Introduction to Mexico 

By 
Anna Dill Gamble 

Rev. R. A . McGowan 
and 

The Latin America Committee 

P R I C E 10 C E N T S 

T H E C A T H O L I C A S S O C I A T I O N F O R 
I N T E R N A T I O N A L P E A C E 

1312 M a s s a c h u s e t t s A v e n u e N . W . 
W a s h i n g t o n , D . C. 

1936 



^ P P R E C I A T I O N for their cooperation in 
sponsoring this report is hereby expressed 

to Fordham University, New York City, in 
their response to the Holy Father's appeal, 
"May they all unite in the peace of Christ in 
a full concord of thoughts and emotions, of 
desires and prayers, of deeds and words—the 
spoken word, the written word, the printed 
word — and then an atmosphere of genuine f 
peace, warming and beneficent, will envelop all f 
the world." 



* 

* I ''HIS is a report from the Latin America Com-
* mittee of the Catholic Association for Inter-

national Peace and is being issued as a study from 
this Committee. It was presented and discussed 
at the regular annual meeting of the organization. 
The Committee cooperated in the final form of the 
report. It was presented to the Executive Commit-
tee which ordered it published. As the process in-
dicates, this report, being the report of only one 
Committee, is not a statement from the whole 
Association. 

L A T I N A M E R I C A C O M M I T T E E 

R E V . W I L L I A M F . B L A K E S L E E , C . S . P . J O H N J . M E N G 

Chairman, ANNA DILL GAMBLE 

J O H N W . B U R K E 

CAJULOS E . CÁSTAÑEDA 

M R S . P E T E R L . C O L L I N S 

J . D E SIQUEIRA COUTXNHO 

R E V . A . C R E I G H T O N 

H E N R Y GRATTAN D O Y L E 

R E V . M O T H E R J O S E P H I N E 

E L I Z A B E T H W . L O U G H R A N 

M A R I E R . MADDEN 

R E V . J A M E S A . M A G N E R 

R E V . V I N C E N T MARINARO 

R E V . R . A . M C G O W A N 

R O S E J . M C H U G H 

E . FRANCIS M C D E V I T T 

M E R C E D E S M O L I N A Y A N C H O R E N A 

W I L L I A M F . M O N T A V O N 

M A R Y S . M U R P H Y 

R E V . W . C O L E M A N N E V I L S , S . J . 

A N N E M . N I C H O L S O N 

M A Y G . O ' D O N N E L L 

R E V . EDWARD P E T E R S , C . S . P . 

M O S T R E V . R I C H A R D P I T T T N I , S . C . 

W I L L I A M A . PRENDERGAST 

R E V . E D W I N R Y A N 

W I L L I A M F R A N K L I N SANDS 

J O H N S C H U L E R 

E L I Z A B E T H B . S W E E N E Y 

SISTER M A R Y V I N C E N T 

R E V . J O H N E . W I L L I A M S , C . S . V . 



T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S 

PAGE 

I — T H E PRESUPPOSITIONS 3 

I I — A CATHOLIC I N D I A N CIVILIZATION 5 

H I — A N ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 6 

I V — M I S R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S G 

V — T H E D E C L I N E 1 0 

V I — M E X I C A N L I F E I N I T S ARCHITECTURE 1 2 

V I I — T H E N E W INDIVIDUALISM 1 3 

V I I I — I N D I V I D U A L I S M VERSUS THE C H U R C H I S 

I X — I N D I V I D U A L I S M I N M E X I C O 1 7 

X — C A N A FAIR HISTORY OF MEXICO BE W R I T T E N ? . . . . 1 9 

X I — C A T H O L I C SOCIAL PROGRAMS 2 3 

X I I — " T H E REVOLUTION." L A N D DISTRIBUTION 2 6 

X I I I — T H E LABOR MOVEMENT. FOREIGN O W N E R S H I P . . . . 2 9 

X I V — T H E C H U R C H AND SOCIAL CHANGES 3 1 

X V — T H E PERSECUTION 3 3 

X V I — I L L I T E R A C Y . I N D I A N I S M 3 6 

X V I I — T H E F U T U R E '• 3G 

X V I I I — A M E R I C A N POLITICAL I N F L U E N C E 3 9 

X I X — T H E EFFECTS 4 1 

X X — O U R I N F L U E N C E — G O O D AND B A D 4 2 

X X I — T H E PRESENT 4 4 



A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O M E X I C O ^ 
/ r ^ 

j |u Spaolal 31 L Collections ̂ J 
T H E PRESUPPOSITIONS 

MEXICO is so lovely and lovable and tragic that the search for the unifying reasons of both its great attractiveness 
and black tragedy goes endlessly on. Those who attack the 
riddle carry along their own presuppositions. That there be no 
mistaking, let the chief ones revealed here be stated at once. 

There is the moral judgment against conquest, empire and 
imposition from without. This must be defined, or it can be 
distorted into a view that leaves the conqueror no duties. Con-
quest, unprovoked, is wrong, and in part is self-defeating. But 
conquest, having become a fact, the situation which the con-
queror has in part or wholly created places on him responsibil-
ities. Spanish rule in Mexico was far from an ideal reparation 
for conquest; but in part it was such, and in total effect vastly 
improved 'the condition of the Indians. 

There is, second, the presumption in favor of the spread of 
Catholic civilization—not only the Catholic Faith and the 
Catholic worship of God, but Catholic family life, Catholic 
social-economic life, Catholic arts, Catholic political life. Vari-
ety from place to place and period to period is implied, and 
failures and opposition are assumed as inevitable. Of these 
elements, Faith, worship, the family and social-economic rela-
tionships are the more fundamental. 

Upon our understanding of these presuppositions and our 
best available knowledge of the facts depends our ability to 
know Mexico. They are Mexico's own terms. Mexico suf-
fered an unjust and a cruel conquest. Given this bad start, 
the people in Mexico began immediately and have continued 
to wrestle ever since with the problem of how and in what 
forms to become a Catholic civilization—or how not to become 
one. 

I t was Spain that conquered Mexico. Yet the very con-
quest presented to the Catholic theologians of Spain herself 
the problems of the morality of conquest and the obligations to 
the conquered. The principles here are in the main the answer 
of these fathers of international law, derived from the help the 
Faith gives to know the laws of human relations. 

The cruelty during the conquest, real however exaggerated, 
3 



4 An Introduction to Mexico 

was but an incident in this larger injustice. Cruelty was, how-
ever, a sin of the time. When we condemn Spain for it we con-
demn her in her own ideal, an ideal then as now, broken by 
all who had not then, or now, reached the point of actually 
practicing the Faith of Christ. With Mexico there were also 
marked differences. The cruelty was the cruelty of individual 
adventurers often acting, as Cortez acted, without even gov-
ernmental warrant for conquest; and Spain to a degree sought 
as soon as it learned of the cruelty (indeed even Cortez sought) 
to prevent further cruelty. Cruelty was a sin to be repented 
and prevented. 

While Spain imposed certain of her institutions upon the 
conquered, the Catholic Faith was not imposed by force I t 
was accepted by the Indians through the words and lives of 
saintly men, their friends and protectors against the oppres-
sion of the conquistadores. Accepting the Faith involved 
also, in very consequence, an end to the human sacrifices in 
the old Aztec religion, an end to cannibalism, and the begin-
f ^ S o f t

t
1

h e
c

e n d o f slavery. Even had the people not accepted 
ttte Faith, Spam was obliged to root out these crimes, once it 
had taken over political power. There is perverseness in criti-
cizing Spam for having interfered with these institutions. To 
her glory she did. 

I t is clear, however, that Spain did not regard all Indian 
customs bad. There was the great wisdom of the missionaries 
m transforming for example, the old dances to the pagan gods 
into dances to Christ and His saints. 

We in the United States think more of the evil done by 
the conquistador es than of the good the Church and the Spanish 
government accomplished. When we are not blaming the Span-
iards for imposing their religion and moral standards upon the 
Indians we are finding fault with them for failing to make 
model Christians of all the Indian tribes. As their long-range 
plans for building a Catholic Indian civilization Show, the 
Spanish did not expect it, and we should not have expected it 

There was, m fact, too much optimism in expecting the 
Faith to transport the Indians speedily and completely to the 
s ate of development reached by peoples who had been Cath-
olics for centuries. Mass conversions to the Catholic Faith 

0 J a VES* o f conviction do not mean creation 
of a Catholic national life. That is a slow process. I t is one 



5 An Introduction to Mexico 

thing to save individual souls, another thing to form a Cath-
olic habit of life, and still another to create a Catholic civi-
lization. Witness the early Middle Ages. Witness ourselves. 

Moreover, we cannot but quarrel with the Europe of the 
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Instead of unit-
ing all resources upon extending the best of itself to the coun-
tries of the new discoveries, Europe split, became nationalistic, 
part of it flirted with classical paganism, part of it went Prot-
estant and all of it in varying degrees started on the road to the 
present world debacle. If any country was to undertake the 
task in the New World alone, Spain was surely best equipped 
and the most courageous. Still the responsibility was too 
much for a single country. 

I I 
A CATHOLIC I N D I A N CIVILIZATION 

All that seems clear. Immediately confusion begins. 
Some refuse to see that Spain tried actually to create a Catholic 
Indian civilization. Some see only the failures so as to con-
demn them. Some, if they realized its nature, would reject 
the central effort. Some glorify even the failures. Some come 
to the problem with a Protestant mind, or a national bias, or a 
pre-War and pre-depression delusion that only nineteenth cen-
tury ideals are good, or with a romantic cult of the primitive. 

One tendency glorifies the qualities and accomplishments 
of 'the Indians before the conquest so as to condemn nearly 
everything that has happened since. Yet which Indians? 
They were of many different levels. They ranged from sav-
agery to cruel although somewhat advanced forms of barbarism 
and on over the hill to decadent sons of dead cultures living 
among monuments which their ancestors or, perhaps, other 
tribes had built. They were of many different characters, 
ranging from mild and friendly tribes to cruel and bloody. 
We may well oppose the way the Indians were brought into 
contact with Europe. Yet Europe was good for them. 

The more common blunder is in not understanding what 
was tried. Spain, representing Catholic Europe, tried to do 
what to the modern mind is the unbelievable. There was con-
flict and much 'haziness; but it seems to be true that she tried 
in the first fervor to establish, under a temporary overlordship 



6 An Introduction to Mexico 

of Spaniards, a Catholic Indian civilization in Mexico. Un-
less this is known, Mexico is not known. Without this knowl-
edge compromises and failures appear as crimes and no ex-
planation exists for an eighty-five per cent Indian Mexico 
today. 

Everyone will admit that vast numbers of Indians received 
the Faith, adopted the monogamous family and, wanderers 
before, came together under their own chiefs in settled villages 
and centers of civilization. Mexico, early, had schools of man-
ual training, liberal colleges, schools of science and universities. 
It enjoyed richly endowed institutions of charity. The new 
worship became a familiar and beautiful part of Mexican life. 
Great poets, painters, architects and wood-carvers flourished. 
Saints were born. All this, against a background of recent 
savagery and barbarism, is amazing. For example, Professor 
E. G. Bourne of Yale University in his Spain in America., says 
that sixteenth century Mexico had institutions of learning "that 
in number, range of studies, and standard of attainments by 
the officers surpassed anything existing in English America 
until the nineteenth century." 

I l l 
AN ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 

Yet more than these, Spain undertook at the beginning to 
establish a just social-economic system. This is what many 
present-day Mexicans forget and most Americans do not sus-
pect. It is not merely that the policy was not the customary 
imperialist policy of slaughter, slavery or isolation on reserva-
tions. 

The very encomiendas, which gained later so evil a name 
were in the beginning what the name implies—a trusteeship 
and indeed a temporary one-generation trusteeship. Spaniards 
were made trustees of vast tracts of lands. On these lands 
lived Indians. Spaniards were trustees of the process of Indian 
civilization. Standards of the trusteeship were laid down in 
the law and the effort was made to enforce the standards. In a 
generation the Spaniards entrusted with this power were to 
withdraw from the lands. The Indians in a generation were 
to become the social rulers of a new and Catholic civilization 
of their own. 



7 An Introduction to Mexico 

The well-known social system of the California missions 
illustrates a second method, repeated over and over again in 
Mexico among the more savage tribes. 

A third method was the communal village lands, the ejidos, 
from which the villagers could obtain many of the needs of 
their life. The general rule was for villages, whether in the 
trustee areas or not, to have their own lands. 

A fourth method, little heard of and yet, usually in less 
developed form, common in even the trustee territory, was the 
establishment of a community and associated life. 

