 The third way in which Mora departed from French liberalism was his anticlericalism, which was motivated by local political events. Despite his admiration for the Cádiz constitution, Mora criticized the fact that it did not abolish the special privileges enjoyed by the military and the church. With respect to the latter in particular, Mora reacted against the church’s opposition to the establishment of republican values and came to regard it as a power capable of destabilizing the republic, to subvert its laws, and to turn the mass of the population against it (Mora 1837: 66). He regarded the church as having a esprit des corps that was opposed to both the national spirit and the representative system insofar as the church sought to maintain special privileges and immunities that were contrary to civil equality. He emphasized the church’s refusal to submit to civil and criminal law, its opposition to freedom of worship as well as to freedom of thought and of the press. On his view, the church opposed these freedoms because their exercise threatened the former’s rule over consciences. In the same vein, Mora regarded the church as an obstacle to public education insofar as education was instrumental to the masses’ emancipation from priestly power (Mora 1837: 63). He also considered the church as an obstacle to colonization of scarcely populated territories in virtue of its opposition to freedom of worship. He even criticized the clergy’s celibacy, which, on his view, isolates its members from society insofar as family ties are the “primary link that binds men to society” (Mora 1837: 61). Mora advocated the confiscation of the church’s property on the grounds that the clergy was not a productive class and lacked an inclination to industrious work. In Mexico, the church was indeed the wealthiest financial agent and the largest single proprietor in the nineteenth century until most of its property was nationalized in 1859.