The 
 
 MEXICAN CRISIS 
 
 Its 
 
 CAUSES and CONSEQUENCES 
 
 BY 
 
 Rev. Michael Kenny, S.J . , Ph.D. 
 
 KANSAS STATE SODALITY UNION 
 
 LEG1 
 
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 The 
 
 MEXICAN CRISIS 
 
 Its 
 
 CAUSES and CONSEQUENCES 
 
 BY 
 
 Re;v. Michael Kenny, S.J. , Pli.D. 
 
 Former Co-Editor of “America ’’ , Author of “American 
 Masonry and Catholic Education” , “ Justice 
 to Mexico etc. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 International Catholic Truth Society 
 
 407 Bergen Street 
 Brooklyn, New York 
 
 I 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Written by request of the editor of Studies , the Dub- 
 lin Quarterly Review, this presentment of the conditions 
 and origins of the present Mexican crisis was deemed by 
 eminent authorities to whom it was submitted of such im- 
 mediate and permanent value as “a poignant compendium 
 of Mexico’s story and of its United States relations to the 
 present hour,” that they urged its publication for Amer- 
 ican readers. Revised under the direction of Bishop 
 Pascual Diaz, the distinguished Executive of the Mex- 
 ican Episcopate who is now in exile for his worth and 
 services, the “Merrier of Mexico” has honored this ar- 
 ticle with his unqualified endorsement: 
 
 “Hago enteramento mio el articulo de P. Kenny sobre 
 la situacion de Mejico. 
 
 •F Pascual, 
 
 Obispo de Tabasco 
 
 “I make Fr. Kenny’s article on the Mexican situation 
 entirely my own.” 
 
 We are confident that our readers will also make it 
 theirs . — International Catholic Truth Society. 
 
THE MEXICAN CRISIS: ITS CAUSES AND 
 CONSEQUENCES 
 
 When Plutarco Elias Calles, styled Constitutional 
 President of Mexico, proclaimed July 2, 1926, that the 
 "laws” he had recently decreed, confiscating to the state 
 all churches and religious schools and institutions and 
 all properties thereof and stripping all ministers of relig- 
 ion of every vestige of personal rights, would, bn and 
 after August 1, be rigidly enforced, the Bishops of Mexi- 
 co replied by ordering the suspension from that date 
 of all church services and public sacerdotal functions. In 
 the light of the immediate consequences of these acts the 
 true inwardness of the whole Mexican situation is dis- 
 closed. 
 
 Thousands of petitions against these laws, with mil- 
 lions of signatures, began to roll in ; but the petitions to 
 the Lord of Law were more visibly impressive. The 
 churches in town and country were crowded during the 
 two weeks preceding the fateful day, and thousands 
 were seen kneeling in the streets and spaces around the 
 churches* while the priests and Bishops were engaged 
 administering the Sacraments from dawn till dawn. This 
 manifestation of Catholic Faith and loyalty was so ve- 
 hemently sincere and universal among every class and 
 calling, despite the risk of life and civil persecution, 
 that the American pressmen who reported it to their not 
 too sympathetic journals caught for the while the con- 
 tagion of its enthusiasm. 
 
 Calles and his clique, the autocrats of this strange Re- 
 public, staged a counter demonstration. They control and 
 are partly controlled by the organization primarily titled 
 Casa Del Obrero Mondial, known in America as the In- 
 ternational Workers of the World or I. W. W. ; but 
 because this communistic society is in bad odor with the 
 American public, who nickname it “I Won’t Work”, its 
 Mexican counterpart now styles itself the Regional Con- 
 federation of Mexican Workers, initialed C. R. O. M., 
 
4 
 
 and commonly called the Crom. There are some 600,000 
 enrolled, and though most of them are ignorant of the 
 Crom’s anti-Christian tenets, its state-backed tyranny 
 over their jobs makes their subjection ordinarily abso- 
 lute. President Calles ordered a monster Labor Parade 
 in Mexico City on August 1, and announced that 200,000 
 marching workers would give the lie to the Catholic 
 claims, and broadcast to the world that his decrees were 
 the mind of Mexico. With the ne’er-do-wells and place- 
 hunting riff-raff crowding into Mexico City under his 
 friendly patronage, and his railroads free to the workers, 
 and these under warning that absence would forfeit them 
 their jobs, his estimate seemed no idle boast. 
 
 Reliable witnesses reckoned the straggling paraders at 
 less than 10,000, including some 3,000 soldiers utilized to 
 swell their ranks ; and they marched through empty and 
 silent streets. The 640,000 population of Mexico City 
 was largely augmented by the crowds who gathered from 
 the country for the last day of worship at the national 
 shrine of Guadalupe; but there was none to greet the 
 Crom parade. Sidewalks were deserted, windows were 
 shuttered, and even the paraders’ demeanor looked sul- 
 len or listless to the reporters. * It seemed rather a fun- 
 eral march. 
 
 Both demonstrations brought into striking relief the 
 total estrangement of the people of Mexico in sympathy 
 and principle from the powers that ruled them with a rod 
 of iron in the name of a republic. There is other and 
 ampler demonstration of their bitter hostility to this clique 
 and their loathing of its laws. Why, then, citizens of a 
 democracy will ask, do they put it or keep it in power? 
 The answer is, they do not. Why they do not is a long 
 and complex story, but its salient outlines can be sim- 
 plified. 
 
5 
 
 Contrasts in Culture and Outlook 
 
 In the first place Mexico is fundamentally an Indian 
 nation. Of its population, which rose from 12,491,67.0 
 in 1895 to 15,112,608 in 1910, declined to 14,234,779 in 
 1920 and is estimated to have fallen over half a million 
 since, only about two and a half millions or 18 .per cent 
 are rated white; and not necessarily pure white, for un- 
 like in the United States where the slightest tinge of 
 negro blood classes the tinged as negro, a strain of In- 
 dian blood in Mexicans of mainly foreign extraction is 
 no bar to white classification. The remaining 82 per cent, 
 exclusive of some 80,000 negroes, is made up of about 
 35 per cent Indian and 47 per cent mixed. These Mes- 
 tizos, of half or more than half Indian blood, are classed 
 as Indians and usually share their habits and character- 
 istics. Hence Mexico is predominantly Indian in num- 
 bers and traditions ; has in fact four times more Indians 
 than Cortes found there, and relatively about as much 
 Indian blood as obtained at his departure, (cf. Encylc., 
 Cath., Intern., Britannica : Mexico.) 
 
 Spanish civilization, in preserving the Indian, did not 
 make him white or European ; but it did make him 
 Christian. It did not nor could it mould him to the 
 ways and precepts of the Roman civil code, but it did 
 remould him in the faith and code of Catholic Rome ; and 
 it preserved him in that mould. It kept the Indian in 
 Mexico with his radical Indian traits and un-European 
 outlook ; and it made him and kept him a good Indian. 
 On the principle actuating State as well as Church, that 
 the Indian’s soul was good and the living Indian capable 
 of good, it kept him living and it made him good. 
 