In these four methods (and their origin) is found the secret 
of that so-called "primitive" life of the villages. Many Ameri-
cans are attracted by it, who, however, do not know that they 
are looking at a carefully nurtured Christian culture, still in 
part surviving after industrialism and nineteenth century capi-
talism and persecution, and still carrying over the Faith and the 
pre-capitalistic ideas and organizations of Europe. 

A lofty example of the great effort is the little-known work 
of Don Vasco de Quiroga. He came out from Toledo in the 
early sixteenth century with the second Mexican government. 
After an admirable year in Mexico City, he was sent to the 
Tarascan territory of the present Michoacan. He did there all 
the things that are usually ascribed to Spain's colonial prac-
tice. He established churches, schools, and hospitals. He en-
forced permanent and monogamous marriages. The Indians 
were gathered in villages and towns. The villages, as was gen-
eral, had lands and limited powers of self-government. 

Don Vasco did more. His was a lake-country and the lake 
furnished a highway from village to village that permitted a 
unity over a large area. Each village around the lake was given 
a trade. One was the textile town, one the shoe town, one the 
fisherman's town, one the pottery town and so on. All marketed 
in a central marketing town. The town of a speciality could 
alone sell textiles or pottery or shoes; the people were assured 
a living from their work. So that prices might be fair for all, 
the prices were regulated. They had self-government. 

A guild organization and guild practices thus lived in a whole 
countryside in the heart of sixteenth century Mexico. The best 
plan of economic relations that the world had developed be-
came the form of social-economic life in Don Vasco's territory, 
adapted to different conditions. In the isolation of villages else-



8 An Introduction to Mexico 

where, it took a different form but the same principle of a com-
munity organized in guilds and of economic morality existed 
commonly, in full or in part, throughout. A volume on the 
Mexico City guilds of the colonial period was, for example, 
published a few years ago by the present revolutionary govern-
ment. Yet this type of associative life has gone relatively un-
noticed. 

There is a question again of prejudgments. Some approach 
Mexico from the nineteenth century standpoint of unquestion-
ing allegiance to morally and socially unregulated and unor-
ganized production and trade; some from the Marxist view-
point; some with thought only of finding crimes and abuses; 
some with a disregard for the importance of a social system; 
some with a belief that the machine started our woes and that 
pre-machine artisans automatically established a good social 
system, even if landlordism might have, unaccountably, afflicted 
their peasant brothers; some from an idealization of the primi-
tive. 

This whole matter requires careful study. To understand 
the earliest stage of colonial Mexico we have somehow to stand 
inside the ideal and see what was attempted. The fashion has 
long been against recognizing it as an ideal worth while or 
even of noticing it at all. 

IV 
MISREPRESENTATIONS 

A history of Mexico written to uphold an anti-Catholic or 
atheist thesis does not make sense. The reader is bored by its 
unintelligibility, much as he is bored by the interminable wars, 
revolutions, and dynasties of Chinese history, and for the same 
reason: the Western mind is unable to grasp the real purposes, 
the ideals, and the philosophies that moved leaders and peoples 
in their endless struggles. Mexican history, written without the 
clue of religion, has made nonsense. Until we get a history of 
Mexico, not steeped in Anglo-Saxon prepossessions, or uphold-
ing the thesis of a group of modern políticos, or one written 
merely as a defense of Spain, both Catholics and Protestants in 
the United States will continue to flounder in a morass of mis-
understanding about our sister nation to the south. 

Seldom, for instance, does one find in United States litera-



9 An Introduction to Mexico 

ture about Mexico any mention of the encomienda system, ex-
cept to hear it denounced. I t is known to United States readers 
only in its decay; and this decay is assumed to be its normal 
state. Nevertheless scholarly researches in regard to this sys-
tem have already been begun by some of our universities, and 
this important social and economic experiment need not con-
tinue to be misrepresented to United States readers. What 
Americans of today, both Catholic and Protestant, and even 
most Mexicans fail to grasp is how carefully and reasonably 
and in detail the welfare of the Indians was debated, according 
to Catholic principles, both in Spain and in Mexico at the time 
the encomienda system was established. 

Modern ignorance of Catholic political and social theories 
of government, together with modern disapproval of theologi-
cal principles and their implications on social life, has much to 
do with our misunderstanding the methods by which Spain tried 
to solve her colonial problems. I t has been much easier to 
misunderstand. I t has satisfied our national and racial pride 
to denounce the whole system as a "vicious system of united 
Church and State" and then dismiss it promptly from our minds. 
That the first great effort was intended, and would have pro-
duced a great civilization had it been continued without com-
promise, is one of those historical facts that too long has been 
covered by the debris of individualistic, anti-Spanish and anti-
Catholic controversy. 

Even where the encomienda system is understood and ap-
preciated, it is too often the custom to ascribe all the credit to 
Spain as though she had only some natural gift for dealing with 
varied racial elements. Casual and sentimental references to 
"the Fray Las Casas whose statue stands . . . lifting his saintly 
visage, etc.," or glorification of the marvelous proficiency of the 
Mexicans in their village handicrafts as a purely Indian 
heritage, simply will not do. 

Neither will it do to put Las Casas in a footnote as a mere 
authority on Spanish "atrocities." It is necessary to explain 
why Las Casas became the champion teller of atrocity stories 
of all time, and yet received such strong support both from the 
Church and from the Spanish government. Nothing could more 
completely refute the popular American belief in the tyranny 
of Spain in Mexico than the fact that Las Casas was not only 
tolerated but encouraged in his campaign on behalf of the In-



10 An Introduction to Mexico 

dian. The result of his uninterrupted activities and propaganda 
is as much a part of the picture as the gruesome stories them-
selves. It is also a part of the picture that he supplied the 
enemies of Spain, both religious and commercial, with a bagful 
of stones to be cast at her; and for this Spain finds it hard to 
forgive him. 

The part of colonial history without which the rest is non-
sense is that the atrocity stories about the conquistadores had 
at least this effect on Catholic Spain: her government, without 
the least hesitation or delay, passed the justly famous "New 
Laws of the Indies," the wisest, the most humane laws for the 
protection of subject peoples ever conceived by any rulers past 
or present. 

Let us therefore not be shocked about Spanish cruelties in 
Mexico 400 years ago and utterly forget that contemporary 
Catholic Spain was even more shocked, so shocked in fact as to 
do something about it. 

We of the United States might remember Cromwell's treat" 
ment of conquered Celts, his methods of confiscation and 
colonization, and his redistribution of the estates of Catholics 
among his soldiers by means of which two-thirds of Ireland was 
transferred to new proprietors. 

V 
T H E D E C L I N E 

But there was a decline in the great early plan and the 
zeal. An external sign of the decline was that the one-genera-
tion trusteeships of vast tracts of land were after great dispute 
and threats extended in the middle of the sixteenth century to 
two generations. Later, trusteeship became the equivalent of 
ownership. A white aristocracy was thus established to rule 
over a subject Indian population. The stamp of inferiority 
and inferior opportunities was put on an underlying population 
of a different race and color. The paraphenalia of an aristo-
cratic society appeared. One class had ease and culture and 
the means of a good life. The results, of a stinted life for a 
majority and of permanent class domination appeared through-
out all society, among both oppressed and oppressors, in family 
life, the arts, social life generally, even in the understanding of 
the Faith. 



11 An Introduction to Mexico 

Old Spain had begun to go down hill. The old fire was 
flickering. Europe, that had once been Christendom, became 
the sad Europe of the absolute monarchies, of the Protestant 
cleavage, of the European wars, of a dying grandeur in Catholic 
countries in spite of much reform, and of a virile Protestantism 
and a rising rationalism, each distilling the poisons of national-
ism in government and individualism in economic life. Spain 
herself became absolutistic in government and crossed the 
Pyrenees to enter the European storm. While continuing to 
spread Christian civilization northward in the missions that are 
so widely famous, Spain nevertheless postponed indefinitely her 
realization in the older parts of New Spain. A small, native-
born aristocracy of Spanish descent was now established in an 
Indian country. Tp rule this aristocracy for the benefit of the 
people as a whole, Spain's vigor needed to be greater. That 
vigor decreased. 

Bishops and priests in Spain and in Mexico had written the 
first policy in the spirit of Catholicism against opposition from 
the conquerors. But as time passed, the weight of the Europe 
of that period, of a declining Spain and a Mexican aristocracy 
hung about even their necks. The bad was accepted. Indian 
inferiority was assumed. Minimum requirements, and even 
less, became the regretted rule. Sentimental and pietistic souls 
worshiped in florid churches. Charity institutions bloomed in 
the midst of a defiance of justice and social justice. 

Breaking the rigors that attended the rule of the landed 
aristocracy of a still • primitive people of another race, much 
even of the original intention or spirit was realized. There were 
the village-lands, the small owner and the organized artisans 
in city, town and village; the patriarchal life on the estates; the 
sense of obligation to others in economic life; the works of 
charity; churches that seem to have grown out of the very soil; 
the Mass and the sacraments; the round of the liturgical year, 
the family feast days, the special holy days of the villages 
and towns; pilgrimages; the beauty of community veneration 
in pageant and folk-dance of the patron saint of their com-
munity; community worship during Holy Week of the crucified 
and risen Christ; and a sense of human unity and equality in 
the Church and before God. 

The later colony was not so bad as painted. The near an-
cestors of the Indians had been pagan barbarians. Their de-



12 An Introduction to Mexico 

scendants were to be outraged by a business and rationalist era. 
Yet so rooted was the Catholic culture of the Indians that even 
now, American travelers to the villages marvel at the merging 
of religion, family life, work and recreation into a satisfying 
and beautiful unity of life in contrast with our own broken and 
meager culture. These Indians still know that life is not a block 
of separate compartments. The industrial revolution has not 
yet reached them and while nineteenth century Individualism 
has harmed them grievously they have not accepted it as a re-
ligion of life. 

They still live in the older culture. But it is not Indian 
culture. It is Catholic culture among Indians. The determin-
ing element is not the primitive material surroundings. The 
determining element is their outlook upon these surroundings 
and themselves. Their outlook is their Faith and moral code 
for this life and the next. American travelers do, indeed, ex-
aggerate; these villages are not little Utopias; but they possess 
inescapable beauty and attractiveness. A like character of soul 
can be seen even in Mexico City. It lays its mark upon Mexi-
cans everywhere, even among those most oppressed or degraded, 
even among those who deny and bitterly persecute the Faith. 

VI 
MEXICAN L I F E I N ITS A R C H I T E C T U R E 

Mexican colonial architecture is an example in point. As 
the Church with the craftsmanship of the guildsmen produced 
in Catholic societies the marvel of Gothic architecture, so in the 
handicraft economy of old Mexico, she created, with a fusion, 
however imperfect, of Spanish and Indian cultures within a 
Catholic view of life, the only original types of architecture 
since the medieval period. 

No one will deny (whatever his particular theories of art) 
that much Mexican architecture is extraordinarily beautiful 
and, for the same reason, that the Gothic of the Middle Ages 
is beautiful. It is an expression of the life and aspirations of 
the people. It was meant to appeal to them and not to the 
critics. Therefore it is creative and not a mere imitation of the 
art of other peoples. The architecture of Mexico tells the story 
of a real collaboration between architect and workman. "In 
New Spain," says Walter H. Kilham in his Mexican Archi-



13 An Introduction to Mexico 

tecture of the Vice-Regal Period, "architectural design swung 
away (from European models) along a path influenced by na-
tive ideas as well as Spanish fashions, through a dazzling climax 
of half-Indian, half-Spanish extravaganza, finally to reach a 
goal (as eighteenth century European formalities of style)— 
the elegant and formal Academismo, which completed the most 
remarkable excursion in architeptural design known to the his-
tory of the Renaissance." 

"There is naturally no Gothic in Mexico," he continues, 
"but in the Renaissance way, the country's splendid churches, 
sweetly domed and towered . . . are products of a really great 
architecture, well-conceived, thoroughly understood, and mar-
velously executed." 

VII 
T H E N E W INDIVIDUALISM 

Mexico would have undoubtedly shaken off her partial ac-
ceptance of evil had there been no great crisis immediately 
ahead. The irrepressible effects even of a shortened effort to 
live Catholic lives and create a Catholic civilization would have 
come to the surface. The Faith is a living thing. If forced 
within narrow boundaries, it sooner or later breaks the dams 
and floods the whole civilization of a people. Before the con-
strained and narrowed Catholicity could, however, break the 
barriers, a crisis of huge proportions had come, and they were 
not prepared. 

