LATIN AMERICA: Eternal Struggle

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. . . . Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven.”*(MATTHEW XVI: 18, 19.) Achille Ambrogio Damiano Ratti, Pope Pius XI, successor to the authority of Peter, brooded last week at ‘the Vatican upon what forces he should loose against Plutarco Elias Calles, President of Mexico, arch foe and suppressor of non-Mexican-born clericals of every creed (TIME, August 2, et ante). His Holiness may have reflected that the Roman Catholic Church has withstood down the ages onslaughts from the civil power of almost every predominantly Catholic state. When Vittorio Emanuele II contracted the temporal sway of the Pope within the Holy See (1870) he but served to enhance the spiritual prestige of the Papacy. Despite the Kulturkampf the Catholic party is still one. of the most potent in Germany. Frenchmen have not so completely disestablished Catholicism as not to heed an occasional whisper from the Vatican. Who is Calles, what is Mexico that the immemorially potent Papacy should fear it may not triumph in the end? Centuries of Strife. During the four centuries of Catholic penetration into Mexico the Roman Catholic Church, abetted by and abetting Spain, extinguished virtually all other religious cults before Mexico won independence of Spain in 1824. It remained for a full-blooded Mexican Indian, Benito Pablo Juarez —after whom Benito Mussolini was christened—to raise the “Reform War” of 1855-61, the pan-Mexican spirit of which was infused into the antiPapal constitution of 1857 and finally forged into the present constitution of 1917 which specifically declares: “Only a Mexican by birth may be a minister of any religious creed in Mexico.” Juarez, while president, not only repelled the attempts of Napoleon III to set up Maximilian of Austria as a Catholic emperor in Mexico (see BELGIUM, p. 13) but banished the Papal Nuncio and all Roman Catholic bishops from Mexico, by decrees if possible more arbitrary than those of President Calles. Yet Juarez died of apoplexy (1872) and the Church of Rome, deathless, unsleeping, recovered its preponderant ascendancy in Mexico during the more than quarter-century-long presidencies of Porfirio Diaz (1877-80, 1884-1911), largely, it is touted, through the good offices of his two pro-Catholic wives, the second, luscious, youthful, blooming. Since then the governments of Mexico have been too unstable to combat the Vatican seriously, until the rise-of President Calles, backed by a resolute, anti-Catholic agrarian-laborite support of Communistic ilk. For the present the Vicar of Christ has contented himself with ordering prayers throughout Catholic Christendom for the supremacy of the Church. His Holiness knows that, though he will go some day to his eternal rest, another and another pope will rise to continue the steady pressure of Catholicism upon the governments of Mexico. If Calles is a second Juarez the Papacy can bide the coming of a second Diaz. Events of a most crucial week in the eternal struggle: Race against Time. During the last hours before the Calles decrees expelling the clergy from their churches came into effect last week Catholic prelates in Mexico continued their recent “race against time” to baptize, confirm and marry as many of the faithful as possible. At the great Cathedral in Mexico City, directly opposite the presidential palace, the Most Reverend Archbishop Jose Mora y del Rio, 72, performed 5,000 confirmations in one day, then swooned in a dead faint. Reviving, he defied the frenzied protests of the lesser clergy that he must rest, tottered back to the altar, continued to confirm until midnight. At Tabasco Bishop Diaz performed similar prodigies. Throughout Mexico the Catholic clergy were instructed by their bishops to cut the marriage ceremony to its bare essentials, to marry couples in batches. Masses were said in most Catholic churches every half hour, and high mass celebrated in the last moments before the decree took effect. Pilgrimages. Mexican Catholics of every ilk—blanketed Indians, burly herdsmen, Parisian-gowned women of wealth—made a last pilgrimage, barefoot, last week to the famed Shrine of the Virgin in the Cathedral at Guadalupe. The more tenderfooted, their feet lacerated and swollen, arrived to prostrate themselves before the shrine in a state bordering on hysteria. Day and night they prayed, jostled one another into a steaming crush in which eight babies died. At lesser shrines throughout Mexico the throngs were smaller, not less hysterical. Protestant Laissez-faire. The Protestant clergy in Mexico, habitually concerned through force of circumstances not with the upholding of a religious empire but with individual religious teaching among Mexicans, displayed an attitude of laissez-faire toward the activities of the Calles Administration last week. Resident Bishop George A. Miller of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Mexico issued last week perhaps the most militantly anti-Catholic statement made by a Protestant dignitary upon the situation: “That no religious persecution is in progress in Mexico, is proved by the fact that this present Mexican situation applies to Protestants exactly the same as to Catholics and is being impartially enforced on all alike, the only difference being that Protestants are obeying the law of the land while the Catholics are raising a cry of religious persecution in order to gain sympathy for their non-existent wrongs.” Violence. The Calles decrees went into effect last week amid such feeble counter demonstrations as would have excited no interest as “ordinary riots.” Newsgatherers felt obliged to report as grave the explosion of the gasoline tank of a Ford sedan in front of the Church of the Sacred Heart, at Mexico City, just as that edifice was being closed. Graver still was the dispersal of a crowd before the Church of San Rafael by firemen who played a fire hose and police-men who hurled brickbats and shot two men and one woman—none fatally. Most grave was the shooting and killing by policemen of a sacristan and two bystanders when the Church of San Bartolomeo was occupied. Despatches indicated that sporadic rioting throughout Mexico probably resulted in the death of less than a score of persons. No Truce. Pious members of the Mexican Episcopate emitted an official statement saying they were willing to enter into a “reasonable truce” until a national plebiscite would express the popular attitude. Pope-baiting Calles was unimpressed. He replied curtly: “This executive has already made known its opinion regarding the religious situation . . . energy to enforce laws of this country.”

*The commission given by Christ to Peter on which according to Catholic theology, the authority of the Pope chiefly rests.