 Across the northern border of 1,833 miles flourishes 
 a great nation of a radically different civilization. The 
 present United States territory is six times the area of 
 Mexico, and its Indian aborigines were proportionately 
 numerous when Puritanism first pilgrimaged to Plymouth 
 
6 
 
 Rock. Our population has grown to 115,000,000 while 
 the Indian has dwindled to 342,406, less than half of one 
 per cent. As in Mexico, the Catholic missionaries toiled, 
 taught, suffered and died through all this land from sea 
 to sea, to keep the Indian in Christian life ; but their work 
 was thwarted, undermined and nullified by a driving prin- 
 ciple of the prevalent civilization, the antithesis of that 
 in Mexico. This compelling, if unconscious principle or 
 rule of action, that races which obstruct or will not fit 
 into Anglo-Saxon progress are unfit to live and survival 
 is to the fittest therefor, has been crystallized in the 
 phrase, “a good Indian is a dead Indian/' So, by chicane 
 and force and alcohol and disease and economic pressure 
 the Indian was made good in that sense. Hence we have 
 no Indian problem, having killed it off ; and, thereby our 
 people as a whole are temperamentally incompetent to 
 value a civilization that preserved the Indian or to ap- 
 praise understanding^ the problems incident thereto. 
 Mexico, however, has other things of enthralling interest 
 to our promoters of material progress. It is rich in 
 gold and silver and copper and other minerals and in 
 limitless petroleum, with their kindred sources of ag- 
 grandizement; and these attract American and other ex- 
 ploiters to Mexico, involving them, and their governments 
 along with them, in problems which they are traditionally 
 unfitted to appreciate or solve. These neighboring con- 
 ditions have had weighty, perhaps dominant, influence in 
 evolving the present crisis ; but its roots go further back. 
 
 How the Indian Was Saved and Civilized 
 
 When the Spaniards entered Mexico the sacrifices of 
 human beings on its altars, with cannibal accompaniments, 
 were said to average some 20,000 yearly; and at the in- 
 auguration of an Aztec King from 20,000 to 50,000 vic- 
 tims were slaughtered in one holocaust. The Aztecs and 
 Mayas of the ruling class retained slight vestiges of re- 
 
7 
 
 markable earlier civilizations ; but though some notions 
 of the true God were transmitted, with traditions that a 
 white man from the East had set up His Cross and 
 preached His doctrine and promised that other white vis- 
 itors would renew it, a degrading polytheism of human 
 sacrifice was the universal practice, and the tribes gen- 
 erally, three-fourth of whom the Aztec conquests had not 
 reached, lived in a state of k warring nomadic savagery. 
 
 That the dominant motive of the conquerors was, as 
 they declared, the spread of Christ's Gospel, is confirmed 
 by the fact that such a people were, under Spanish hands 
 and rule, transformed into devoted Christians and multi- 
 plied in the process. Not a few of the conquerors and 
 their successors were also dominated by motives of ag- 
 grandizement and, like the North American colonists, re- 
 garded the Indian as an inferior species devoid of Chris- 
 tian rights ; but with this radical difference, that in Mex- 
 ico such views were anathematized by Church and State, 
 and the natural rights and essential equality of the na- 
 tives proclaimed and enforced. The Will of Isabella, 
 confirmed by Papal decrees, that the Indian be treated as 
 a freeman and spiritual equal, continued to dominate the 
 civil policy of Spain, however imperfectly some adminis- 
 trators executed it; and nowhere as consistently as in 
 Mexico. 
 
 Most minute and definite directions to governors and 
 administrators were enjoined and peremptorily reiterated 
 by the crown to protect and, in cooperation with the 
 Church and its missionaries, to Christianize and civilize 
 the natives ; and the royal ear was ever open to the indig- 
 nant protests of Las Casas and a long line of others just 
 as vehement against abuse. It is from the records of such 
 protests that defamers of the Mexican Church frame 
 their accusations, somewhat like those critics of Aquinas 
 who take the objections he appends to his propositions 
 as expression of his views ; whereas the dual records, of 
 
8 
 
 rule and remedy as well as exception and protest, bear 
 historic witness that lofty motives and benevolent prac- 
 tices in treatment of the Indians by Church and State 
 were the prevalent rule and abuse was the exception. 
 
 Even among the Conquistadores this rule prevailed. 
 Nunez de Guzman was cruel and avaricious and was 
 punished for it; but Cortes, who would have perilled the 
 success of his enterprise to # stop human sacrifices but for 
 Fr. Olmedo’s prudent dissuasion, set a precedent in his 
 initial settlement for kindly justice with Christian en- 
 lightenment to the Indian; and many of his fierce war- 
 riors exchanged their armor for Cord and cassock to 
 become equally valiant soldiers of Christ in evangelizing 
 the subjects of their conquest. It is doubtful if the his- 
 tory of Christendom presents such another heroic line 
 as the Missionaries of M ! exico. They brought the in- 
 domitable valor and endurance of the Conquistadores to 
 this more glorious and enduring conquest. 
 
 Schools and Scholars and Missionary Marvels 
 
 The Chaplains of the conquerors were struggling with 
 the dozen languages and hundred dialects of Mexico, 
 when three Flemish and twelve Spanish Franciscans for- 
 mally commenced that conquest in 1524. They were wel- 
 comed by Cortez who knelt with his captains to kiss the 
 feet of the poor ill-clad friars in view of the populace, 
 and gladly lent them his prestige and power. It was 
 they who made that power endure, for it was they and 
 their successors who won the hearts of the natives. The 
 Mexicans called them “Motolinia”, poorest of the poor ; 
 and their lives made that title so adhesive that one of 
 them, their future provincial, who founded churches, 
 schools, missions and towns from Nicaragua to the north- 
 ern limits, baptized 400,000 with his own hand, and alone 
 held whole districts in civil as well as spiritual obedience, 
 is known in history as Fray Motolinia. Another whose 
 
9 
 
 work was typical of their general procedure was Brother 
 Peter of Ghent, kinsman of the Emperor Charles V. 
 This princely lay-brother built numerous churches and 
 hospitals, and soon had over a thousand natives in his 
 primary school ; which he gradually developed into a col- 
 lege for higher studies, a training school for teachers, an 
 academy of arts and crafts, and a general civilizing cen- 
 ter whence native teachers and officials went forth to co- 
 operate with the Franciscans and other Missionaries in 
 bringing the principles and arts of Christian civilization 
 to the tribes of Mexico in their native tongue. 
 
 Such schools were established in each new centre for 
 boys, for girls, and for adults, and averaged from 800 
 to 1,000 in attendance. Fray Zumarraga, first Bishop 
 of Mexico, founded nine schools for Indian girls and an 
 asylum where half-castes were trained and provided for 
 reputable marriage. In 1544 he had catechisms, school- 
 texts and the Bible translated into Indian “for,” he wrote, 
 “there are so many who know how to read;” and he es- 
 tablished a printing press, the first in the new world, 
 which became actively productive of translations, copies 
 and original works. His famous Santa Cruz College, 
 founded in 1534, for Indians, and San Juan de Letran for 
 Mestizos, which, besides Latin and Philosophy, had chairs 
 of music and of Mexican medicine and languages, sent 
 forth native mayors, governors and teachers whose 
 knowledge of the languages and habits of their people 
 greatly expedited the missionaries’ progress. 
 