The crisis had been approaching for some time but it broke 
at the opening of the nineteenth century. Sometimes the crisis 
is identified with Independence; and surely inexperience in the 
art of government, a reluctance of some to separate from Spain 
and the long indecisiveness, including even a non-appointment 
of Bishops for many years as the controversy dragged on and 
the Church suffered, launched Mexican life under a separate 
government unhappily. Oftener the crisis is identified with the 
rise to power of those of partly Indian blood; and surely the 
clash of differing social inheritances marked the Mexican crisis 
in a special way. But the chief fact about the Mexican nine-
teenth century was that Mexico moved in a world that was be-
ing made over and Mexico tried to imitate the pattern of the 
countries that led the world change. 



14 An Introduction to Mexico 

The industrial revolution had come; and Mexico, imitating 
the world and not living up to her own nature, tried, with all the 
implications in social system, governmental policy and religion, 
to go "rugged individualist." Mexico faced the central world 
crisis of the nineteenth century and tried to solve it in the wrong 
way and in a way not suited to herself, and in a way that the 
rest of the world tried and, as we now in a world tragedy know, 
tried wrongly and suicidally. 

So drab a thing as the reaching out for Mexican raw ma-
terials and for the sale there of her machine-made goods set 
off the spark. This unheroic beginning should not be startling 
to Americans; we remember well a tax on tea. Here was merely 
the effort to buy and sell. But it had even more dynamite in it. 
For inside it and around it a whole new kind of life was coming 
to a country which was not only in its material surrounding 
still extremely simple but did not believe in the moral code, or 
lack of it, in the new system. I t is true that Mexico had already 
mortally offended against her own ideals. But she had never 
rejected them. They were still at work, had done great good 
and would do more. But now, invaded by the modern world, 
Mexico was asked to reject the old ideals and believe in some-
thing different. 

Confuse the issue that arose at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century with universal literacy and material progress; 
with political independence or an effort to end the power of the 
landed aristocracy's privilege; or with the rise of the mestizo 
or with Republican government (all of which were a part of it 
or accompanied it)—'and it remains at heart the same. The 
underlying issue was whether the new means of work and life 
should be consciously directed to the common good and whether 
human beings should be self-organized and governmentally 
regulated to that end; or whether there was to be no organiza-
tion or government action and each individual allowed, en-
couraged and put in a position to do about as he wished in ac-
cord with his own greed and pride. This latter answer was 
adopted. It was the answer of Individualism. Freemasonry, 
as it happened, became the chief agency of the wrong answer 
and has remained so ever since. 

This new scheme of things implied at the outset a rejection 
of any law of God and Church about right and wrong in this 
part of life. But if there was to be no right or wrong and no 



17 An Introduction to Mexico 

sense of responsibilities to others in so grave a thing, so ever-
expanding a thing and in something that takes up so much, of 
one's conscious life and involves so many human relationships 
as does the circle' of ownership, work and the obtaining of the 
material means not only of life, but of family welfare, leisure, 
education, culture, freedom and even, sound morality—then the 
whole scheme of life that the Catholic Church teaches is not 
only to be disobeyed but contradicted and defied. Objectively 
there is not only mortal sdn but heresy and the heresy extends 
far. 

VIII 

INDIVIDUALISM VERSUS T H E CHURCH 

Mexico in accepting this individualist scheme was trying to 
deny her nature; For Mexicans were then and are now Cath-
olics. To go individualist they had to change their souls. Their 
best tradition had been one of economic morality, organized 
responsibility and government action. Now they were trying 
to throw it off. I t is true that the colonial dry-rot of the later 
colonial period had left them ill-equipped to think out the 
new machine era in terms of their own underlying principles. 
They were enticed; as well, by the expanding wealth of the in-
dividualist nations, which were also the industrial countries, 
and by the promise of greatness obtained through universal and 
compulsory literacy in a naturalistic education. The new ideas 
wrenched them. They realized this. But more and more the 
new era turned against the whole past and sought to destroy 
thè greatest things in Mexican life. 

I t was no accident that Juarez, the leader of the fifties, who 
began the break-up of the village-lands in order to force In-
dians to become rugged individualists (which resulted in their 
becoming wage-hands and beggars), should have also begun 
the more intense phase of the persecution of the Church that 
has now continued, in fact or in threat, for three-quarters of a 
century. Nor was it an accident that Don Vasco's self-govern-
ing village guilds and all the associative life should have lost 
legal protection at the hands of men who tried to strip the 
Church of all influence in the country. There was an undying 
feud between the Church and the new atomic, fluid and mo-
rality-denying Individualism;..the village-lands and the guilds 



16 An Introduction to Mexico 

were in the spirit of the Church, and Individualism contradicts 
that spirit. 

The feud was the deeper because the new Individualism was 
not creating a modern business country. Foreigners became 
the chief industrialists, bankers and traders. Aspirants to the 
wealth and power that Individualism promised turned their 
eyes then to ownership of land—not toward land distribution 
for the masses but toward their own rise to membership in the 
landed aristocracy. In the revolutions they often succeeded 
to the estates of the defeated. 

The proponents of the new era, forced to live in a rarefied 
atmosphere of theory, emphasized hostility to the Church be-
yond those of other Catholic countries that similarly tried to 
put on an individualistic soul. Wanting to become landed 
aristocrats, they could arouse their anger still further against 
the Church. The Church possessed rich endowments in land to 
support education, charity, and worship. In that non-commer-
cial period of Mexico, the Church funds served as practically 
the sole banker and the money was loaned at a low rate of in-
terest. To us in a commercial age of much use of money, when 
churches, charities and schools can be supported by current 
taxes, voluntary contributions of money or fees, it is hard to 
realize the great need of endowments in another type of eco-
nomic life. But endowments were the common rule of the time. 
The alternatives were barter and taxes. Neither was depend-
able. If taxes alone had been relied on, the danger also of 
government domination would have been great. That the en-
dowments of the Church were excessive for the purposes, is now 
commonly agreed. The endowments being great were all the 
more a target of the aspiring but defeated business individual-
ists. Robbing the Church, as Spain had often shown, was easy; 
and the revolutionists, through ownership of stolen endowments, 
could and did rise to the position of the old landed aristocracy. 

Seventy-five years ago the last endowments were taken. 
Title to even buildings and grounds was taken. Many of the 
buildings were put to the same or even other uses in other 
hands. To speak of a wealthy church in Mexico as a fact of 
the past seventy-five years is wholly false. 

In this period of Individualism, the Indians became soon 
the despised people in their own country. Indian feast days 
were thought shameful. For villagers to practice their old arts 



19 An Introduction to Mexico 

and try to keep the old associated life was held unprogressive. 
The customs of France, Great Britain and later the United 
States were imitated. 

I X 
INDIVIDUALISM I N MEXICO 

By those who wished to introduce the new Individualism the 
Church was accused of being opposed to progress. Therefore 
the Church, they said, must be destroyed. A virulent cam-
paign was waged against religious education. Yet the Mexican 
government did not itself proceed with-'-a program of non-
religious education in its own nineteenth century ideal. The 
reigning political groups, while accusing the Church of being 
unscientific and an obstacle to progress, sold out the industrial 
resources to foreigners. They spent their public life attacking 
the Church and upholding vagrant philosophies. Partly they 
were rationalizing the robbery of the Church. Then because 
they could not throw off their ingrained Catholic Faith or be 
simon-pure believers in pagan Individualism, they reared their 
families Catholics and themselves crept back into the Church 
on their deathbeds. 

When the secularist and individualist crisis broke at its 
greatest fury in the fifties (although it had been long brewing), 
Catholics had not removed the dry-rot of the later colonial 
period nor overcome the effects of an unguided Church during 
part of the long independence controversy. Now they found 
themselves besieged as well and legally, when not in fact, under 
the ban of persecution. T o meet the crisis and fight the new 
Individualism, both in its denial of economic morality and 
brotherhood and in its opposition to the Church, they needed 
saintly heroism and far-sighted wisdom. The incessant ham-
pering of the Church in her teaching powers by European gov-
ernments had a specially devastating effect in Mexico and South 
America long before their independence from Spain. In the 
suppression of the Jesuits and their expulsion, not only were 
missions destroyed but many seminaries were closed. There 
was then and has been since a great shortage of priests. It was 
therefore not surprising that so many Mexicans, through lack 
of instruction and in the mixed and confused currents of the 
times, were unable to discern both wherein leaders of the 



18 An Introduction to Mexico 

Church had been at fault and how much the new régime was a 
defiance of the Church's own social morality. In the colonial 
period Indian oppression came t o be partially accepted. In the 
nineteenth century the new Individualism, if not accepted, ; was 
not, even when the oppression was greater, attacked either 
strongly enough to have effect or (in a scattered country of 
isolated villages and towns) strongly enough to be generally 
known. 

The Church was, falsely, given the reputation of even caus-
ing the injustices of the old régime. The village-land system 
and the associative life of the villages, towns and cities had been 
the creation of the Church. In an amazing effort to build a 
civilization the Church had met defeat in part and had almost 
succumbed. But the new anti-Catholic individualists were 
themselves opposed even more to the democratic system of 
village-lands and guilds than to that aristocratic oppression 
wherein the social teaching of the Church had been overcome. 
They broke up the village-lands. They fought the associative 
life and deprived iit of government sanction and help. But they 
kept the aristocratic landed system and extended it and made 
it their own. They destroyed the good and kept the bad and 
even when active persecution lapsed they continued attacking 
the Church. 

Social injustice rolled higher and higher. Possessing little 
opportunity to sell their products and not crushing so much the 
Indians resident thereon, the old landed estates had been easy-
going patriarchal baronies. Now in the nineteenth and early 
twentieth centuries many estates became business firms. The 
pressure of profit-making told on the farm laborers and tenants 
who had lost, also, their own land-holdings in the dispersion of 
the village-lands. Industrial undertakings were under the same 
pressure. Foreign ownership, even when working conditions 
were better, made the oppression more hateful and drew, as 
well, the envy of those desiring business success: and their re-
sentment at the domination of foreigners. Such, was the pres-
sure of competitive business upon the Mexican complication. A 
revolution was on the way. 



19 An Introduction to Mexico 

X 

CAN A FAIR HISTORY OF MEXICO BE W R I T T E N ? 
Partisan controversy against both the Catholic Church and 

Spain has completely obscured the underlying causes of Mexi-
co's continued revolutionary activities. One fact cries loudly 
for explanation: Mexico has been free from Spain for more than 
a hundred years; for seventy-five years the Church in Mexico 
has been plundered of her wealth and subjected to the civil 
power ; yet the social and economic difficulties of Mexico are 
not solved. Mexico's troubles cannot indefinitely keep on being 
the fault either of Spain or of the Church, when both have been 
for So long eliminated from the political and economic life of 
the country. , , , , 

The people of the United States are at last facing the fact 
that any adequate interpretation of present-day Mexico must 
give us a clear explanation as to why her native rulers for more 
than three generations have failed much more completely than 
did her Spanish rulers in giving to the Indian masses economic 
security and sufficiency. Nothing can be more significant of 
our owri bankruptcy of thought than the acceptance by United 
States commentators on Mexican affairs of two such false issues 
as the quarrel with the Church and the efforts to recover a sup-
posedly "lost" Indian civilization. 

We in the United States should not only divest our minds 
of our preconceptions against the Latin, but we should also 
learn to know the Indian better and not to be simply senti-
mental about him. Sympathizers with Mexico in this country 
are far from doing justice to the Indian mentality—to its ideal-
ism as well as to its power of thought, and to its moral and 
spiritual grasp of Christian principles. A well-known apologist 
for "Indianism" admits that the great Indian masses in Mexico 
are quite unaware of any cleavage between Indian and Mexi-
can of Spanish descent! His explanation, however, is inade-
quate. " I n general," he says, "the Indian Who has remained 
Indian is inarticulate about it.: Politicians—usually mestizo— 
may boast 'soy puro Indio.'" But race-consciousness, he 
shows, is not a characteristic of the really "pure Indian" who 
apparently has not the slightest desire to revive a dead Indian 
civilization or to free himself from Spanish influence. What 
the pro-Aztec sentimentalist cannot grasp is that if the Indian 



20 An Introduction to Mexico 

has so far resisted the race antagonism his government is bent 
on arousing in him, it is because he is so deeply and thoroughly 
Catholic. The Mexican government official understands this 
matter better than do his United States sympathizers; for hav-
ing been for so long unable to "enter the mind" of the adult 
Indian, he is now, through teaching atheism in the schools, at-
tempting to "enter the mind of the child." 

