Religion: I Am a Believer

Akin to the feelings of the persecuted early Christians when Constantine suddenly announced his conversion was the feeling of Mexico’s long-harassed Roman Catholics when President-elect General Manuel Avila Camacho proclaimed several weeks ago: Soy creyente (“I am a believer”).

With less than a month to go before his inauguration on Dec. i, Avila Camacho’s confession of faith has helped to minimize the moral support given to his conservative rival, General Juan Andreu Almazan, by Mexican Catholics.

Like Henry IV, who believed France was worth a Mass, Avila Camacho may have believed that Mexico was worth a confession of faith. But whatever its motive, it was the most reassuring phrase Mexican Catholics had heard in a generation, for it foretold an end to an era of tribulation. Already Catholics have openly begun to rebuild ruined churches. Soon to take place at Campeche is a Eucharistic Congress, including outside processions (although priests are legally forbidden to wear clerical garb in public)—things which have not been allowed in Mexico for 30 years.

Mexican politicos have long been anti-Catholic in public, even though their wives, mothers and children often were not.

Last week by the score they proclaimed their renewed adherence to Catholicism.

Cartoonists had a field day. One drew a man raising his hat as he walks past a church (says his wife: “Don’t do that; they might think you’re a Senator”). Another showed a maid telling an early-morning caller, “Oh, no, the Senator’s not in; he went to seven o’clock Mass.” Mexico’s famed, shovel-mouthed comic, Cantinflas, built a skit around a gun-toting politico trading his pistol in for a rosary, added “They’re buying holy water instead of tequila now.” As with Spain, Catholic liberals have been disinclined to blame all Catholicism’s trouble in Mexico on leftist politicians. For more than 300 years after Cortes conquered Mexico, the Church had enormous wealth and influence, did not always use them spiritually. In his 1937 encyclical to Mexico Pope Pius XI put his finger on one trouble when he wrote that its clergy needed “sanctification,” urged the necessity for an efficient priesthood. To Mexican Catholics the Pope gave sound advice: “Be good to the poor, to workers, to Indians; promote application of the principles of justice and charity; eliminate abuses, at the same time guarding against violent changes which only would cause harm instead of good.” But only in Russia has the Church been under more systematic political fire than in Mexico since the dictatorship of Plutarco Elias Calles. Churches were burned and looted, their bricks used to make roads and their bells melted to make statues of revolutionary leaders. Images were piled in the streets and burned as “fetishes.” Priests were hounded, sometimes shot. Church services were forbidden and homes where they were secretly held were raided.

Catholicism’s lot in Mexico has eased slightly of late years. Under its lean, dark, learned Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez y Rodriguez, a friend of President Lazaro Cardenas, the Church has been law-abiding, has seen one restriction after another lifted or lapsed. But still in effect are such cynically anti-religious provisos as the State of Tabasco’s law permitting any priest to officiate provided he is married.

There are still no seminaries in Mexico (priests are trained over the border in Texas and New Mexico). Church buildings still legally belong to the State, and only one priest is allowed to officiate for every 50,000 parishioners. Worst of all from Catholicism’s standpoint. Catholic moppets are forbidden religious education, must be sent to socialist-slanted State schools.

Unlike the bulk of his fellow politicos, Avila Camacho has always been a pretty good Catholic, goes to church on occasion.

From the time of his nomination (he was originally picked by the conservative, military wing of the P. R. M.—Cardenas’ Party of the Mexican Revolution), he has swung steadily Right, repudiated Communist support. Religious restraints on the Church are going. Whether the Church will win its fight against secular education is not so certain, though there are signs that it is making headway.