 Meanwhile other religious orders, Jesuits, Benedic- 
 tines, Dominicans, Augustinians, assisted by numerous 
 sisterhoods, were busily pursuing the same plan of com- 
 bining secular with religious instruction. The Augus- 
 tinians founded the great San Pablo College, and the 
 Jesuits San Ildefonso, for Spaniards and Creoles; and in 
 1553 was opened the University of Mexico, with all the 
 faculties and privileges of Salamanca, including Arts and 
 
10 
 
 Science, philosophy, theology, law, medicine and Indian 
 languages. It was open to all irrespective of race, and 
 in the theological department which trained a native 
 priesthood, mastery of an Indian language was required 
 for graduation. This, the first University in America, 
 which soon ranked in repute with Salamanca and had in 
 fact a wider and more practical range, produced, with 
 its supporting institutions, a series of native poets, dram- 
 atists, historians, jurists, scientists, theologians and even 
 journalists from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth 
 century which the contemporary Spanish output did not 
 notably excel, and the British Colonies had no output 
 to compare with. 
 
 It is significant that the most notable poet of the sev- 
 enteenth century, glorified in Spain as "the tenth Muse”, 
 Inez de la Cruz, was a M'estiza Nun; and the nuns of 
 various orders, at first from Spain, but soon of native 
 origin, everywhere sustained and supplemented the mis- 
 sionaries’ efforts in conducting schools, hospitals, asy- 
 lums and every variety of social and institutional service. 
 It is also significant that the great University has been 
 suppressed or degraded for a century by the revolution- 
 ary regimes, and though the countless buildings of edu- 
 cation and benevolence still strew the land, distinguish- 
 able by their architectural and esthetic beauty, they are 
 all profaned today, having long ago been wrested by 
 vandal governments from the Church that built them 
 and the uses of culture and benevolence they fostered. 
 But priests and nuns of native blood remain, rendered 
 more conspicuously true to the same purposes by perse- 
 cution and proscription. 
 
 Instruction of the many tribes outside the narrow 
 limits of the early conquest followed at first their reduc- 
 tion by military expeditions, with Cross and sword con- 
 joined. Soon, however, the Jesuits adventured with Cross 
 alone to the still unsubdued savages of northern Mexico 
 
11 
 
 and California, territory won to Christ and Spain by 
 Fathers Salvatierra and Kino and their comrades. Close 
 to three score martyrs,* as heroic as their now beatified 
 contemporaries of New York and Canada, were mutilated 
 and slain in that long emprise ; but others bravely re- 
 placed them till by the Cross alone the natives were sub- 
 dued to Christ. In holy rivalry the Franciscans also went 
 northwards without military escort, to the east of the 
 Jesuit territory, and with like result, victory by martyr- 
 dom. In 1680 twenty-one of their brethren were slain 
 in New Mexico in one day; but they also kept bravely 
 on, and when in 1767 the Jesuits were expelled, the Fran- 
 ciscans worthily took up their work and toiled unaided to 
 keep the tribes intact and Christian. These tribes are 
 now extinct; but the mission buildings from San Antonio 
 to San Francisco, erected by the Indians whom these 
 missionaries transformed into artisans and artists, are 
 visited by admiring tourists who marvel at the solidity 
 and fineness of their workmanship; and their architec- 
 ture is copied widely through the States. Yet the con- 
 trasts they present between the civilization that so trans- 
 formed the Indian and preserved him and the civilization 
 that extinguished him, is seldom noticed, and its lesson is 
 ignored. 
 
 Help and Hindrance of Royal Absolutism 
 
 The expulsion of the Jesuits and the confiscation of 
 their mission properties had a doubly sinister significance. 
 Besides the disastrous suppression of the most extensive 
 and practical Indian mission work and of the most en- 
 lightening and morally directive institutions for the edu- 
 cation and moulding of the governing classes, it voiced 
 the echo in Mexico of the then moral and religious de- 
 cadence in Spain ; and in extending the exercise of royal 
 absolutism it set a precedent for similar and wider usurp- 
 ation in the future. Already there was little in any 
 
12 
 
 department of state that the King had not been wont to 
 direct and control personally or by his appointees. This 
 absolutism, impeding native training to responsibility, be- 
 queathed a civil inheritance which the strongest were to 
 seized in its power without its principles, and to make 
 tyrannically absolute when they misnamed it a republic. 
 
 The King’s equally absolute ecclesiastical control 
 proved even more disastrous in its consequences. He 
 appointed Bishops, prelates, abbots, holders of benefices, 
 and assigned the limits of dioceses and missions. No 
 churches, monasteries nor religious foundations could 
 be erected nor order nor congregation introduced with- 
 out his seal ; and he could translate or suppress them at 
 his pleasure. True, his appointments were usually ju- 
 dicious, and though nothing could be initiated without 
 obtaining his consent through a complex series of inter- 
 mediaries, when the labyrinthine red tape was unwound 
 the King’s all powerful support for every -worthy enter- 
 prise accompanied his sanction. In 1557 Charles V set 
 his seal to the proclamation of Viceroy Velasco: “The 
 liberty of the Indian is more important than mines, and 
 their revenues are not so valuable that all divine and hu- 
 man laws should be sacrificed to obtain them;” and Fer- 
 dinand Vi’s instruction to Viceroy Amdrillas is typical 
 of the long line of royal directions : 
 
 “See that the Bishops and the secular and religious 
 clergy receive all the support they need from the civil 
 courts to uproot idolatry ; that those having Indian, negro 
 or mulatto servants send them daily to the Christian doc- 
 trine classes, and that field workers be given the same 
 opportunity on Sundays and other days of precept, and 
 be not otherwise occupied until they have learned the 
 catechism, and let those who do not comply be fined. All 
 priests working among the Indians should study and 
 know their languages. The condition of the Indians in 
 all New Spain should be investigated to see if they are 
 
13 
 
 oppressed by those who have a duty to teach them ; and 
 should such conditions exist, they shall be reported to the 
 bishop, that with his help measures be taken to eradicate 
 the evil. ,, 
 
 To the execution of such policies the Kings contrib- 
 uted generously, but mainly from the tithe funds of the 
 church ; for even the church tithes belonged to the 
 Crown. These, however, and other revenues the Span- 
 ish Kings allocated freely to every kind of missionary and 
 religious work, and have thus to their credit the multi- 
 tude of hospitals and asylums, churches, convents, col- 
 leges and schools erected in their day, though private ben- 
 efactors supplemented the royal grants, and in later years 
 altogether replaced them. Hence it is clear, that, far 
 from acquiring great wealth and absolute power under 
 the Spanish regime, the Church never possessed either, 
 though by a King's good will and intent she utilized as 
 much of both as a kindly master judged helpful for her 
 functioning. Prelates occasionally served as viceroys 
 and governors, and conspicuously for the common good ; 
 but this in no way loosened the King's universal grasp. 
 The Church was virtually the slave, if a favored slave, 
 of a benevolent despot ; and when the despot that replaced 
 him waxed malevolent the Church became a slave indeed. 
 