A pro-Aztec obsession has led the archeological amateur of 
today to hope, for some strange reason, to rediscover in the 
prehistoric past some solution for our modern ills. The 
archeological romanticist and the communist realist have united 
in their willingness to surrender everything, even the preserva-
tion of the sick and the aged and the helpless, that has been 
achieved in Mexico through Christian social teaching. They 
admire (as well they may) the handicraft economy of the 
Mexican Indian. But lest the Church might gain some credit 
for this, they quite unhistorically ascribe the origin of the 
village handicraft system entirely to the Aztecs. Their knowl-
edge of the medieval guild system is almost non-existent; and 
a prejudice against the Middle Ages, surviving from dead con-
troversies, makes it the easier for them to ignore Spain's 
achievement in transferring to the Western hemisphere a system 
the destruction of which in Europe is acknowledged by econo-
mists today to be one of the major disasters of post-Reforma-
tion times and of today. 

The pro-Aztec propagandist is not content to claim for his 
cult of the primitive the Catholic handicraft and organized 
economy of the Indian. He asks us to divest our minds entirely 
of Christian preconceptions against pagan Indian morality, even 
to the point of condoning the bloody ritual of human sacrifices. 
In Mexico, a Study of the Two Americas, one writer of this 
pro-Aztec school, in a paragraph on "Heatlth and Hygiene," 
attempts even to show social uses of human sacrifice (which he 
elsewhere refers to as a fad, saying: "Like other fads, it might 
have passed.") because Aztecs "from anatomical studies of sac-
rificial victims worked out a reasonably complete nomenclature 
for the human skeleton and muscular and nervous systems." 
He approves the "sensible, if harsh procedure of exposing those 
with probably incurable diseases, well supplied with food, to 
recover or die." 

We of the United States are so absorbed in our own fight 



21 An Introduction to Mexico 

on "rugged Individualism" and the liberal philosophy which 
have filled our own country with millions of unemployed that 
we have forgotten what the effect must have been on Latin 
American countries. Above all, we fail to recognize the part 
played by Mexican revolutionary leaders of the last century, 
such as Juarez, in imposing upon Catholic Mexico the economic 
system of England, France, and the United States—a system 
based, as we know, on an individualistic philosophy of free 
competition, economic immorality, no organization, and gov-
ernment inaction in the face of injustices. What could be more 
slip-shod or uncritical than to load on Porfirio Diaz the entire 
blame for Mexico's experiment with laissez jaire? I t should 
not be forgotten that economlic liberalism had its origin in 
philosophic liberalism. The effect on Mexico as on other 
Latin American countries was profound. 

The so-called "enlightenment" advanced the idea that hu-
man nature is inherently good. Jean Jacques Rousseau and 
the French Revolution popularized in Latin America the notion 
that mankind has been corrupted only by institutions, from 
which man must be freed in order to develop his powers to the 
full. Rousseauists substituted for conscience and the action 
of divine grace the natural emotions of man, denying the idea 
of evil and the necessity for moral effort. They believed that 
in order to remain spontaneously viirtuous, it is sufficient to 
remain in a state of nature. To the sentimental believer in the 
"goodness" of human nature, the Church, with her doctrines 
of original sin and man's need for salvation, is regarded as the 
greatest of all enslavers of mankind and the fundamental cause 
of all social ills. While Rousseauism has been today completely 
discredited in Europe and the United States through the dis-
astrous results of unfettered human nature in the industrial field 
and in international life, yet the present rulers of Mexico con-
tinue to profess thelir faith in a philosophy that teaches that to 
"free" mankind from religion and moral restraint is to insure 
him prosperity and a new start in life. That the present gov-
ernment in Mexico does not really believe in the sentimental 
theory of the inherent goodness of human nature, goes without 
saying. For it is undoubtedly influenced, also, by the Hegelian-
ism current in Russia and Germany which declares that the 
"State is the divine idea on earth" and should have supreme 
rights over the individual. This is, of course, nothing else than 



22 An Introduction to Mexico 

a modern version of the Machiavellian idea of the divine right 
of kings. 

The liberalistic philosophy which prepared the way for the 
new tyranny (whether of capitalistic dictatorship within the 
shell of democracy or State absolutism) was heightened in 
Mexico by Benito Juarez. By dividing the land among the 
individual Indians, they were thought to have been given their 
"liberty." But left to a system of free competition without the 
protection of either organization or the State or the Church, the 
Indians destitute of experience or the means to develop their 
own land, sold it to foreign exploiters, for whom they henceforth 
were obliged to work as peons. This unequal competition be-
tween the Indian and the foreign capitalist, in which the Indian 
played the tragic losing part, readied its culmination during 
the Diaz régime. During the revolutionary period that has 
followed; the land program (a program that to date has done 
more to enrich the leaders than to strengthen the peons) has 
been undertaken to undo, not to continue, the work of Juarez. 
The liberalistic solution of the land problem is entirely in the 
discard, but a morally irresponsible and atheist State absolutism 
has been substituted for a State regulation open to the criticism 
of the Christian conscience. 

The break-up of religious unity in Europe had both in 
Europe and the Americas gradually destroyed a clear concep-
tion of the part religion should play in the social and economic 
life of mankind. Even Catholics, following their Protestant 
neighbors, little by little ceased to criticize in the light of Cath-
olic teaching the institutions under which they were living. 

Ever since the so-called Reformation, Catholics had been 
told by the enemies of their Faith that the economic and social 
system under which they lived are outside the sphere of reli-
gion; and gradually many Catholics began to believe this. 
While in Protestant countries the non-Catholic majority had 
openly and frankly revised their social ethics to fit the eco-
nomic interests of the dominant class, Catholics in Catholic 
countries that stood under the rule of a Masonic minority of-
fered less and less resistance, and finally learned to acquiesce 
in a system for which they felt no moral responsibility. 

In the revolt against the medieval system, Machiavelli's 
"Prince" had almost immediately emancipated the English and 
French governments from any considerations of moral restraint. 



23 An Introduction to Mexico 

It was many a year, however, before Catholic Spain succumbed 
to the seductive idea that the King can do no wrong. I t is not 
for nothing that we owe to Spain the development of inter-
national law and the denial of the complete sovereignty of the 
State and of its claim to be the judge in its own cause. The 
secularist divorce between Christian morality and the economic 
and international life of peoples is one of the greatest calamities 
of modern times. 

The day has come when a fair history of Mexico may at 
last be presented to the people of the United States, because 
the liberalism, upon which our own economic system has been 
built and that has done so much to confuse and wreck Mexico, 
is now challenged on every side. But a fair history can never 
be written by men who either hate the Church or would, in the 
popular sense, apologize for her. It must be written by one 
who understands the meaning of her teachings upon the life of 
peoples and who has a clear understanding of the ideas and of 
the Faith, as well as of the economic motives that move both 
men and nations. 

X I 

CATHOLIC SOCIAL PROGRAMS 

The new series of revolutions broke in 1911. Shortly after 
the beginning of the century Catholic organizations, in. spite 
of the threat of persecution, had begun to form in order to 
oppose the reigning Individualism. The Mexican Catholic 
Congress was the first spearhead. Its first meeting in 1903 
dealt with, among other matters, credit unions and the estab-
lishment of labor associations that would develop into improv-
ing the whole range of labor's life, economic, religious, moral 
and cultural, in both city and country. The following year 
and again in 19Q6 and in 1909, the Congress met and concerned 
itself more extensively with the economic problems of the Mexi-
can dispossessed. 

Catholic Farm Congresses were held in various places. The 
1904 Catholic Farm Congress recounted in session after session 
the misery into which the Indian laborers, on the land had fallen. 
The speakers painted in detail a black picture of widespread 
drunkenness, half-starving men and families, concubinage, child 
labor, illiteracy, peonage, unbelievably low wages, and misery, 



24 An Introduction to Mexico 

moral, physical and economic. They called for reform all along 
the line. A speaker at the closing session besought a change 
not only in the name of justice and charity but to save Mexico 
from being bought piecemeal by American capitalists. "The 
laws of life do not halt," he said, "and the moment is here 
when if we do not pay the worker well, the foreigner will come 
here to pay him." 

Foreigners were even then increasing their ownership. But 
before the speaker's fears were fully realized, revolution had 
come. Catholic efforts working in a poisoned atmosphere had 
done some good but not enough. Living under the threat of 
persecution, and due to the lack of priests, the Mexican 
Church's voice had not been heard far. Still in a state of 
siege, it tended, as is always true of such times, to draw in 
upon itself and try to hold fast to the minimum of faith and 
morals. 

With the revolution there came much more activity and 
boldness. The Mexican "Social Week" of 1912 treated land 
distribution, a plan of inalienable family patrimony, and usury. 
This was before the Mexican revolution attained to the social 
program it later developed. 

The workingmen's associations had grown and formed 
their own federation. In January 1913, while Modero was 
still President, and four years before the new Mexican Consti-
tution and its well-known articles on land and labor were 
adopted, their federation drew up a far-reaching program. 
Minimum living wages, fixed by a council within each industry, 
were asked. On the land question land distribution was asked 
for in order that the man on the land would have "the ownership 
and stable use of enough land for the fitting support of his 
family." They asked for regulation of the work of women and 
children and the prohibition of the work of married women 
and of children under twelve; for the system of inalienable 
family patrimony; for social insurance against unemployment, 
accidents, sickness and old age; for profit-sharing and the rise 
of the non-owning workers to the status of ownership; for anti-
profiteering and anti-speculation laws; for middle class and sal-
aried employees' organizations; for a regulation of "home-
work," Sunday-rest laws, the legal right of unions to exist, tax 
laws based on ability t o pay, etc. 

The program read as follows: 



25 An Introduction to Mexico 

O U R C H I E F E C O N O M I C D E M A N D S 

1. Preservation of the home and the life of the family, which requires as 
indispensable conditions: 

(a) Establishment of a minimum wage in each industry by a coun-
cil of the industry which will meet the needs of an adult 
worker in normal conditions of life. 

(b) Regulation of the labor of women and children, leading to the 
suppression of wage labor by mothers and the prohibition of 
child labor under twelve years of age, with special guarantees 
for the health, morality and security of the work of young 
women. 

(c) The acquisition of a family property, inalienable and indivisible, 
consisting not only in small rural property but also in the city 
home and shop of the artisan. 

2. Institutions for social insurance against unemployment, accidents, sick-
ness, and poverty in old age. 

3. Permanent councils of compulsory arbitration to peacefully settle con-
flicts between capital and labor. 

4. The right to share as far as feasible in the profits and even in the 
ownership of companies, to be obtained particularly by stock owner-
ship or other methods of simple application. 

5. Protection against profiteering and speculation, open or secret, which 
through various methods concentrates national wealth in the hands of 
the few by taking advantage of inexperience or of others' needs. 

6. Facilities for the organization and protection of the middle class by 
means of free organizations of private salaried employees and em-
ployees of the State, of small artisans, small merchants, etc. 

7. Effective safeguarding of home-work, above all that of women and 
persons in the needle trades, founding for that purpose organizations 
for defense and assistance as necessary. 

8. Representation before the government of the interests of the workers 
by means of representatives of their organizations. 

9. As to the agrarian question, we propose a special program in which, 
taking into consideration the respect due the legitimate rights of own-
ers, we present a whole system of reforms directed toward assuring 
a s ' f a r as possible to every capable farm worker the ownership and 
the stable use of enough land for the decent support of his family. 
In this program, we give capital importance to those institutions which 
at the same time that they favor the economic position of the farm 
worker, train him in his duties, educate him, improve his morality 
and protect him against his own faults and mistakes which render 
unproductive and ineffective his economic improvement. 

Our reforms proceed in a normal manner, step by step, without great 
transitions and without advances attempted before the people are ready 
for them; steadily, however, sustained and constant, we shall march 
toward the goal set before us. 



26 An Introduction to Mexico 

Additional Observations 

It has not been our intention to outline all of the demands that we 
desire to make for our people, but only those that are the most urgent. 
Some among the demands are matters of strict justice, others merely of 
equity, of usefulness and opportuneness, but not for that reason less 
desirable, since human progress ought to be realized by obtaining a pro-
portional advance for all social classes. This is demanded by the order 
of nature itself, by the harmony of Divine Providence and by the will of 
God. We make these demands with all the firmness of those who ground 
themselves in principle; in proclaiming them, we shall never use wrongful 
means, convinced as we are that in social changes moral fqrce is the 
only one that sooner or later conquers all difficulties. 

We ask of the Public Authorities: In general, that they give due con-
sideration to the demands stated above. 

