberal ones that antagonized it.