 The fact that Mexico had no serious revolt for two 
 centuries and was the last of the Spanish colonies to de- 
 mand independence, and then as a monarchy under a 
 Spanish King, would disprove the charges of govern- 
 mental cruelty. Fray Motolinia, the beloved apostle of 
 the Indians, branded the accusations of Las Casas as 
 grossly exaggerated and his proposed reforms as injuri- 
 ous and impractical; and the Franciscan Provincial had 
 had a longer, wider and more successful experience than 
 the Bishop of Chiapas. Abuses there were by occasional 
 corrupt administrators, and by the unprincipled adven- 
 turers, not all of them laymen, that plague every pioneer 
 
14 
 
 country ; but against them, as the Spanish archives show, 
 there was always an outcry and a. remedy. When Mar- 
 quez de Gelvez abused his viceroyalty to create for him- 
 self a monopoly of the corn product of 1623, and so 
 made an Indian famine imminent, Archbishop de la Serna 
 took the lead of his starving people, and when other 
 measures failed, secured redress by excommunication 
 and interdict. This action, which soon removed both the 
 “corner” and the Viceroy, is significant in view of the 
 similar procedure of the present Mlexican Episcopate and 
 the people’s equally vigorous response. It represents the 
 general attitude of the clergy in exercising what influence 
 they held in favor of their people, especially the native 
 races, and it accounts for the people’s unswerving loy- 
 alty to them. 
 
 From the time of Charles III the religious and ad- 
 ministrative laxity of Spain was reflected in her colonies, 
 tending to license rather than restraint. With the ex- 
 pulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the numerous and flour- 
 ishing Indian villages and townships of northwestern. 
 Mexico, in which they had established municipal gov- 
 ernment on the Spanish plan with central church and 
 self-supporting trades and tillage, and other native com- 
 munities similarly formed and cultured by various mis- 
 sionary bodies, received no longer the watchful care and 
 intensive training that had been rapidly lifting them to- 
 ward a self-sustaining civilization. The schools in which 
 the Indian children were sedulously taught became ne- 
 glected, and when the anarchic regimes that subverted the 
 Spanish system shut out the priest from the school, sel- 
 dom providing any to replace him, reading and writing 
 became a lost art, and farming and building a primitive 
 procedure. This accounts for Mexico’s present illiteracy 
 and industrial decay. 
 
 The exactions of Spain for home defence during the 
 French revolutionary period created wide discontent, and 
 
15 
 
 her seizure of the funds and revenues of the Obras Pias 
 caused further economic disruption. These funds, donat- 
 ed for religious purposes, were invested in 5 per cent 
 loans on convenient terms to small farmers, the interest 
 supporting charitable and educational works. Von Hum- 
 boldt, who wrote in 1810 that the schools and colleges and 
 various benevolent institutions of Mexico were in num- 
 ber and character far in advance of the United States 
 of that period, estimated the Obras Pias at $45,000,000. 
 Though their confiscation, in disorganizing education and 
 agriculture and charitable works, deeply aggrieved the 
 entire people, yet so attached were they to Spain that 
 when Charles Bonaparte usurped the Spanish throne, a 
 representative Mexican junta proclaimed Ferdinand VII 
 their King even against his own renunciation, and sent 
 seven million dollars to support him. Despite the op- 
 position of the Napoleonic "liberal” propagandists and 
 the greedy Spanish adventurers and officials, called by 
 the natives “Cauchupines”, the Creoles and Indians stood 
 by their King ; and when the priests Hidalgo and Morelos 
 led an ill-timed revolt in the name of “religion and our 
 Lady of Guadalupe” against this class, the royal author- 
 ity enabled the officials to suppress it with an army 80 
 per cent native. 
 
 Ruin Wrought By Robber “Republics” 
 
 After some years of turmoil the royal commander, 
 Iturbide, a native Mexican, joined in 1821 the Creoles and 
 Indians in a demand for an independent constitutional 
 monarchy under a prince of the Spanish line. This was 
 the Plan of Iguala or the Three Guarantees of Religion, 
 Independence and Union ; and when the new Viceroy, 
 Don Juan O’Donoju, sanctioned it, its acceptance seemed 
 assured. It is pertinent to notice here that, despite the 
 numerous abuses of Spanish power and a half century 
 of North and South America’s example and incitement, 
 
16 
 
 the Mexican declarers of independence grounded their 
 claims on no such “long train of abuses and usurpations” 
 as Britain's colonies had denounced, and far from brand- 
 ing their King a tyrant they sought the continuance of his 
 rule, but without the foreign intermediaries, against 
 whom alone lay the burden of their grievances. 
 
 However; the rejection of the plan of Iguala by the 
 then rationalistic Spanish Cortes, which the year before 
 had ordered the suppression of all religious houses and 
 institutions, threw all parties into violent dissension, and 
 Iturbide’s assumption of authority as emperor wa$ fol- 
 lowed by revolt, and in 1824 by his execution, the usual 
 Mexican finale of defeated leaders from Hidalgo to our 
 day. The victorious faction framed a constitution after 
 the United States form and called themselves a federal 
 republic, dividing the country into some 27 states, regard- 
 less of geographical or racial or other natural unfitness 
 therefor. The constitution looked fairly well on paper, 
 but that was the sum of its merits. Mere paper it re- 
 mained. 
 
 The people, by nature and traditional habits and the 
 lack of that training for civil life of which the suppres- 
 sion or expulsion of their religious tutors had robbed 
 them, had not the faintest idea of democracy, nor had 
 the framers of the Republic any concept of the work- 
 ings of an elective or democratic system of government; 
 and neither have had their successors to this day. Their 
 republics and their elections have been invariably a mock- 
 ery, for this has been their genesis of power: Armed 
 bands of self-seeking adventurers and bandits win to 
 mastery by slaughter and destruction, executing those of 
 their predecessors who had not got safely away with the 
 plunder they amassed; these again amass riches by spoil 
 and graft, till malcontents, dissatisfied with their shar- 
 ings, split off into another patriotic revolt ; and should 
 they succeed, the same process is enacted da capo. Once 
 
17 
 
 in power they get themselves confirmed by safely organ- 
 ized, pistol-picked electors discriminately counted, 
 whereof the “election” of Calles is a typical example. 
 Flores, his opponent, had the votes, but the Calles faction 
 had the counting, to which the* suspiciously sudden death 
 of Flores gaves Mexican validity. 
 
 A Congress so selected in 1825 named one Victoria 
 president at the bidding of the leading guerrilleros, ana 
 he was promptly recognized by governments eager for a 
 share in Mexico’s mines and commercial wealth. The 
 1824 constitution like the Plan of Iguala guaranteed the 
 rights of the Church, but in this respect as in most others 
 the guarantors utterly disregarded their organic instru- 
 ment; wherein they were ably abetted, if not guided, by 
 Joel R. Ponsett, the first American Consul, who had se- 
 cured them United States support against Iturbide, and 
 with other Americans was actively promoting Masonry in 
 Mexico. It was the period when M'asonry had reached 
 such political power in the United States that a national 
 party was formed to avert its menace ; and while at its 
 apogee it streamed over the border, its prestige attract- 
 ing many to its York and Scottish Rites whom the brand 
 imported by the Bonapartist and Spanish rationalists had 
 not affected. 
 