And in particular: 
1. That they recognize the legal personality of economic organizations, 

recognizing their right of holding property to the extent necessary, 
right of jurisdiction within an industry over their members and right 
of representation before the public authorities. 

2. That they recognize the right of employers' associations, labor unions 
and economic councils to establish wages and salaries equitable in 
themselves and socially advantageous. 

3. That they pass and enforce a law on Sunday rest, j 
4. That they change the Civil Code in the manner necessary to change 

small rural or city holdings into inalienable and indivisible family 
properties. 

5. That they subject the stock exchange and trading to strict regulation. 
6. That they reorganize the tax system which weighs too heavily today 

on small owners and make it more equitable by reforming particularly 
those taxes which increase the cost of living and by establishing, in 
general, a system of taxes through which the burden of the poor and 
the rich will be proportionate to their ability to pay,-

X I I 

" T H E REVOLUTION." LAND D I S T R I B U T I O N 

The revolution of 1911, which inaugurated the present 
régime, had begun chiefly as a political drive against the old 
dictator, Diaz. Quickly it changed, and was to be expected to 
change, into a demand for reform. Oppression was unbeliev-
ably gross and could not go on indefinitely. 

The course of the revolution has been, however, obscure. 
We are still close to it; that may be why it is hard to grasp. 
The more important reason is that it is not at all sharply defined. 



27 An Introduction to Mexico 

If it were, for example, a Socialist revolution, we would see it 
demand common ownership of industry, trade and farm lands. 
But there is nothing of the sort. Certain of the old communal 
village-lands are restored and personal ownership of small 
farms is a general aim of the law. Even large estates may re-
main. As to industry, regulation is provided in behalf both of 
labor and the Mexican nation. There is a strong bias against 
foreign and in favor of Mexican ownership. 

There has been much violence, much use of the word Social-
ist, much violation of both assumed and real rights, much con-
fiscation, much agitation of an incendiary nature, much mur-
der, and much indoctrination in colleetivist phrases and even 
ideas. But something more is necessary to make or wish a 
colJectivist change. I t is, however, true that the trend varies 
from one part of the country to another and from time to time. 
And it lis further true that the end is not in sight. 

I t could have been expected that the first political break 
with the old Individualism would have signalled a drive against 
Individualism itself. And so it happened. There has been 
much backing and filling all along. And the whole movement 
while hardening now into a definite mold is still uncertain of 
itself and still subject to change either without notice or with 
the notice of further violence and further revolutions. 

As the revolution developed, four situations exploded. The 
first was the old one of landlordism, a burden from the begin-
ning and, far worse than it was a hundred years earlier. I t 
has been Mexico's greatest economic evil. The 1904 Catholic 
meeting described its tragedy. A social change leaving land-
lordism untouched would have been unthinkable. An agri-
cultural country, rural Mexico is made up for the most part 
of villages, whether free or on the estates. I t is not a country 
of isolated rural homes. There is a community life even when 
it is the community llife of quasi-dependents. Oppressed, yet 
enjoying a degree of community life, not long out of pre-
colonial barbarism and savagery and deprived, during the indi-
vidualist dispensation, of the normal life of the Church, the 
peons rose in bloody revolt in many parts of the country. The 
revolt was more intense in the farm-factory regions of the 
sugar and kenequen plantations and in the regions of foreign 
ownership. 

The drive of the revolution in its early stages was for quick 



28 An Introduction to Mexico 

division of the landed estates and the return of the village-lands 
that the Juarez laws had dispersed. In both cases violence 
and the equivalent of confiscation were the practice. Either as 
to ownership or as to violent and confiscatory seizure hardly 
anything else could have ibeen expected. As to ownership the 
collectivist notion of large collective farms, owned and admin-
istered by the government, would hardly enter the minds of the 
plantation laborers or their leaders. The tradition of Mexico 
is all in favor of some form of regulated personal ownership 
and of non-governmental associative life. There was indeed 
talk of the laborers' entering joint rental contracts to adminis-
ter the estates cooperatively and gradually buy them out. But 
this too implies a form both of personal ownership and asso-
ciated life and was, in fact, advocated by the Mexican Catholic 
social movement. 

Vliolence was to be expected. The first revolutionary lead-
ers—Madero, Huerta and Carranza—had no thought of a 
thorough-going social change. They were of the old school. 
But Carranza, himself a large landowner, had to accede to the 
drive for land reform to create his political future. Zapata, a 
people's hero in the south, smaller uprisings nearly all over 
the country, such bandit leaders as Villa, and the Yucatan ex-
perience forced the program of the Carranza government to-
ward land distribution. With the country in anarchy, mass 
seizures of land, whether under the cover of law or not, had 
bfecome common. 

The government in its land program has gone through the 
motions of providing compensation. The assessed value of the 
lands for taxation purposes is, however, taken as the true 
value, although low assessment had been the practice. The 
owners, when paid at all, are paid in almost worthless govern-
ment certificates. All along, too, there has been much seizure 
of estates by political officials for their own personal owner-
ship and use; they have wanted to establish themselves in the 
landed class and have found it easy to attain landed wealth. 

In spite of all the turmoil not much land has been, in fact, 
distributed t o small owners. Limitations still placed on land 
distribution even leave a large part of the people unable to 
obtain farms for themselves. 



29 An Introduction to Mexico 

X I I I 
T H E LABOR MOVEMENT. FOREIGN OWNERSHIP 

T h e second explosion was that of city labor. Their oppres-
sion had been* deep and terrible. I t was, however, less than 
that of farm laborers. Moreover they were fewer. Railroad 
men had already organized but had stood aloof. The Catholic 
labor associations were small and were largely educational, 
religious and insurance organizations. In the spirit of Indi-
vidualism, the laws had put almost insurmountable barriers in 
the way of unions. A small syndicalist group, derived in part 
from the Spanish revolutionary movement and the American 
I WW, existed, but it was more like a group of conspirators. 
I t had revolutionary fervor, however, and had backed Carranza 
and Zapata. As the CROM, a labor federation, it rose to 
power under Calles. 

Strangely an advanced labor code was written into the Con-
stitution without labor pressure or even much labor guidance. 
By some this anomaly is explained as a result of the fact that 
since practically all industrial companies at that time were 
owned and managed by foreigners, a labor code, helping many 
Mexicans and hurting very few, was a part of the general 
drive of "Mexico for the Mexicans." This may have been a 
motive. But the form in which it was couched remains unex-
plained. According to a Catholic lawyer in Mexico City, a 
leading member of the committee that dealt with the labor 
article in the Constitution was a lawyer of the old and antj-
Catholic school. He knew nothing of the subject. He had his 
son secure material on it. His son, a friend of members of the 
Catholic social movement in Mexico City, went to them for 
help. They furnished the program of the Federation of Cath-
olic Labor Associations, mentioned above, and some of the 
voluminous Catholic social writings in Spanish. It was kept 
secret on both sides. The labor article in the Constitution 
shows at any rate signs of such an origin. 

Under the labor article and with the patronage of Obregon 
and especially Calles, the labor movement grew strong. Since 
then labor strength has declined. One administration split the 
movement and tried to keep it quiet. The old CROM has 
suffered much. Labor, in general, is fighting with its back to 
the wall but still has some support from the government. 



30 An Introduction to Mexico 

At the 1904 Catholic Farm Congress the speaker who sum-
marized the meeting emphasized a third explosive situation, 
the continuous growth of foreign ownership, particularly by 
Americans, and its danger to the Mexican masses and the 
middle class. Both Juarez and Diaz had encouraged foreign 
ownership. Mexico was being swallowed up. Its industry, 
banking and trade were, in large part, foreign owned. Its 
lands were falling into foreign hands. Reform of its economic 
life meant action against foreign ownership. Clash With for-
eign governments was thus inevitable. Even regulation of the 
property rights of the foreigners meant a clash. Since many 
of the owners were Americans and since the United States 
had then a policy of trying to represent European governments 
in the Caribbean countries, the clash would center in Mexican-
American relations. 

At first the violence of the revolutionary bands, caused most 
of the difficulty. Then it became the question of the recogni-
tion of a President who had come to power following the assasi-
nation of his predecessor and, as it was charged, a murder 
which he had inspired if not directed. But all along, the third 
stage of the issue was the most important*, it was whether 
American property rights would be free from confiscation or 
even from much regulation. The controversy dragged on for 
years and finally was solved by a compromise. The oil and 
mining companies formed the chief group in the controversy. 
In the long view of things, and even while they suffered consid-
erable losses during the course of the controversy, they seem to 
have been victorious. A second group is the owners of lands. 
Those whose land had been expropriated have received little 
or nothing. But the quantity expropriated has not been great. 

In recent years the economic "revindications" of the revo-
lution so violently fought for have grown less and less. The 
land distribution program has lost intensity. The labor pro-
gram has weakened immeasurably. The foreign Owners are 
still in Mexico. At the same time, certain Mexicans have risen 
in the business and landed world and have done so largely 
through political power. 

Nevertheless the Mexican government still speaks in terms 
of an advancing social revolution. The government is now 
in the midst of a six-year program that in its economic phases 
still emphasizes land distribution, the labor program' and regu-



31 An Introduction to Mexico 

lation of foreign ownership. Far more markedly than in the 
earlier period, it dwells upon farm cooperatives. It speaks be-
sides of organization by industries for economic self-govern-
ment. , The present program realizes far more than the earlier 
one the need pf saving the land through irrigation, improve-
ment of the technique of farming and the development and 
protection of the physical wealth of the country. 

The change t o a social system that will work for the com-
mon good in Mexico still lies, however, in the future. I t may 
come gradually through administration of the present laws and 
changes in them and through the action of economic organiza-
tion. Otherwise Mexico faces sometime another social revo-
lution.. For the social injustice continues. 

XIV 
T H E CHURCH AND SOCIAL CHANGES 

All during the violent part of the revolution, churches were 
being outraged and Bishops and priests attacked. When the 
revolution had in 191.7 reached the point of writing a new Con-
stitution, the old persecuting article of the old Constitution 
was repeated. Amendments, were even added that would still 
further subject the life of the Church to the desires of what-
ever government officials might happen federally and in the 
States to be in power. Partly this .was a carry-over from 
Individualism. Individualist enmity to the Church had all àlong 
persisted. The old Diaz elements were strong in the new revo-
lution ;• Carranza had, been himself a Diaz State-governor and 
was a. landlord. The largest part , of the revolutionary group 
that wrote the Carranza Constitution was political, anti-foreign 
and individualistic (but i n behalf of Mexican aspirants to 
wealth) rather than desirous of a social revolution within the 
country. They had grown up during a generation when the 
Church was despised and under threatened or active persecu-
tion. They had been trained by Masonry. Their course as to 
the Church might have been foretold. 

Neither did those leaders of the revolution who wanted it 
to mean social change think of the Church as their possible 
friend. They probably knew nothing of the Catholic meet-
ings under Diaz, They probably did not think that the village-
lands .whose restoration they fought for were of Catholic inr 



32 An Introduction to Mexico 

spiration. Under the competition of machine-made goods and 
the legal ban, the old guild structure had almost wholly col-
lapsed. They knew little of the early colonial fight for an 
Indian civilization. Most of them knew nothing of the Cath-
olic Labor Federation's program for minimum wages, unions, 
profit sharing, workers' ownership, social insurance and land 
distribution—a program issued when Madero, the politico, was 
still in power, months before the first State law on land distri-
bution, two years before the first federal law and four years 
before the Constitutional provisions on land and labor were 
adopted. 

If they knew of all of these or any of them, still the cumu-
lative impression in theiir minds was that the Church was 
against a social change. The experience of the revolutionary 
period was fresh in their minds. In the early part of this 
period the method of getting land was either outright and vio-
lent seizure or at best something verging on violence. All 
along reasonable compensation has been lacking. The Church 
is against both violence and confiscation. Opposition to vio-
lence and confiscation would be thought to be, and certainly 
could be made out to be, opposition to land distribution itself. 
The new labor movement in its early stages was likewise vio-
lent and much given to syndicalist terms and even ideas. 

On the side of the chief Church spokesman there was doc-
trinaire silence about the restoration of the village-lands sys-
tem. There was a hesitation to advocate land distribution to 
the limits of Catholic social teaching, which would have gone 
much farther than the terms of the Constitution. There was 
an insistence on trying, in rivalry with the existing unions, to 
establish Catholic labor unions out of the old labor associa-
tions. Moreover, the matter of foreign ownership and the 
status of the oil and mining industries was neglected. 

