Abstract

RAMIREZ BONILLA, Laura Camila. The Moral Radar of the 50’s. The National Commission of Moralization against the Media in Mexico. Hist. graf [online]. 2018, n.51, pp.267-292. ISSN 1405-0927.

The aim of this article is to characterize the Comisión Nacional de Moralización del Ambiente (CNMA), as one of the main organs of social control and activism in the public sphere of the Catholic Church in Mexico in the middle of the 20th Century. The study emphasizes the position and actions that this entity, a subsidiary of Mexican Catholic Action, developed against mass media. The context is not naïve: It is a time in which, for the first time, the main media industries of the century converge: press, cinema, radio, and television. This paper poses questions around the internal organization, values and projects of the CNMA, its interest in mass media and how it sought to neutralize or influence it. Thus, it is argued that, from anti-communist and anti-modern militancy and the distrust of the secular State, morality and the search for its control became alternative - and effective - spaces for Catholic players to participate actively in the public sphere in the fifties.

Keywords : moral; Catholicism; media; secular organizations; modernization.

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