 The rival factions split into “Escoseses” and “York- 
 inos” and as the president was Yorkino and federal, the 
 vice-president, who always aims to supplant him, was 
 Escoses and Centralist ; and the eagerness of each fac- 
 tion to gain followers, with the American consulate’s en- 
 couragement, inoculated widely the Masonic virus and 
 made Masonic membership a prerequisite for political 
 power and the multiplying jobs at its disposal. This un- 
 dermined the loyalty of many, and the Church’s necessary 
 condemnation of both Masonic alignments and their sys- 
 tem of plunder and graft, intensified their hate and de- 
 termined them to destroy the Church and its influence 
 
18 
 
 with the masses, on the logical principle that as two such 
 powers cannot co-exist, the Church must go, or go under. 
 On this policy both factions were at one, and their 
 hunger for available spoil speeded their invasion of the 
 Church’s rights and possessions in the teeth of their own 
 constitution. 
 
 In 1828 they decreed the expulsion of the Franciscan 
 and other Spanish missionaries among the Indians, with 
 confiscation of the properties they held in trust, despite 
 the prophetic protests of the governors in California and 
 elsewhere, that the withdrawal of their only teachers and 
 controllers would throw the Indians back into savagery. 
 In 1833 they initiated the accomplishment of Masonry’s 
 paramount purpose by banishing clergy and religion from 
 all public schools' and national education ; and while still 
 claiming the royal privileges of filling vacant sees and 
 benefices, they proceeded to confiscate further the re- 
 maining temporalities of the Church. 
 
 Count de Maistre would add a fifth note to the Church, 
 that all her enemies are friends. It is the sole bond that 
 has held the Masonic plunder factions of Mexico togeth- 
 er. They were at one another’s throats in a series of 
 barrack revolutions through all Victoria’s regime ; and 
 that this internecine strife for spoil and power, with 
 consequent anarchy, was intensified during the three suc- 
 ceeding decades is graphically revealed in the fact that, 
 from 1829 to 1859, Mexico had forty-seven presidents, 
 not counting a number of rival chiefs who often played 
 the part more effectively than the actors in the title role. 
 It was this grasping for power of a defeated faction that 
 precipitated the hopeless war with the United States 
 1846-1848 ; and, while the American troops were march- 
 ing on the Capital, the rabid patriots were fighting bloody 
 battles with one another and decreeing alternately fur- 
 ther plunder of the Church. Mexico’s consequent loss of 
 Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California seems a fit- 
 
19 
 
 ting retribution for her utter neglect of that rich empire, 
 except to expel the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries 
 and destroy the marvellous foundations they had built 
 without her aid. 
 
 The departure of the American troops was the signal 
 for universal strife; and a decade of civil wars culmi- 
 nated, after a three years’ struggle of the Conservatives 
 to conserve what was left, in the occupation of the Cap- 
 ital in 1861 by Benito Juarez, the worst enemy of re- 
 ligion to usurp the presidency till Plutarco Calles climax- 
 ed even him. His decree to suspend payment of interest 
 on all debts recalled to the foreign creditors United 
 States Minister Corwin’s report, that after forty years of 
 convulsions under seventy-three rulers and thirty-six dif- 
 ferent forms of government, Mexico’s condition was then 
 so hopeless that only by the intervention of foreign power 
 could order be restored. 
 
 However, the intervention of England, France and 
 Spain, and the apparently sinister designs of Napoleon 
 III in creating Maximilian of Austria Emperor of Mex- 
 ico, threw the United States, itself convulsed by civil war, 
 on the side of the Juaristas. These, in the general eag- 
 erness for stable rule, had become a negligible faction 
 till the United States, at first by unofficial incitement and, 
 when its Civil War was over, by men, money and muni- 
 tions and the threat of a huge army on the borders, en- 
 abled them to overthrow Maximilian, and put and kept 
 the Juarez faction in the saddle. 
 
 Juarez Conpletes the Church’s Enslavement, 1857 
 
 Maximilian himself had facilitated the task. The 
 Conservative party, which was truly the people of Mex- 
 ico, had accepted him on the basis of constitutional gov- 
 ernment and the Plan of Iguala; but when he declared 
 his adherence to the Commonfort- Juarez Constitution and 
 laws which he was pledged to repeal, they at once with- 
 
20 
 
 drew their support. This alone would have caused his 
 downfall, but only United States assistance could have 
 made these laws prevail. The Juarez code was the cul- 
 minating achievement both of Masonic radicalism then, 
 and of Red radicalism now. 
 
 The Constitution of 1857 confirmed all previous in- 
 fringements of religious rights and abolished all that 
 was left, outlawing the Church itself as a juridic entity; 
 and the laws of Juarez, 1859-1871, gave that instrument 
 exhaustive statutory effect. Under Articles 5 and 27, 
 which abolish monastic orders and the right of religious 
 institutions and ministers to acquire property or the rev- 
 enues therefrom, Juarez had laws enacted in 1859, per- 
 petually suppressing all religious orders, novitiates, con 
 fraternities and sisterhoods, even confiscating to the State 
 "all books, printed or manuscript, paintings, antiques, and 
 other articles belonging to the suppressed communities.” 
 Wearing the religious habit or living secretly in communi- 
 ty was made a criminal offence ; all hospitals, asylums, 
 houses of correction and charitable institutions were sec- 
 ularized; legacies to ministers or even to their domestics 
 or “relations to the fourth degree” were made null and 
 void ; and “ministers of any form of religion cannot act 
 as directors, administrators or patrons of private char- 
 ity ” 
 
 All Churches and ecclesiastical residences and appur- 
 tenances were declared state property and their use was 
 permitted only in accord with state regulations, “but no 
 religious rite shall take place outside of the Church 
 buildings anywhere in the republic, including cemeteries, 
 vaults and crypts which no cleric shall enter, nor shall 
 ministers wear ecclesiastical dress or insignia.” The laws 
 of 1859 made marriage a civil contract only and nullified 
 all marriages not so contracted, the State alone determin- 
 ing validity, nullity, divorce and all other marriage ques- 
 tions. Niot only was the Church forbidden to teach, but 
 
21 
 
 all religious instruction in public institutions was prohib- 
 ited, and the name of God was eliminated from oaths and 
 other civil formalities and instruments of public instruc- 
 tion. Other “Reform Laws” of like purport were enact- 
 ed and in 1874 President Tejada raised many of them to 
 constitutional rank. A study of this cumulative system 
 of exhaustive persecution seems to justify the claim of 
 Calles that he is but executing the laws he had found al- 
 ready enacted. The most despotic persecutor can go no 
 lengths for which the Juarez system will not find him 
 warrant. 
 
 This orgy of penal laws was hampered in execution 
 by similar orgies of revolt and strife, assassination, con- 
 fiscation and universal anarchy. Neither Juarez nor Te- 
 jada, his understudy, ever held undisputed sway outside 
 the capital; and priests continued to function where and 
 how they could, risking and often suffering exile, impris- 
 onment and death. Jesuits and others who in 1873 were 
 discovered in “felonious” operation were expelled and in 
 1874 three hundred Sisters of Charity were deported on 
 the charge of “secretly undermining the lawful govern- 
 ment of Mexico.” To offset such perils a “national 
 church” had been set up with government and Masonic 
 patronage, and when this collapsed various United States 
 sects were let loose on the starving people. Though their 
 hunger-driven proselytes were few and unstable, their 
 calumnious reports proved valuable propaganda for their 
 radical patrons, fostering further antipathy to the Mexi- 
 can Church and corresponding sympathy for her “liberal” 
 persecutors. The intensified extension of such propagan- 
 da with its reaction on official headquarters in Washing- 
 ton has become an important factor in the present crisis. 
 