The cleavage was thus widened between the social revolution 
and the Church in Mexico. Yet the earlier violent seizures of 
property were declining. In time it could be expected that 
a satisfactory form of payment would be worked out for ex-
propriated lands. The labor movement was stabilizing itself. 
The Catholic labor union was very weak. The influence of 
the Church was slight. In the main there was Catholic agree-
ment with the economic aims of the revolution. There was 
thus no reason in the social revolution for a feud between gov-



33 An Introduction to Mexico 

ernment and Church, as there had been reason under the old 
Individualism. Friendship should have come soon. Yet in 
1926 the government launched a new blow at the Church that 
threatened its very life. 

XV 

T H E PERSECUTION 

What was the cause for the new persecution? The Arch-
bishop of Mexico City had indeed just given an interview to a 
Mexican newspaper man in which he said that the Bishops 
were still in favor, as of course they would be, of trying to 
change the persecuting features of the Constitution. The in-
terview was, in fact, an act of charity of an old man to a re-
porter who had been ill and was being paid on commission and 
in need of money. I t was not an announcement at a time, when 
the oil controversy with the United States was feverish, of an 
immediate campaign of the Mexican bishops to amend the 
Constitution. The Mexican secret service undoubtedly knew 
this. Yet the federal government took this occasion to launch 
a persecution. From the social-economic point of view, which 
the revolution proclaimed was its sole purpose, the persecution 
had no valid reason. The Church was on the side of the main 
economic aims of the revolution, if not all its methods. Cath-
olic organizations had advocated those aims back in the Diaz 
period and in the Madero period; and violent taking of land 
was declining. Those leaders of the government who wanted 
the revolution to serve the people did indeed think that the 
Church was the enemy of the revolution. But the Church was 
weak. Moreover had they thought a little, inquired but a 
little, they would have changed their minds as to the social 
teaching of the Church. In December 1924, the Archbishop 
of Mexico City had publicly endorsed the earlier programs of 
the Catholic meetings. 

Politically the 1926 persecution seems to have been a 
jockeying by the Obregon and Agrarista factions in the Calles 
government for importance in administering the revolutionary 
laws in order to retain power and pave the way to a second elec-
tion of Obregon. Of two factions one was "agrarian" and for 
Obregon and the other was a labor faction. The labor faction 



34 An Introduction to Mexico 

In Z Zrg'- 0 r g a n i 2 m S * * * city labor and farm labor. 
In the agrarian field its organizations were leading in é more 

e s s v i o l e n t ™ r e permanent d e v d o p m e n T S 
S J w . n » 1 ^ ^ a g a i n s t . t . h e o l d C T chaotic and unorganized 

agrarian seizure or petitioning. Its power in the city labor 

I I i S fZSt STeme- T h e c a b i n e t o f f i c e r s administering 
the land labor, oil mining and foreign-ownership clauses of 
the Constitution were of the labor faction. This was the whole 
social part of the revolution. There was nothingTeft for the 
upon i f ° U P W i t h C X C e p t t h e C h u r c h c l a u s e - They seized 

, Within the Calles cabinet it was the Agrarista faction which 
administered the persecution. From that date began t h e r a S d 
decline of the land, labor and foreign-ownership phLes of fhe 

ztr<- D r r a c y had> indeed> 
S S Z S S * r r e d e f i n i t e l y the forms of the Z Z 

a n d P ° l i t i c a l dictatorships, 
corruption the rise of politicians to wealth, and the conscious 
or unconscious use of persecution and a school p r o ^ a m to mask 
the failure to continue the social changes. T w ? e l e m e i ï ^ 
men usmgffipolitical office for personal S t h and men S w to Îhetonf'TÏ M " " t h C Ch^h-came more and 3?| 
tothe front The Mexican equivalent of Kluxism, which had 

¿ S S u I l y r r t U r e d u n ^ e r Diaz and Juarez'and indeed 
most of their predecessors, when an irremediable conflict was 
waged between the Church and pagan Individualism now 
ruled Mexico when the social changes which the revolution 
proclaimed were save for the methods used) full I the stream 
of Catholic social teaching. From the beginning of the r e v " 
ution there had been many (witness C a r r a r a and, p e r h a p s ' f e 
argest part of the Constitutional Convention) who paid only 

lip service to social justice and who were children in nearly 
every sense of the nineteenth century. Now the old anti-
religious hatred became sovereign. And the school that guided 
them, as it guided the nineteenth century: régime was the 
Masonry of Individualism and Secularism 

The persecution began and continued. I t should never 
should have soon ended. I t c o n t i n u é u n S 

the 1929 modus vivendi and began , àgain in 1932 ' Yet to 
speak of a persecution beginning and subsiding and starting 
again is to speak relatively. The persecution has been con-



35 An Introduction to Mexico 

tinuous; it existed before 1926 and after 1929; it has varied 
simply in intensity and in the backing given it by the central 
government. Its chief recent elements have been a drastic and 
outrageous limitation of the number of priests in the States, 
the actual prohibition of religious education and anti-religious 
education in all schools. Just now no one sees its ending. But 
it has to end and when it ends the process of creating a Chris-
tian. civilization will continue and the Church will go on being 
the teacher of its principles and the inspirer of them. 

. Under the 1917 Constitution (Art. 130), the States are to 
determine the maximum number of priests "according to the 
needs of each locality." Another Article guarantees the right 
of a person "to practice all ceremonies, devotions or observ-
ances of his creed, either in: places of public worship or at 
homey"; (Art. .24). Fourteen States have violated the latter 
Article to the extent of riot permitting even one priest to serve. 
Oyer 35,000 cities,-towns and villages in these fourteen States 
wholly lack religious care save from priests in hiding. In no 
other .State is the permitted number of priests-anything but 
inadequate.. Perhaps the best is Morelos; forty priests are 
allowed for its 223. communities, in which live a population of 
132,723. Aguascalientes allows two for 443 communities and 
132,900 people; Durango allows two for 1,69.1 communities and 
493,530 people;- Hidalgo, allows five for 667,000 people and 
2,481 communities;. Michoacan allows thirty-three for 4,994 
communities and Over a million people. There is no reasonable 
conclusion possible. save that even the Constitution is here 
broken. ; "The. needs of each, locality" in order that everyone 
may "practice all ceremonies, devotions or observances of his 
creed" are not the criterion of the law,.. When the best condi-
tion is.that;forty priests have to care for 223 communities— 
one priest to eight communities—and when others range from 
eighty communities to one priest, to 800 to 1, and fourteen 
States allow no priest to function whatsoever, the situation is 
plainly an attack on freedom of religion.1 

1 N O T E or T H E E D I T O R S : A S this is going to press the news from 
Mexico tells of "a partial alleviation of the situation of the Church" in 
the midst of a great increase in the drive to accomplish the social side of 
the Mexican program. Since 1926 the reverse, as this report shows, has 
been true; the Church was being persecuted more as the social part of 
the changes was declining. The situation is still, however, very much 
in the balance. 



36 An Introduction to Mexico 

XVI 
ILLITERACY. INDIANISM 

¿ S t t } 1 « ® • m 
n i n e t e ^ h w-nt1i r v T d o u b t t h a t t h e individualist nineteenth century, as well as demoralizing the Mexican m 3 W « 

m i L d a
e c v s T t ti r r n o m i c hai i ™ 

illiteracy. It had deprived the Church schools of their cu^tZ 
mary means of support and had failed to e L b l i s h [ n 
s ea d a comparable system of secular e d u c a S n The Cath SeSTdt^PS ?Tod had pointed to the Mm 
country A , t f c a d v o c a t e d a new system of schools for the 
country. As the persecution waned and as the money system 
of economy permitting support from tuition fees, grew c S 
ohe schools had grown in the Diaz period. Bu f h e Churdi 
did not do enough. Moreover it was hard pressed; a priest in 

f o r e
k

x a m P ^ , arranged for a parish organlzat on o 
a school S h ° P I ° r d e r t 0 g C t f u n d s t 0 build and Support 
r , , J ? U F i n g t h e f a r l i e r P®™6 o f t h e revolution, the educational 
program was alternately encouraged and s t a g e d The S v 
eminent recently has turned more consistently S the promo 

X ? lM i f f e ^ a the P-hibitUof c S X 
ffil S P ® ! t has been trying to enforce what is called 
Socialist education. Some of the disillusioned friends of he 
Mexican revolution see both in the so-called SocialisTeducat on 
thne m i n d s e o f T h r U t i T , a -quieting c o m j S n s S iS me minds of the revolutionary leaders both for a failure to S 
rii'fwSV vTo m i c aims of.revoiuti°n h I B M 
r f Y e l m a country in which the families of the 
Church-haters are Catholics (Obregon sending to Arkona or 
his fiance s parish priest, who had been exiled by Obreionhim 
sdf, to celebrate his marriage; the Sacrament of C o n £ a r i o n 
administered privately in the home and at the r e q u e s t a 
high government official by a Bishop who was "in hiding" from 
he same official; a government official withdrawing his 3 

from a Catholic school just before he closed it oW P esident 
Diaz never stepping foot in a church in Mexico and t E f S h i s O W n P r f v a t e chaplain; Ca fe taken 
to a Catholic hospital in Los Angeles and having holy p i c S 



37 An Introduction to Mexico 

in his home: so the stories have it), vagaries of all sorts can 
be expected. 

Their combining what is called Socialist education with 
anti-religious education may be in part due to their own par-
tial betrayal of the aims of the revolution. Still one wonders 
whether the stronger reason is that they are turning to what 
they call Sociaist education in the hope of rearing a generation 
of Mexicans who will finish what they have hardly begun. 

From what can be learned, the "Socialist" education is a 
combination of anti-religious education, some of the maunder-
ings of pedagogy mixed with good pedagogy, and an emphasis 
on social obligations in economic life. I t is in part vicious, in 
part atheist, in part good. The social philosophy is not Social-
ist but social on a humanitarian and anti-religious basis. Given 
a different basis the social-economic aim would be not only not 
anti-Catholic but eminently Catholic. The social nature of all 
economic activity and of economic rights in work and prop-
erty is a thoroughly Catholic idea. 

In Mexico it commonly happens that even those who think 
they are not Catholics and are avowedly anti-Catholic cannot 
escape the influence of the fight waged and, then, partially lost 
by the Church to create a Catholic civilization. When the 
Church-haters talk of the social nature of property, when they 
glorify the possibilities of the old Indian stock of Mexico, when 
they are fired with anger at oppression and now at a largely 
thwarted social change, they draw their inspiration from their 
own Catholic heritage and environment. The dignity of all 
men in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic brotherhood of all 
men are ingrained in their souls. They cannot escape the 
effects of the early effort at temporary and regulated trustee-
ships which left its mark even on its tragic successor, the sys-
tem of landed estates. They cannot escape the effect of the 
village-lands, the small farms in many parts of the country, 
the associative life, the missions. They cannot escape the long 
Catholic generations going to Mass, receiving the sacraments, 
celebrating their holy days. 

To recount the lingering traces of the old Indian paganism 
in Mexico, an American wrote a book, Idols Behind Altars. 
There are such traces, of course, more strongly marked here, 
less marked there: after fifteen centuries of Catholicity there 
are still the old pagan fairies in Ireland; Emerson turned from 



38 An Introduction to Mexico 

imageless Puritanism to Pantheism; pagan gods were still wor-
shiped in the the early Middle Ages; Satan worship is not yet 
dead; witch-burning and witch-hanging had a recrudescence 
after the Reformation; spiritualism is a religion today. The 
more important truth is not the traces of paganism but that 
even the anti-Catholics are partially Catholics; there are "altars 
behind idols." Apart from their vagaries, they want what the 
Church wants because the Church wants it and because the 
Church has inspired them to want it; but they think that the 
real source of their inspiration is against them and they fight 
their natural ally and spiritual and moral leader. Here is the 
greatest tragedy of modern Mexico—not the tragedy of the 
persecuted, pitiful as it is, but the tragedy of the persecutors. 

XVII 

T H E F U T U R E 

In a country so young and so recently out of pre-colonial 
pagan barbarism and savagery a person has to expect extremes 
of good and evil, failures and false starts, swirling turrents and 
backwaters, saints and men like that early European Count 
Baldwin who had hoped and planned during a lifetime of war, 
rapine and licentiousness to die a monk in a monastery that he 
himself had built and who did indeed so die. The quick for-
mation of a whole civiization in Mexico, completely Catholic, 
was doomed by the very nature of the case. But the process 
goes on. The partial defeat of the Church, the tacit accept-
ance of much of that defeat, the dry-rot that set in, the indus-
trial-individualist crisis and the long subjection of the Church 
are none of them permanent. The Church teaches the way to 
live as well as the way to die; the way to civilization as well 
as the way to heaven. The technique of civilization is not for 
the Church to dictate. But the spirit and principles of civi-
ization belong to it. 

