The Mysterious Church of the Third Order in Dolores Hidalgo

On the Dolores Hidalgo map, which you obtain from the tourist's office, depending from which direction you are coming, the Templo de la Tercera Orden, "Church of the Third Orden, is at the corners of Jalisco and Querétaro, Puebla and Jalisco, or Morelos and Jalisco. This is the insane and maddening beauty of maps in Mexico. A street name can change at each corner you come to or actually bear multiple names. I've seen many gringo tourists have a melt-down over this while trying to navigate using city maps.

The Templo de la Tercera Orden I was particularly interested in seeing because of the controversial nature of this religious order in Catholicism. We sat across the street from this church to stare at it while resting in a fine and very appealing little plaza, Jardin Compositores Dolorenses, that was not just spotlessly clean but had ample benches and trees for your comfort. You've got to admit that the designers of colonial cities understood that cities were to be planned for people first with other concerns secondary. I love that about colonial cities in this country.

The "Third Order" was a religious order within Catholicism in which "lay people" could serve like professional priests without "living in community". Men and women who could not enter the normal venue of full-time religious service could be a part of this order and wear the habit and receive the benefits from being in a religious order.

The Rule of the Third Order of St. Francis became the foundation for almost all of the Third Orders. However, once the battle for independence was won in Mexico, the victors were understandably a little gun-shy about the Catholic church's power base and the atrocities for which the new Mexicans held it responsible. A secularizing movement began.

The government took the land on which the churches stood and in some cases rendered the edifice into something more secular like a hotel or they tore down the church. It was believed in the secular arm of the then government that the Third Order could rise as a political threat since its members were thought to be Mexico's "religious right."[1]

This church was small and very reminiscent of small churches I've seen in America's Hispanic southwest. There was no sight of ostentatious gothic towers, no deeply intricate Spanish Baroque facades, nor where there scary little statues looking so abstract so as to defy description. No. This was a basic, functional, and most humble little church that you would swear to have seen in each of Hollywood's rendition of "Remember the Alamo." I immediately fell in love with the humility of this church and spent the better part of an hour on a plaza bench across the street just staring at it.

The inside of this church was as functional looking as its outside. It was very small compared to the city's other churches. It has an array of the usual pictures, statues, icons, money collection boxes, and a decent but humble little altar. We saw many in the church doing in churches what one is meant to do-praying.

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14637b.htm