 Religious Revival Under the Diaz Toleration 
 
 From 1876 to 1910 its activity diminished. Having 
 seized the capital and the presidency in the usual fashion 
 
22 
 
 after years of sanguinary war with the Juaristas, Porfirio 
 Diaz became the first and only president of Mexico to ex- 
 tend his authority over the whole nation, to extinguish 
 brigandage and establish peace and financial stability, and 
 to interrupt the anti-clerical policy of priest-baiting and 
 Church robbery. The Juarez laws remained; but Diaz 
 knew how to prevent or temper their incidence and thus 
 allow the harried Church, stripped naked of all but her 
 inherent spiritual power, to function ever so quietly and 
 lead an underground life unmolested. She was still a 
 mere slave, but a slave protected against notable abuse. 
 
 Making the best of this constructive toleration, she 
 gradually re-established her churches and opened some 
 2,000 schools and institutions among the Indian popula- 
 tion, often where she had suffered a dozen confiscations ; 
 and she re-established and reorganized her seminaries. 
 From the priestly training and the apostolic labors of that 
 period was begotten the marvelous heroism of faith and 
 loyalty displayed by priests and people in the present 
 crisis. At the end of . the Diaz period some 2,000 free 
 schools and colleges and practically all the rural schools, 
 since the inadequate state system seldom extended be- 
 yond the cities, together with all the hospitals and numer- 
 ous benevolent institutions of Mexico, were maintained, 
 and maintained free, by clergy and sisterhoods that were 
 penniless, entirely dependent on the generous charity 
 of rich and poor. 
 
 This disposes of two of the three main charges 
 brought against the Mexican Church : that she has amassed 
 immense riches, kept the people in ignorance, and in the 
 Spanish period maintained herself by the murderous re- 
 pression of the Inquisition. All three are calumnious 
 myths, invented in the lodges and forged, fashioned and 
 propagated for American consumption. Whatever the 
 Inquisition may be charged with elsewhere, it has a clear 
 record in Mexico. All Indians were exempt from its jur- 
 
23 
 
 isdiction, and in 277 years the sum total of its death pen- 
 alties was 49, mostly foreign disturbers whom any crim- 
 inal court would so sentence; which sustains the conclu- 
 sion of a recent reviewer that our gunmen have wrought 
 more destruction in a year than had the Spanish Inqui- 
 sition in three centuries. 
 
 The salient historic facts recorded not only preclude 
 the amassing of wealth by the Church but charge to her 
 despoilers the illiteracy and poverty of the peons. The 
 Indians were always exempt from the Church tithes, and 
 tnese, moreover, were applied by the King to the Chris- 
 tian and industrial education of the natives. The expul- 
 sion by Charles III of their Jesuit civilizers with the con- 
 fiscation of the properties held in trust for their people, 
 and the later seizure of the other mission properties and 
 of the Obras Pias funds that sustained education and 
 agriculture, set back the industrial and cultural develop- 
 ment of the whole population. 
 
 Yet, despite these handicaps, education was more gen- 
 eral among all classes at the opening of the revolutionary 
 era than it ever has been since. The Church and her 
 ministers had so far been able largely to arrest the down- 
 ward trend by their labors and the donations they se- 
 cured. Thereafter they had to repeat the process indefi- 
 nitely, for every tangible property acquired by the Church 
 for the education and uplift of the people was seized, 
 wherever their sway extended, by the successive revolu- 
 tionary factions, who invariably used power as an avenue 
 to pelf and never erected an educational edifice on the 
 ruins they had made. Diaz was the sole exception ; and 
 when he fell the tolerated security of the Church fell 
 with him, and therewith the educational and social res- 
 toration which her ministry had mainly efifected. 
 
 Diaz’ arbitrary rule of three decades was legitimized 
 by the general assent. Holding down the restive and 
 hungry factions with a strong hand and occasional scraps, 
 
24 
 
 lie stabilized finance and promoted industry and commerce 
 by the aid of foreign investors, chiefly from the United 
 States, whose experience and enterprise he welcomed and 
 facilitated. It was Americans who built up the M'exican 
 railroad mileage from a few hundred to 15,000 miles, 
 opened and reopened mines, established manufactures 
 and controlled or owned the most productive industries 
 and much of the best land. Their success while adding 
 vastly to the country's wealth and general prosperity be- 
 got native jealousy of the progressive “Gringoes”, which 
 was fanned by envious American exploiters who had 
 failed to secure concessions. This was accentuated about 
 1910 when the importance of petroleum and the inex- 
 haustible riches of Mexico's oilfields were realized. Then 
 two small factions hostile to Diaz, powerfully supported 
 by the Masonic and evangelistic elements intolerant of 
 his tolerance, filled the hospitable American press with 
 the infamies of Diaz absolutism, and, with American 
 arms, opened revolution on the border. Had the Amer- 
 ican government exercised half the energy it displayed 
 in arresting like movements against Obregon and Calles, 
 the Madero-Magon operations could not have even started. 
 Seeing clearly the American writing on the wall, Diaz 
 resigned, and soon Madero became president. 
 
 U. S. Intervention Props Persecution and Plunder 
 
 Madero, an educated but ill-balanced idealist, antago- 
 nized the self-seekers who had used him as a figurehead, 
 tte would give them industrial justice when they wanted 
 spoil, and, what they least desired, a free democracy by 
 honest elections. This prospect, the first of the kind in 
 Mexico, stirred the Catholic Union to activity, and it soon 
 became evident that with a free vote and a fair count 
 they would sweep the elections, federal and state. Such 
 an outcome would be alike disastrous to the Masonic 
 
 KANSAS STATE' .SODALITY UNION 
 
ST. MARYS, KANSAS 
 
 25 
 
 Radicals and Protestant evangelists, the Crom or I. W. 
 W. communists and bandits, and not a few concessionist 
 adventurers ; and so another revolution started in the 
 North with American arms and munitions. There is a 
 persistent report from well informed quarters that Diaz 
 alienated the Washington administration by refusal to 
 lease them Magdalena Bay, a fine harbor well suited for 
 a naval base in Mexican California which Japan is also 
 said to covet, and that it was Madero’s failure to ratify 
 the promise of this lease that transferred American sup- 
 port to his motley opponents. 
 
 An unlooked for event foiled their plans for the mo- 
 ment. Felix Diaz, nephew of Porfirio, landed in Vera 
 Cruz with European munitions, and triumphantly entered 
 the capital, the Porfirian soldiers flocking to his stand- 
 ard. To prevent useless butchery, General Huerta, whose 
 strength had maintained the government thus far, made 
 terms whereby Madero surrendered and Huerta became 
 provisional President. An Indian like Diaz, he proceed- 
 ed to govern with such firmness and justice and so satisfy 
 the orderly elements, native and foreign, that his govern- 
 ment was soon recognized by England and Germany, ana 
 United States recognition, recommended by her Ambassa- 
 dor and Consuls, was deferred only in view of the ap- 
 proaching inauguration of a new Executive. President 
 Wilson assumed a diametrically opposite policy; whence 
 issued the orgy of anarchy and persecution that culmi- 
 nated in the decrees of Calles. 
 