The social revolution has demanded schools and the end of 
illiteracy. The schools should be non-religious, the revolution 
has said; and here the revolution has clashed again with the 
Church and with nearly all tradition, even the pagan. Nor is 
it only that the Church wants its right respected to educate 
in its own schools. I t is against non-religious education in the 



39 An Introduction to Mexico 

public schools,, as well, and superlatively against the anti-
religious education. 

Mexico is still Catholic although the process of demoraliza-
tion goes on apace. And when the Church returns, Bishops, 
priests and laity will have the opportunity to join in all the 
good of the Mexican revolution, its land distribution, its farm 
cooperatives, its labor standards enforced by law, its labor 
organizations, its recent turn toward a fully organized economic 
life, its land development and agricultural education program, 
its emphasis on education in social obligations, its opposition 
to economic rule by foreigners, its development of an art and 
culture in keeping with the Mexican genius and many other 
of its aims. The Pastoral Letter of the Mexican Hierarchy 
(1935) entitled "Liberty for the Church—Work of the Church 
for Social Betterment," is an indication of what is in mind. 

Yet it will be hard to grasp the opportunity. The follow-
ers of the revolution will be suspicious. Memories of the per-
secution will stand in the way of a full-hearted acceptance of 
the good in the new program. The great landowners, even 
those who rose to the aristocracy through ownership of the con-
fiscated Church endowments will try as they have done from 
the beginning to deflect Catholic policy from allegiance to a 
Catholic civilization. I t will be no short and placid sailing. 

X V I I I 
AMERICAN POLITICAL I N F L U E N C E 

Waves of strange thought will beat always on Mexico from 
a world that is trying, often in wrong ways, to establish the 
elements of civilization in a machine society. Mexico joined 
in the mistaken ways that the world followed in the nine-
teenth century. She suffered for it and is now trying to fight 
the bad past. There will be continuous temptation to join 
every future world movement, whatever its nature. The great 
difficulty always will lie in how to take the actual good from 
the rest of the world, which will consist chiefly of greater 
knowledge and of new ways and means of action, and how to 
pass it through the Mexcan genius and the Catholic view of 
life. We, her next-door neighbor, will be the most open both 
to helping her and hurting her. Thus far we have done far 
from well. 



40 An Introduction to Mexico 

Poinsett, the first American minister to Mexico, introduced 
Masonic lodges of the York rite. Against the dominant Scotch 
rite lodges he interfered for several years in the York lodges 
on the side of those who favored a loose federal govern-
ment. This was, he held, an advocacy of American principles. 
But a federal government also served to oppose British influ-
ence, and especially served to weaken Mexican control over the 
northern border-country which twenty years later, because of 
this, became more easily ours. Poinsett, the meddling minister, 
is not forgotten in Mexico. 

Poinsett's interference set a precedent in the myriad changes 
of Mexican politics. One outstanding case at the beginning of 
the Mexican War was the agreement with Santa Ana for safe 
passage to Mexico and its Presidency in exchange for a promise 
to treat liberally with the United States over the annexation of 
Texas and California. Another was the agreement with 
Juarez's representatives in 1859 to give him recognition as 
President in return for a promise of still more territory, per-
petual rights-of-way across the Mexican isthmus, passageways 
from the border to the west coast and much land to American 
railway builders—an agreement that later developed into an 
astounding treaty with him, which our Senate fortunately re-
jected, providing for a protectorate. Another was the recog-
nition withheld from Huerta early in the present revolutionary 
period. 

In the first two cases we interfered clearly for imperialistic 
purposes. In the third case we had, indeed, a horror of recog-
nizing as President a man whom we charged with murdering 
his predecessor; but Huerta was also thought to lean toward 
the British oil companies and against ours and this influ-
enced the decision against him. In all three cases our recogni-
tion and help apparently determined who should be President. 
And in the aid given Juarez, a particularly vicious blow was 
struck for an added and sincere, but cruel, unjust and stupid 
reason. 

It might seem that there could be fewer things worse than 
interfering in a neighbor's political life to further our imperial-
ism and enhance the profit of our citizens. A worse thing was 
the additional motive of our action. The man who dealt first 
with Juarez stated it: "The maintenance of the Liberalists in 
power," he said, "is an object worthy of the ardent moral co-



41 An Introduction to Mexico 

operation of our government." In a report that tells of 
promises made to aid our economic and political imperialism 
this may appear hypocritical. But there is no reason to think 
he was not sincere. He spoke the American mind of that time. 
The "Liberalists" who were worthy of our ardent moral co-
operation were the ardent exponents of competitive Indi-
vidualism. 

X I X 
T H E EFFECTS 

Taking territory and seeking to put Mexico under a protec-
torate was not so bad as trying to violate the Mexican soul 
and crush the growth of a Catholic civilization. We had the 
excuse of the dry-rot in the old régime, its establishment of an 
oppressive landed aristocracy and its hesitancy to adopt even 
the good in the nineteenth century life. The extreme individ-
ualist faction inside Mexico had the same excuse. Mexico her-
self would have dealt, even if slowly, with these matters. Yet 
we, foreigners, felt it our duty to be big brother to Mexico 
and for the profit of our citizens lead it into the path we were 
treading. That the Church stood against Individualism in 
Mexico was merely further proof of the righteousness of our 
cause. I t bothered us none that Juarez, our favorite, should 
have stripped worship, education and charity of their endow-
ments. For the Catholic Church, it was said, was always 
against progress. Besides the Catholic Church was not Prot-
estant. It was even Spanish. The Catholic religion, certainly 
or at least probably, had to be stripped of influence in the 
country if Mexico was to progress I We were convinced that 
progress meant material development through Individualism. 

We stood on the side of the man, Juarez, who completed 
the process of forming an individualistic governmental struc-
ture in Mexico so as to break the old village-land system, weak-
en or destroy the associative life of the villages and cities and 
open the door wide to a businessmen's society in Mexico. We 
knew that our citizens would be high among the economic 
rulers of the country. And so it happened. Railroads, oil, 
metals, refining and smelting, power plants and utilities, cattle, 
sugar, fibers, rubber and coffee estates and some manufactur-
ing came to be owned by Americans. The Civil War, revolu-
tions against Juarez, and the French effort to establish Maxi-



42 An Introduction to Mexico 

milian as emperor prevented much investment until the late 
seventies. Investment grew slowly until the nineties. I t 
jumped from half a billion to over a billion and a half from 
1902 to 1912. We owned then 78 per cent of the mines, 72 
per, cent of the smelters, 58 per cent of the oil, and 68 per cent 
of the rubber; and what we did not own of these, other for-
eigners generally owned. 

We helped Mexico's economic development. But we did 
so in the typically individualist style. We first helped to 
change Mexico's governmental structure to one that would pre-
vent much governmental intervention in economic life. We 
then secured concessions and property rights, often in shady 
ways (as shady as the ways in which the wealth of our own 
country was at the same time falling into a few hands). 
Finally we sought to keep our emigrant capital a legal citizen 
of the United States. 

Sub-soil rights, for example, under traditional Spanish law 
belong to the community. Diaz transferred much oil land into 
simple ownership. When in the revolution Mexico tried to re-
gain the earlier concept that these rights are a matter of 
limited concession, our government hastened to help our in-
vestors and all foreign owners. Our credit power and our 
power over the import of arms gradually put the Mexican gov-
ernment where it had to compromise vitally upon its program. 

Embargoes on arms, under the circumstances, have made 
the Mexican government almost a protectorate of ours. Time 
after time the prevention of arms shipments into Mexico, ex-
cept to the government, has maintained the present group in 
power. 

X X 
OUR INFLUENCE—GOOD AND BAD 

Geography has made the United States Mexico's greatest 
danger and greatest potential help. French writings, American 
political influence and British trade, all shared in foreign pres-
sure during the early period of the nineteenth century. Ameri-
can influence in all three fields has since then grown steadily. 
Our political influence has become paramount. Our economic 
power has easily become first. American thought and writings 
have grown immeasurably in influence. 

The currents are many. Never since the first generation 



43 An Introduction to Mexico 

of Spanish domination, and then only in the official policy and 
in the Church, has there been such confidence in Indian great-
ness and such a determination to create an essentially Mexi-
can civilization. But then it was to be a Catholic Mexican civi-
lization. Strong elements in that tradition persist even among, 
one might say, especially among, the avowed anti-Catholics 
who proclaim that the Faith and its servants are their enemy. 
But along with our general influence in Mexico upon styles, 
architecture, food and movie morals, the influence upon the 
very propagandists of a new and native civilization, which has 
been exercised by our own American rebels to American life 
has been considerable. 

The ideas borrowed from the United States are chiefly in 
matters of technique, in that cowardly philosophy of technique, 
pragmatism, and in real or false science. But to Mexican 
minds mere technique and a timid philosophy of experiment are 
unsatisfactory. Methods in pedagogy and the pragmatical ap-
proach suffer, therefore, a change when they reach the Mexican 
cactus. The effect seems to be an over-emphasis on the new, 
an exaggeration of the role of teacher and a sloughing off of 
the experimental approach. 

In Mexico's six-year Plan, inaugurated in 1934, we find 
this: "Primary schools, in addition to excluding all religious 
teaching, shall furnish a true scientific and rational answer to 
each and all of these questions which must be solved in 
the mind of pupils, in order that they may form an exact and 
positive conception of the world surrounding them and of the 
society in which they live; otherwise the school would fail in 
its social mission." In other words, there is no God but science 
and the teacher in the primary grades knows all the answers. 
In a preceding paragraph of the Plan it is said that "the teach-
ings . . . must be those set by the State." The result is a 
strange hybrid, a union of State and science under the State. 
Since the teacher answers all questions and cannot conceivably 
answer them right, there is, and must be expected to be, much 
distortion in education and much denial of the best in Mexican 
life. Vicious fancies of naturalistic schools of pedagogy, long 
exploded elsewhere, become the word of science and of the 
primary teachers, and then enter the life of the Mexican vil-
lagers, whom the government has committed, itself to save and 
now through this education would still further demoralize. 



44 An Introduction to Mexico 

Both the new knowledge and an experimental approach, 
when guided by right standards, are necessary. The chief diffi-
culty is a lack or a confusion or a borrowing of standards (the 
very weakness of pragmatism), or a lapse into the old pagan 
standards. 

But we have also helped Mexico. The advice given the 
Mexican labor movement by the American Federation of Labor 
has helped to stabilize it. The experience of United States 
Catholics with Individualism and material advance, uncompli-
cated by persecution, has served several times to help Mexican 
Catholics to distinguish between the good and the bad. Oppo-
sition to armed intervention by the United States, expressed 
both publicly and privately by friends of Mexico or merely by 
enemies of imperialism, has several times prevented or delayed 
such intervention. Our government has been most kind to 
Mexico's religious exiles. Yet our influence has been in the 
main bad, including the direct efforts, however slight in effect, 
to turn Mexico to those Protestant sects most compatible with 
competitive industrialism. 

X X I 

T H E P R E S E N T 

Ironically, considering our long reputation, it was an 
American Ambassador, Dwight W. Morrow, who paved the 
way for the agreement on the modus vivendi of 1929 between 
the Mexican government and the Church. During the present 
resurgence of persecution Catholics of the United States, in 
sympathy and knowing well the bad record of our govern-
ment both in partially creating the very conditions that have 
permitted persecution and in maintaining the present group in 
power, have asked our government to help end the presecu-
tion. Ambassador Daniels' undiscriminating praise of the 
Mexican government's educational system, a center of persecu-
tion and irreligion, has brought continued attacks upon him. 
What he said made it seem as if our government favored the 
persecution, an impression which at this stage of our national 
development seems unquestionably false. In the light both of 
the good and the bad in our past record, it appears that our 
government should again do something to overcome the perse-
cution there. Wilson, for example, once exacted a promise of 



45 An Introduction to Mexico 

religious liberty from Carranza's representative as a condition 
of diplomatic recognition. It can act the more readily be-
cause there is no intrinsic opposition between government and 
Church. 

