CARRERA, RAFAEL. - President of the Republic of Guatemala, b. in Guatemala on 24 Oct. 1814, d. there on 14 Apr. 1865. The son of an Indian and a black woman, he received no education and at first worked as a cattle herder. In 1838, having put himself at the head of the rebels, he besieged and conquered Guatemala. In 1847 he had himself elected president of the Republic, which he declared independent, an act that definitively put an end to the United States of Central America. C. knew how to win the sympathies of England, and served as mediator in the conflict that arose between the president of Honduras, Guardiola, and the ecclesiastical authority. In 1854 he was elected president for life. He readmitted the Jesuits to Guatemala, from where they had been banished almost a century earlier, and on 7 Oct. 1852 concluded with the Holy See a highly favorable concordat by which Catholicism was declared the religion of the State.

Bibliography3 works

BIBL.: Anon., s. v. in Enc. Eur. Am., X, pp. 1325-26; H. Bancroft, History of Central America, III, San Francisco 1886, passim; J. Schmidlin, Papstgeschichte der neuesten Zeit, II, Munich 1934, p. 154. The text of the concordat is in Raccolta di concordati su materie ecclesiastiche tra la S. Sede e le autorità civili, edited by A. Mercati, Rome 1919, p. 810 ff.

Silvio Furlani

@incollection{ec3_carrera_rafael, author = {Furlani, Silvio}, title = {Carrera, rafael}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {III}, pages = {935}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1949}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/carrera-rafael} }

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Carrera, Rafael

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