 For the first time in Republican Mexico the President 
 opened Congress in the name of God and urged it to pray, 
 and so to legislate, that God’s law and peace should reign. 
 The people applauded, but the unrepresentative Congress 
 was hostile, and a deputation of Mexican and American 
 Masons made the formal proposal to Huerta that on his 
 pledge to accept their program they would secure him 
 election and United States recognition. Huerta bluntly 
 
26 
 
 refused the Masonic pledge, saying that a Catholic he 
 would live and die. Soon a revolt began to form in the 
 north, and Carranza, its figurehead, was assured of 
 United States support by deputed representatives of the 
 American Scottish Rite, whose Supreme Grand Master 
 had just pledged to Messrs. Wilson and Bryan the serv- 
 ices of World Masonry for their arbitral peace plans. 
 
 Thereafter the government’s Mexican policies fol- 
 lowed Masonic lines. Ambassador Lane Wilson, who 
 with his consular colleagues had insisted that the Huerta 
 government insured stability and the Carranza-Villa ban- 
 dits anarchy, was recalled ; and so was his successor who 
 similarly advised. They were replaced by consuls and 
 emissaries who associated and cooperated with as vile a 
 set of bandits as ever raped and pillaged in the name of a 
 republic. While the Carranza-Villa ruffiandom were des- 
 ecrating altars and sanctuaries and robbing whatever re- 
 ligious properties were left, expelling and even violating 
 the sisterhoods, torturing and holding priests for heavy 
 ransom or death, and frequently for both, PresidenpWil- 
 son raised the arms embargo in their favor ; and, when 
 they still made little headway, he seized Vera Cruz April 
 10, 1914, the only channel for % federal supplies, and so 
 by armed intervention hoisted Carranza and his spoilsmen 
 into power. 
 
 That their previous and subsequent outrages were 
 worse and more numerous than Cardinal Gibbons and the 
 protesting Catholic societies represented and were known 
 to the Government as such, is revealed in a bulky volume 
 lately issued by the present administration recording the 
 United States-Mexico official relations of 1914. It in- 
 cludes replies of President Wilson to Cardinal Gibbons 
 admitting the extent and enormity of the crimes against 
 life, liberty and religion, and deploring the inefficacy of 
 his efforts to prevent them. His efforts to put and keep 
 their perpetrators in power knew no such inefficacy. So 
 
27 
 
 eager was he therefor, that according to his closest confi- 
 dant, Colonel House, he induced Congress to reverse their 
 position and his on the Panama Tolls in order that Eng- 
 land, whose ambassador, Sir Lionel Carden, had secured 
 her support of Huerta, might in return disown both Car- 
 den and Huerta and thus permit him a free hand. It so 
 happened; and though pillage and outrage and interne- 
 cine strife became ever more rampant he recognized the 
 Carranza government, even with its 1917 Constitution be- 
 fore him, an instrument as comprehensively destructive of 
 religious liberty and human rights as the Penal Laws 
 of Ireland. 
 
 This policy did not end with President Wilson. When 
 the robbers split over their spoils, and Obregon, usurper 
 of the Yaqui tribal lands and chief drafter of the 1917 
 Constitution, had displaced and executed Carranza, he 
 was recognized in due course by President Coolidge, 
 though Mr. Wilson had charged the alleged murder of 
 Madero against Huerta as a diriment impediment. As 
 Obregon had revolted in 1920 because Carranza had 
 picked another to succeed him, so in 1924 his chief min- 
 ister, de la Huerta, revolted against him when he declared 
 Calles his heir ; and he was having like success until word 
 that the United States had supplied munitions to the 
 Obregon troops and freedom of transit through its ter- 
 ritory turned his victorious march into flight for his life 
 beyond the borders. The previous recognition of Obre- 
 gon and this saving intervention, which secured the suc- 
 cession of Calles, was effected through what has been 
 styled “diplomacy in oil.,” 
 
 The Calles Communism and American Diplomacy 
 
 From 1914 to 1920 the Wilson policies and intermedi- 
 aries had, in return for concessions to favored interests, 
 permitted or condoned innumerable outrages on the life 
 and property of American citizens, and the Republican 
 
28 
 
 Party had made this “shame to the United States” and 
 “disgrace to our civilization” an issue in the 1920 Presi- 
 dential campaign. Accordingly the Committee on For- 
 eign Relations sent a Sub-Committee to investigate and 
 report. This representative and competent body found the 
 key of the situation in the Queretaro Constitution of 
 1917 and in the still ruling clique who had devised it. 
 It was the work of Obregon and Calles, and when some 
 few of the hand-picked delegates objected to its wildest 
 provisions, they were silenced by pistol shots ; whereupon 
 harmony prevailed. It has been argued that this Con- 
 stitution, with the Calles supplement and the acts there- 
 under, are all void inasmuch as the members were not 
 elected, the instrument was not approved by the majority 
 of States, and both Obregon and Calles as rebel leaders 
 were ineligible to the presidency. But all these bars would 
 equally void the code and laws of Juarez and all Mexican 
 presidencies, if we except the later validation of Diaz. 
 Their only validity was violence, and the only essential 
 difference lies in the present more ruthless enforcement 
 of the worst Juarez iniquities, of which the Calles com- 
 pilation is the logical derivative. The 1917 anti-religious 
 articles and the Calles Decrees only extend the drastic 
 confiscations and prohibitions of 1857 by depriving every 
 minister and religious, and in some respects every mem- 
 ber of the Church, of juridic personality. Stripping the 
 Church's personnel of citizenship and ownership, and 
 violators and even critics of its provisions of jury trial 
 and process of law, the Calles completion of the 1857 
 and 1917 Constitution rounds out a system more effec- 
 tively contrived to uproot religion forever than even that 
 code pronounced by Burke the masterpiece of perverted 
 ingenuity. 
 
 But it has other and wider restrictions, specifically 
 communistic, that more directly concerned the American 
 Committee. Article 27 vests in the State the ownership 
 
29 
 
 of all lands and the determination of the maximum area 
 it shall lease to individuals ; makes all previous contracts 
 and ownership null and void ; prescribes that all mines, 
 oil wells and other interests and enterprises shall be op- 
 erated by natives only; and that foreigners can retain 
 or acquire property only by naturalization or by sworn 
 renunciation of the right of recourse to their home gov- 
 ernment for redress. In effect, the two sets of articles 
 mean, first, that the Catholic Church shall not function 
 nor foreigners exercise its ministry ; second, that the State 
 may filch and apportion all property at will, including 
 some billion dollars’ worth under American title, and bar 
 foreigners from further acquisition. 
 