The hope of Mexico remains the Catholic Church and a 
growth of Catholic national life. This persecution is but an 
interlude. The life of the Church will go on, as indeed it has 
gone on, to a degree even during the persecution. Baptizing, 
confirming, saying Mass, hearing Mass, receiving Penance and 
Holy Communion, marrying and rearing families, learning the 
truths of the Faith, receiving a Catholic education, celebrating 
the holy days, dying in the Faith, will go on. The dignity 
of a man and the brotherhood of all, without exception, will be 
inculcated directly and by the example of an all-inclusive Faith 
and worship. 

Mexico still has to undergo its economic reform on the land, 
in the factory and in relation to the foreigner. The Church 
will be its friend. Unthreatened by persecution, undominated 
by a remote monarchy, not tramelled by a local aristocracy and 
able to draw strength and guidance from a Catholic world no 
longer so 'beleaguered, the Church in Mexico can and will be 
the moral and spiritual leader in the establishment of an eco-
nomic system that will serve the common good of the people of 
Mexico. The persons engineering the social change in Mexico 
have already learned from the Church that the resources, 
physical and human, of a country should serve the good of all; 
that along with individual rights the natural community life of 
people in their work is a first agency of the common good; 
and that government is to be used freely, but not as the sole 
agency, for social justice. Limited rights, association, and gov-
ernment action are parts of that natural law on which the 
Catholic life is based. 

The organization that the Church in Mexico has estab-
lished to band the laity together for Catholic work is called 
Catholic Action. Its work is in the realm of the spiritual and 
of education of laymen and laywomen so that they will know 
and love and work for a Catholic life and civilization. The 
growth of a Catholic civilization in Mexico will, in large part, 
depend upon the laity united in this general organization. 
They will take up the old task that Catholics undertook at the 
beginning and that, in spite of failures, of dry-rot, of the intro-



46 An Introduction to Mexico 

duction of nineteenth century idiocies, of persecution and of 
defamation, has been shouldered all the time. Their native 
and unassuming heroism is on their side. The most closely 
corresponding Catholic organization in the United States, the 
National Catholic Welfare Conference, can be of help. Cath-
olics of the United States seem to have as their special future 
role that of helping Catholics in Mexico to distinguish between 
the good and the bad in the thought and practice of that mod-
ern world which in large part reaches Mexico through the 
United States. 

APPENDIX A 
N. C. W. C. STUDY CLUB OUTLINE 

(Printed with Approval of the N. C. W. C. Study Club Committee) 
Lesson I 

T H E B E G I N N I N G S . (Sections I-IV) 
T O P I C S TOR D I S C U S S I O N 

1. The two presuppositions (Section I ) . 2. The inspiration respon-
sible for the good elements in Spanish colonization (Section I ) . 3. The 
central aim (Section I I ) . 4. The "prejudices" preventing the realization 
of aims (Section I I ) . 5. The Quiroga program (Section I I I ) . 6. Com-
parisons of the Quiroga program with current programs (Section I I I ) . 
7. The clue of Religion (Section I V ) . 

PAPERS 

1. The New Laws of the Indies. 
2. The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

Lesson II 
T H E D E C L I N E . INDIVIDUALISM. (Sections V-VII) 

T O P I C S TOR D I S C U S S I O N 

1. The establishment of a, kind of Indian vassalage: its reasons (Sec-
tion V). 2. The difference between later colonial Mexico and our old 
Slave South (Section V). 3. Mixed good and evil in Mexico (Sections V, 
V I ) . 4. Factors in the development of Mexican architecture (Section V I ) . 
S. How Individualism came to Mexico (Section V I I ) . 6. Individualism 
versus morality (Section V I I ) . 7. The influence of foreign trade on 
Mexico (Section V I I ) . 8. Mexico's acceptance of a material change in its 
consequences (Section V I I ) . 

PAPERS 

1. Individualism (or "Liberalism") as described in Pope Pius X I ' s 
"Reconstructing the Social Order." 

2. Review of "Latin America and the United States," Catholic Asso-
ciation for International Peace, Washington, D. C. 



47 An Introduction to Mexico 

Lesson III 
T H E INDIVIDUALIST PERSECUTION o r T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . 

(Sections VIII-X) 
T O P I C S FOR D I S C U S S I O N 

1. The doctrinal opposition of Individualism and the Church (Section 
VIII). 2. Business failure and increased opposition to the Church (Sec-
tion VIII). 3. "A wealthy Church" (Section VIII). 4. Persecution (Sec-
tion I X ) . 5. Unpreparedness of the Church (Section I X ) . 6. Social 
Effects of Individualism (Section I X ) . 7. Indian "primitivism" (Section 
X ) . 8. The world depression as affecting the possibility of viewing 
Mexico more objectively (Section X ) . 

PAPERS 
1. Review one of these three books in the light of Section X : 

"Mexico, a Study of the Two Americas," Stuart Chase. 
"Idols Behind Altars," Anita Brenner. 
"Mexico and Its Heritage," Emest Gruening. 

Lesson IV 
T H E C A T H O L I C REACTION TO INDIVIDUALISM:. (Section X I ) 

T O P I C S FOR D I S C U S S I O N 
1. Early twentieth century meetings. 2. Effects of persecution upon 

the Church's work against social injustice. 3. Comparison of program 
with current programs in the United States. 4. The charge of the Church 
being "reactionary." ' 

PAPERS 
1. Mexican Social Conditions on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution. 
2. The Diaz Régime. 

Lesson V 
T H E R E V O L U T I O N . (Sections X I I - X n i ) 

T O P I C S FOR D I S C U S S I O N 
1. A political revolution changing to a social revolution (Section 

X I I I ) . 2. The main trend as non-socialist (Section X I I ) . 3. Land pro-
gram and effects (Section X I I ) . 4. Labor program and effects (Section 
X I I I ) . 5. Foreign ownership program and effects (Section X I I I ) . 
6. Possible future revolutions (Section X I I I ) . 

PAPER 
1. Review of Tannenbaum's "Mexican Agrarian Revolution." 

Lesson VI 
T H E PERSECUTION. (Sections XIV-XV) 

T O P I C S FOR D I S C U S S I O N 
1. The "Individualists" in the revolution and their idea of the Church 

(Section XIV). 2. The idea of those who wanted social change (Sec-
tion XIV). 3. The Church and violence (Section XV). 4. Hesitancies 



48 An Introduction to Mexico 

of Church leaders on certain points (Section X V ) . 5. The eve of the 
1926 persecution. 6. How the 1926 persecution began. 7. Extent of the 
present persecution. 8, Very recent changes. 

PAPERS 
1. The Mexican Federal and State Laws Against the Church. 
2. Reviews of the following: 

Pastoral Letters of the Mexican Bishops. 
"Blood-Drenched Altars," Most Rev. Francis C. Kelley. 
"Chaos in Mexico," Charles S. MacFarland. 
N. C. W. C. Pamphlets on Mexico. 

Lesson VII 
EDUCATION. T H E F U T U R E . (Sections XVI-XVII) 

T O P I C S FOR. DISCUSSION 
1. Illiteracy (Section X V I ) . 2. "Socialist" education (Section X V I ) . 

3. Anti-Catholic "Catholics" (Section X V I I ) . 4. When the persecution 
ends (Section X V I I ) . 

PAPER 

1. Comparison of the main lines of the Mexican revolutionary program 
with the Catholic program in Section X . 

Lesson VIII 
AMERICAN POLITICAL AND E C O N O M I C I N F L U E N C E . ( S e c t i o n s X V I I I - X I X ) 

T O P I C S FOR. DISCUSSION 

1. Poinsett and Mexican loss of our Southwest (Section X V I I I ) . 
2. Our action at critical moments in Mexican history (Section X V I I I ) . 
3. Our relation to Juarez, champion of Mexican Individualism (Section 
X V I I I ) . 4. United States economic penetration in 1912 (Section X I X ) . 
5. Action since 1912 (Section X I X ) . 6. Embargoes on arms (Section 
X I X ) . 

PAPER 

1. Review of some book on United States-Mexico relations in past 
twenty-five years. 

Lesson IX 
SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL I N F L U E N C E . (Sections X X - X X I ) 

T O P I C S FOR DISCUSSION 
1. American influence on Mexican education (Section X X ) . 2. Good 

influence (Section X X ) . 3. The United States government and the pres-
ent persecution (Section X X ) . 4. The future and the Church (Section 
X X I ) . 5. Organized Catholic laity in Mexico (Section X X I ) . 6. Cath-
olics of the United States and Catholic Missions (Section X X I ) . 

PAPER 

1. Hopes of Religious Peace in Mexico. 



THE Catholic Association for International Peace has grown 
out of a series of meetings during 1926-1927. Following 

the Eucharistic Congress in Chicago in 1926, representatives of 
a dozen nations met with Americans for discussion. In October 
of the same year a meeting was held in Cleveland where a 
temporary organization called The Catholic Committee on In-
ternational Relations was formed. The permanent name, The 
Catholic Association for International Peace, was adopted at a 
two-day Conference in Washington in 1927. Annual Confer-
ences were held in the same city in 1928, 1929, 1930, 1933, 
1934 and 1935; in New York City, 1931; and in Cleveland, 
1932. All-day regional Conferences took place in Chicago on 
Armistice Day, 1930; in St. Louis on Washington's Birthday, 
1932; at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, 
on November 19, 1933; at Marquette University, Milwaukee, 
Wisconsin, on November 25, 1934; College of Notre Dame of 
Maryland, Baltimore, February 9, 1935; Villanova College, 
Villanova, Pennsylvania, May 25, 1935; and at the University 
of Detroit, November 10, 1935. It is a membership organiza-
tion. Its objects and purposes are: 

To study, disseminate and apply the principles of natural law and 
Christian charity to international problems of the d a y ; 

To consider the moral and legal aspects of any action which may 
be proposed or advocated in the international sphere; 

To examine and consider issues which bear upon international 
goodwill; 

To encourage the formation of conferences, lectures and study 
circles; 

To issue reports on questions of international importance; 
To further, in cooperation with similar Catholic organizations in 

other countries, in accord with the teachings of the Church, the 
object and purposes of world peace and happiness. 

The ultimate purpose is to promote, in conformity with the mind 
of the Church, "The Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." 

The Association works through the preparation of commit-
tee reports. Following careful preparation, these are discussed 
both publicly and privately in order to secure able revision and 
they are then published by the organization. Additional com-
mittees will be created from time to time. The Association 
solicits the membership and cooperation of Catholics of like 
mind. It is seeking especially the membership and cooperation 
of those whose experience and studies are such that they can 
take part in the preparation of committee reports. 

The Committees on Ethics, Law and Organization, and 
Economic Relations serve as a guiding committee on the par-
ticular questions for all other committees. Questions involving 
moral judgments must be submitted to the Committee on 
Ethics. 



Publications of the Catholic Associa-
tion for International Peace 

Pamphlet S e r i e s — 
No. 1—International Ethics. 
No. 2—Latin America a n d the United States. 
No. 3—Causes of W a r , a n d Security, Old and New. 
No. 4—Haiti, P a s t and P r e s e n t (out of print). 
No. 5—Francis de Vitoria (out of print). 
No. 6—American Agriculture a n d International Affairs. 
No. 7—Puerto Rico and the United States. 
No. 8—Europe and the United States—Elements in Their 

Relationship. 
No. 9—The E t h i c s of W a r . 
No. 10—National Attitudes in Children. 
No. 11—Tariffs a n d W o r l d Peace. 
No. 12—Manchuria—The Problem in the F a r E a s t . 
No. 13—International Economic Life. 
No. 14—The Church and Peace Efforts. 
No. IS—War and Peace in St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei. 
No. 16—Peace Education in Catholic Schools. 
No. 17—Peace Action of Benedict X V . 
No. 18—Relations Between F r a n c e and Italy. 
No. 19—Catholic Organization for Peace in Europe. 
No. 20—The United States and the Dominican Republic. 
No. 21—An Introduction t o Mexico. 

Miscellaneous S e r i e s — 
T h e W o r l d State. 
Appeals for Peace of P o p e Benedict X V and Pope Pius X I . 
Peace T r e n d s . 
Syllabus on International Relations. 
Argentina—Land of the Eucharistic Congress, 1934. 
P e r m a n e n t Peace P r o g r a m of P o p e Benedict X V . 

Reports i n P r e p a r a t i o n — 
Nationalism. 
I s W a r Justifiable T o d a y ? 
Disarmament a n d Catholic Doctrine. 
T h e W o r l d Court. 
International Cultural Relations. 
So-called "Over-Population." 
Catholicism—the Keynote of Pan-Americanism. 
W o r l d Cooperation—Symposium. 

N. C. W. C. Joint Committee o n P e a c e -
Peace Statements of Recent Popes. 
T h e Christian W a y t o Peace.