Laws passed by the Haitian government in 1824 secularized the Catholic Church's lands in Santo Domingo and placed the institution under state control. Working from correspondence, pamphlets and petitions, Keane-Dawes argues that these reforms produced a new distribution of power, one that drew local communities into the workings of both secular and religious institutions.

The article also joins two bodies of scholarship that seldom meet: work on what Haitian unification did to the Church in Santo Domingo, and work on Haiti's diplomatic efforts to secure its sovereignty in the Atlantic world.

It begins with the differing church-state relationships on either side of the island and the conflict these generated after the annexation of 1822, turns to how the clergy responded to Haitian rule and to the 1824 secularization law, and closes on what the reforms meant for ordinary communities and their priests.