La erección de una diócesis en Costa Rica (1825-1826)

The objective of this article is to reconstruct and analyze the project for the establishment of the bishopric of Costa Rica in 1825 by the Constitutional Assembly of Costa Rica, the reasons and debates that gave rise to it, and, finally, to review the position of Friar Luis García, the Mercedarian friar who was appointed first bishop of the diocese by the state decree of September 29th. It is argued that the erection of the bishopric of Costa Rica in 1825 failed because the Costa Rican civil power ignored the jurisdictional limits between the civil power and the ecclesiastical power, and doing so created the bishopric by his own decision, through a radical legislative measure that arose in the context of broader, still unresolved discussions around the patronage and from it, around the sovereignty of the new American states and around the (re)definition of a new ecclesiastical discipline for the Catholic Church by the Latin American clergy.