 The religious problem in Hispanic America was, in some regions, primarily about religious toleration and individual rights, where the liberal position regarding religion centered on the demand for freedom of religious worship. This was the case in Argentina where the local Catholic Church was relatively weak. By contrast, in some other regions, such as Mexico or Colombia, where the church was much stronger, the religious problem was more complex and not merely a matter of individual rights insofar as the church was powerful enough to destabilize the new republican governments and to challenge their legitimacy. Where it had the power to do so, the church sought to mobilize the moral religious sensibilities of the majority of the population against the attempted liberal reforms. The church opposed civil equality in order to protect its own legal privileges and immunities, rejected the freedoms of thought and of the press as threats to religious morality and clerical authority, fought against economic reforms that endangered its position as the largest landowner and wealthiest corporation, favored a form of government that mirrored its own hierarchical structure (i.e., absolute monarchism), and sought to maintain official recognition and support by the state. The challenge posed by the church to the new liberal republics combined claims to political and economic power with the defense of morality and religion. In sum, the church opposed all aspects of liberal ideology in the name of the religion of the vast majority. By contrast with France at the time, liberal Catholicism did not develop in the Americas.