Father Fernando Arturo de Meriño y Ramírez (January 9, 1833 – August 20, 1906) was a Dominican priest and politician. He served as the 29th President of the Dominican Republic from September 1, 1880, until September 1, 1882. He served as the President of Chamber of Deputies of the Dominican Republic in 1878 and 1883. He was later made an archbishop.
Origins Meriño was born in Antoncí, in the area of Ozama on January 9, 1833, during the time of Haitian rule in the Dominican Republic.
His parents were livestock owners, known as hateros. His father, Pedro de Meriño, was a descendant of Canarian colonists who immigrated the 18th century.
At the age of 11 he moved to San Carlos – a town near Santo Domingo – to further his education. He has reported these early years were surrounded by the deprivation. (Buenaventura Báez, in response to an attack that Meriño directed at him at the end of 1865, commented angrily that he had never had to sell pigeons on the streets in his childhood). Meriño was admitted to the first class of the Seminary of Saint Thomas of Aquinas, founded by Archbishop Tomás de Portes Infante in 1848. Among his companions, some would later influence ecclesiastical circles. The new seminarian benefited from the protection of the archbishop, who welcomed him into his own home and got him a meager stipend in exchange for services in the cathedral. His education continued with attendance at chairs at the San Buenaventura school – created by President Báez during his first administration. Also at this school he made friends with students who would later rise to other top positions, such as Manuel de Jesús Galván. He was ordained on April 24, 1856, and was sent to serve in Neiba.
Political involvement Criticism of Pedro Santana During those years, General Pedro Santana, who had replaced Buenaventura Báez, held the presidency of the first Dominican Republic. While one of the ingredients of the Báez presidency had been the establishment of cordial relations with the priesthood, Santana did not care to keep them appeased - forcing Archbishop Portes to swear the constitution, considered by him to be atheistic for stating the independence of the State. The confrontation reached such levels that the archbishop lost his mind and had to be replaced by a coadjutor. Meriño was a well known critic of Santana
He was a deputy to the Constituent Assembly of Moca, which drafted the progressive Constitution of that time. Under Santana's protectorate, Meriño was in charge of the Cathedral and Seminary of the City of Santo Domingo by 1858. With the death of Archbishop Portes and, later, that of Father Gaspar Hernández, the way was paved for Meriño to become the head of the church. On February 25, 1859, at the age of 26, he was appointed head of the Catholic Church in the Dominican Republic. Two years later, at the age of 28, in March 1861, Pope Pius IX appointed him Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Santo Domingo.
Soon Santana reciprocated the enthusiasm of the cathedral parish priest by promoting him as apostolic delegate, after consultation with the bishop of Curaçao, considered the closest to the country. The appointment was ratified by the Vatican at the first opportunity, an expression of the vacuum left by Portes' absence and the control that the government held. In the provision for this purpose, Meriño received power equivalent to that of the bishops, which placed him with barely 26 years, as the leading figure of the Church in the country.
The priest's vocation for power soon became evident, both over the ecclesiastical apparatus and in politics. Since then, it can be assured, he harbored the goal of consolidating leadership through his elevation to archiepiscopal dignity. It would take many years to achieve the goal, but he persistently linked himself to national politics, always with the aim of strengthening his position in the clergy. In this purpose lay the foundation of the symbiosis between the priest and the politician who would accompany him until his elevation to the prelature in 1885.
It is symptomatic that the first text reproduced in the compilation of one of his works, published in 1906, was the article that appeared in 1859 in La Flor del Ozama, “What is the Catholic Priesthood and how it influences the customs of the people.” In it he justifies the interference of the clergy in politics, in the name of the values he embodied of self-sacrifice, humility and preaching of fraternal union. More importantly, he asserted that the priesthood, due to its connection with the divine, had exclusive control of the truth, for which it was consubstantiated with the values more illustrious, who implicitly placed him above the politician:
Such positions makes it understandable that his relationship with Santana did not place him in the condition of a puppet, so he looked for ways to consolidate a personal position that would allow him to assert his rights. political conceptions, since then of nationalist orientation. Gradually, he would gradually distance himself from the president. Already at that time, Meriño was convinced that the destiny of the Dominican people had to be associated with national independence and a political order that guaranteed individual freedoms. It is probable that, thanks to his intelligence, he was the one who understood most acutely among the priests that the ecclesiastical institution should put themselves at the service of the national cause and get rid of their conservative burden. This position was expressed in one of his first sermons, as apostolic vicar, delivered on February 27, 1860. He took advantage of the anniversary to praise patriotism and advocate for unity among Dominicans. Both themes questioned the orientations of Santana, whose annexationist position was known and whose egocentrism was above any other consideration. Meriño continued to lead the ecclesiastical institution perhaps because Santana judged that such criticism lacked relevance.
