Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza

Eulogio Gregorio Clemente Gillow y Zavala was the first archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Antequera, Oaxaca located in Oaxaca de Juarez, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was the key cleric in President Porfirio Díaz's policy of conciliation with the Roman Catholic Church, which kept the anticlerical articles of the liberal Constitution of 1857 in place but suspended their implementation.

Life Born at Puebla, Mexico in 1841, he was the member of a wealthy and socially prominent family, the son of an English Catholic from Lancashire, Thomas Gillow, who immigrated to Mexico in 1819, and María Zavala y Gutiérrez, who inherited the title of the Marchioness of Selva Nevada. Originally Thomas Gillow was a jeweler, but he became a successful agricultural businessman, managing his wife's estates, and keenly interested in improving farming methods in Mexico. In 1851, Gillow father and son attended The Great Exhibition in London; and young Eulogio remained in England for education, attending the Jesuit college of Stonyhurst. He had impressed Pius XI and returned to Rome to serve as the pope's private chamberlain.

During the First Vatican Council, Gillow was a theological adviser to the archbishop of Oaxaca. The relationship between Gillow and Díaz was the key to easing the Church-State conflict in Mexico. When the widowed Díaz married his second wife, seventeen-year-old Carmen Romero Rubio, the daughter of one of his key advisers, he asked Gillow preside, but Gillow suggested that the archbishop of Mexico and prominent supporter of the Second Mexican Empire to do the honors. Symbolically it was powerful, demonstrating the liberal Díaz's respect for the Church and the easing of the position of a prominent conservative cleric. which Díaz was pleased with. Gillow and Díaz exchanged expensive and symbolic gifts, a pastoral ring with a large emerald to Gillow, a jeweled representation of Napoleon's victories to Díaz. Gillow's post as archbishop in Díaz's home state had a number of benefits, due to his political and ecclesiastic connections. As such he worked to get a railway connection between Mexico City and Oaxaca and worked to open schools and preserve a number of the city's colonial churches.

During the Mexican Revolution, his estate in Puebla was seized by Constitutionalist forces. Gillow went into exile in Los Angeles, but returned to Mexico just prior to his death in 1922.

Writings Apuntes históricos sobre la idolatría y la introducción del cristianismo en la diócesis de Oaxaca. Reminiscencias del Ilmo. y Rmo. Sr. Dr. D. Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza, Arzobispo de Antequera (Oaxaca). Four editions published between 1920 and 1921. Actas y Decretos del Concilio I de Antequera celebrado en Oaxaca, del día 8 de diciembre de 1892 al día 12 de marzo de 1893. Primera carta pastoral del Illmo. señor doctor don Eulogio G. Gillow en la que saluda al clero y fieles de la diócesis que se le ha confiado Informe rendido á la Sociedad agrícola mexicana, sobre las ventajas que resultan á México de cultivar los cereales con la maquinaria agrícola norte-Americana, 1880.