I was just trying to point out that the violent reaction against the Church in Mexico and Spain didn't just pop up out of nowhere as a similar reaction in this country would.
There were reasons, many quite legitimate, why so many people hated the Church in Mexico and Spain.
The repression of the common people in Mexico and Spain was far more severe than that in the American colonies which led to our revolution. Their revolutions, when they eventually came, were therefore more or less by definition far more extreme than ours.
Our military is not subject to the same laws as we are, either.
Unless I'm quite confused, an American army officer accused of murdering a civilian in Denver will be tried in CO criminal court. His military status is irrelevant in such a case. In Mexico and Spain prior to their revolutions he would have been tried before an army court and almost always set free to kill again.
Similar situations applied in Church courts.
Military justice still exists in the US, and whether a person is tried in a military or civilian court depends on a variety of factors.
The Church has always had canonical courts, but of course they were not allowed to impose certain punishments (this was one of the reasons that the State was involved in the Inquisition, since people were handed over to the State after their canonical trials). The level of jurisdiction depended upon agreements between the Vatican and the state in question.
Normally, the two functioned rather similarly: the Church did maintain “penitentiaries,” which were essentially harsh monastic jails for clergy convicted of crimes, and in certain cases would combine with the State to punish particular crimes. After the Cura Merino (a leftist activist, btw) tried to assassinate Isabel II, he was sentenced to be garroted...but only after Church officials had sliced and cut off the pads of his fingers, where he had received his priestly annointing. So sometimes this didn’t work out very well for the clergy...
The anti-clericalism in Mexico was rooted in the same ideology that drove the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions in 1848, the Paris Commune, the Communist revolutions in Russia and Spain. The French enlightenment was animated by a hatred of the Church that soon spilled into hatred of Christianity in general. Even Protestant England and America was thunderstruck by the appearance of anti-Christ in France. The English and Scottish Enlightenment had no such animus. Even Gibbon, no friend of Christianity, was horrified by the slaughter. In their desire to uproot what the Jacobins called “Feudalism”—they stopped at nothing. There was no balance in their thinking, and one can find it today even in or own country as some seek to purge the public square of Christian influence.