Against the annexation When it became public that Santana had decided to annex the Dominican Republic to Spain, Meriño decided to join the open opposition. He apparently took steps behind the scenes to try to prevent the annexation, and even tried to dissuade Santana in an interview they both held. Unfortunately it was too late, and on March 18, 1861, the inhabitants of the capital contemplated the spectacle of lowering their tricolor flag to be replaced by that of the Kingdom of Spain. After the annexation was completed on March 18, 1861, Meriño criticized Santana and the annexation from the pulpit. This forced him to leave the country in April 1862. He moved to Spain and then to Puerto Rico. Later, he was in Venezuela and then in Cuba. Wherever he stayed during his exile, he wrote denunciations of the annexation. Once the Republic was restored, he returned in 1865 and was elected President of the Constituent Assembly. Although lacking the strength to prevent the annexation of 1861, Meriño decided to openly oppose it. A few days before the consummation of the infamy, on February 27, 1861, he gave a speech, in the presence of the tyrant, directed against selfishness, an instinct denounced as the cause of all the evils that afflicted the Republic. He started from a theological consideration to propose how contradictory passions had developed from the moment “the first man fell from the grace of God” and “all miseries invaded him.”
In that piece he put his intellectual capacity and skills into play. oratories. The prelate's cultural training was biased by the theological approach and by a rhetorical style that emphasized brilliance in expression, but he had clear considerations about the Dominican reality, which allowed him to integrate theology with liberalism. However, he did not offer an original interpretation of Dominican history. His political oratory, as brilliant as it became, was limited to reiterating accepted principles. Regarding religious issues, he did not stop repeating conventional notions of Catholicism. Likewise, other types of writing lacked acuity, such as a geography manual, limited to a descriptive plane. In any case, at the time, when a small body of intellectuals was just being formed, His verb provoked fascination by vigorously evoking saving principles. It was what he did to elliptically attack Santana's aspirations to control everything, seen as a product of the passion of selfishness:
Several elements can be derived from this complaint, which prefigures the global nature of its principles. On the one hand, it supports all consideration of the historical process in an origin derived from divine will. That is, his philosophy of history is teleological and is aimed at endorsing a modern concept of freedom. For this reason, he concludes by repudiating the conservative vision that equates the modern and revolutionary spirit with “concern and fanaticism.” He assimilates selfishness to the spheres of power “when they neglect the serious interests of the community that has placed its trust in them by only thinking about their personal usefulness; when they see the hungry crowd and thousands of citizens reduced to misery, taking little care of such misfortunes.” He concluded by contrasting the selfishness, then prevalent, with the patriotism that the Trinitarios had shown in 1844 to lay the foundations for national achievement:
The dictator's reaction to the priest's proclamation was immediate. Santana tried to force the vicar to recant, which he categorically rejected. Santana just isolated him, protected by the security provided by his authoritarian preeminence, ratified by the annexationist order. After a year, despite the fact that Meriño remained calm, Santana, in his capacity as Spanish captain general, decided to deport him to help pave the way for a Spanish prelate. Meriño remained abroad during the following years, while the armed struggle for the reestablishment of national sovereignty was carried out. He calculated, surely based on his personal interests, that it was appropriate to abide by the Vatican's decision to support the annexationist regime.
This attitude contrasted with the courageous previous criticism, although in private, he continued to weigh Santana negatively and with considerable reservations about the annexationist regime. But the interference was evident again of personal convenience over their political orientation. When the insurrection began in Cibao, on August 16, 1863, in a letter to Carlos Nouel from Puerto Rico, Meriño condemned it. Furthermore, months later, while in Spain, he decided to accept the new order, swearing before the Spanish flag. He met with Queen Isabella II and prominent politicians of the metropolis. He even considered returning to serve the newly appointed Archbishop Bienvenido Monzón, representative of Spanish rule and a retrograde stance. He surely calculated that with such a step he would be in a position to recover hierarchical positions within the ecclesiastical apparatus. He himself admitted that in the metropolis he had dedicated himself to resolving his “business.” However, distrustful, the monarchy did not send him back to his homeland, but to Puerto Rico, giving him a canonry in the cathedral of that island. He remained in that position for two years, completely oblivious to the ongoing Dominican Restoration War.
At the beginning of 1865, when the decree of the Cortes was made public