 The American Committee in a voluminous report rec- 
 ommended a new treaty removing the Constitution’s dis- 
 criminations against American rights, or, in lieu thereof, 
 occupation of Mexican ports by U. S. Marines. It would 
 condition recognition on definite stipulations that Ameri- 
 cans shall be free to enter, reside, teach, preach, and hold 
 church property in Mexico, provided they take no part in 
 its politics ; and that all retroactive or other laws barring 
 foreigners from ownership shall not apply to Americans. 
 In brief, the Committee advised that the Mexican gov- 
 ernment should not be admitted to friendly relations until 
 it had guaranteed such exercise of all fundamental rights 
 as is the wont of civilized peoples. 
 
 In 1921 the Harding administration took up the ques- 
 tion ; and therewith the Mexican politicians and certain 
 American Companies also became active. The oil mag- 
 nates, who gave thought solely to their money interests, 
 went down to Mexico and made arrangements with Ob- 
 regon and Calles whereby their National Petroleum Oil 
 Company should hold a 51 per cent and Mexico a 49 per 
 cent interest in all oil reserves, and, in return, the Mexi- 
 can Government would receive a $5,000,000 bonus, gener- 
 ous assistance in flotation of loans, and American recog- 
 
30 
 
 nition. This last was more difficult in view of the For- 
 eign Relations Committee’s report, which weighed other 
 things than oil; but a cabinet minister, who was later 
 dismissed and put under indictment on oil charges, fa- 
 cilitated matters. Two commissioners, friendly to oil ; 
 were dispatched to Mexico, and on their report of Obre- 
 gon’s commercial concessions and promises contrary to 
 his constitution, but of no change nor promise of change 
 in its provisions, President Coolidge granted recognition 
 September 23, 1923. When soon thereafter Obregon was 
 hard pressed by de la Huerta it was his American oil 
 beneficiaries who secured him Washington’s saving inter- 
 vention. 
 
 He had convinced them that the Constitution’s prohi- 
 bitions would not affect their interests ; that, in fact, he 
 had not enforced its religious nor property restrictions, 
 and he had a convenient judiciary to interpret them. This 
 seemed plausible then ; but when Calles was counted into 
 the presidency the true inwardness of Mexican diplomacy 
 became revealed. Constitutionally ineligible on the triple 
 ground that he is the son of a foreigner, had shared in 
 the previous revolutions, and was not elected, Calles 
 boldly reasserted his notorious Bolshevik pronouncements 
 and, proclaiming immediate enforcement of both its anti- 
 religious and confiscatory provisions, he had his judges 
 to reverse their reversal of the constitution regarding the 
 petroleum concessions. Now that he had secured Ameri- 
 can recognition and the monies of the Oil Companies, he 
 felt safe in cancelling his commitments therefor; and for 
 three substantial reasons. 
 
 He had secured the affiliation of the Communist 
 Crom, his personal political faction, under the guise of a 
 labor union, with the American Federation of Labor. 
 When Calles’ plan of confiscating private properties for 
 the benefit of his following was personally presented to 
 Mr. Gompers, the then president of the Federation, as 
 
31 
 
 the chart of restoration of lands and rights to the de- 
 frauded peon workers, he accepted it as such, ^and by his 
 influence secured for Calles and his party the support of 
 perhaps the most powerful organization in America. 
 
 He also relied on another society whose still wider in- 
 fluence had helped to establish American recognition. 
 As himself a 33rd Degree Mason and recipient of 
 a M'edal from American Masonry, both rare Ma- 
 sonic distinctions, and backed openly by the U. S. Su- 
 preme Council of the Scottish Rite, which conducted a 
 political campaign f o compulsory secularization of Amer- 
 ican schools, then declared supreme objective, Calles 
 counted with confidence on the three million voting Ma- 
 sons of the United States. On these and other non-Cath- 
 olics he had further grounds of reliance. 
 
 By affording friendly facilities to the Protestant pros- 
 elyters in Mexico, while persecuting ruthlessly the Cath- 
 olic Church, Calles won the enthusiastic support of the 
 Baptist and Methodist and Protestant Alliance leagues, 
 whose political activity had imposed their program on 
 the nation and ha: long been dominating Congress and 
 Senate. Moreover, he could reckon on the virulence of 
 the pervasive Ku Klux Klan and the traditional Protest- 
 ant prejudice, which, because restrained at home by the 
 American Constitution, would be more readily enlisted 
 for anti-Catholic movements abroad ; and his consular 
 and special agencies had everywhere established centres 
 of lying propaganda to utilize and unify the forces of 
 American bigotry. He had also noted that the Catholic 
 attempts to stem the Wilson intervention in favor of his 
 gang had been weak and ineffectual, and his personal 
 experience had convinced him that the Mexican clergy 
 would suffer whatsoever outrages meekly, for he and his 
 kind had seen to it that suffering was the badge of all 
 their tribe. 
 
 • Hence he continued recklessly the expulsion of for- 
 
32 
 
 eign as well as native priests and religious (including the 
 papal delegates Mgr. Crespi and Archbisho'p Caruana, an 
 American citizen), completed the suppression of religious 
 institutions, and extended nation-wide confiscation and 
 spoliation with accompaniments of murder, desecration 
 and other crimes and brutalities too numerous or inde- 
 cent for narration. There was general, if passive resist- 
 ance; and the more effectually to crush it, he issued June 
 14, 1926, his supplementary decrees, so clamping down the 
 1917 Constitution that no religious institution may exist; 
 that within the Church no priest may function except in 
 the manner, measure, times, places and numbers the state 
 prescribes, and outside of churches there can be no re- 
 ligious teaching nor service by lay or cleric, family or 
 group, of any kind anywhere ; and that the federal, state 
 and municipal officials shall impose without jury or trial 
 the drastic penalties prescribed for violations, and, fail- 
 ing so to do or to report infractions, shall themselves be 
 subject to like fines and imprisonments with forfeiture 
 of office. 
 
 The Mexican Resurrection 
 
 Then something new happened in Mexico. Bishop 
 Manriguez y Zarate of Huejutla had issued in March a 
 memorable pastoral of a quality unwonted in Mexican 
 allocutions. It proved a trumpet call to all Mexico, and 
 beyond. Entered in the Congressional Record by Con- 
 gressman Gallivan, it has reached every quarter of the 
 States through government mail and by its virile sinceri- 
 ty counteracted the Calles propaganda. Painting vividly 
 the outrages on human rights as on religion, that this new 
 and more ruthless Jacobinism inflicts, and the suicide 
 which the Church's submission to State license for her 
 every act of ministry and worship and use of even voice 
 and pen would effectuate, he summons priests and people 
 to wield the sword of thought and opinion before which 
 
33 
 
 despotism crumbles, and defend their rights against this 
 fury of outrage on their manhood as on their faith. 
 
 To their failure therein he traced the source of their 
 calamities. Not only was the charge that they had played 
 politics a lie, but it was their culpable omission to take 
 part in fundamental politics, in those principles and prob- 
 lems of government on which depend the peace and wel- 
 fare of peoples, that had brought down on them God's 
 anger, of which their persecutors are but the instruments. 
 Let them repair the omission; assert their citizenship; re- 
 sist the destroyers of human right; stand steadfast nor 
 flee before the wolf ; be martyrs, if need be, for faith and 
 freedom and go boldly to prison and to death. Let pas- 
 tors set example of sacrifice to their flock. If Churches 
 are closed make every home a sanctuary. If one school 
 is seized, open another ; and hold school under tents and 
 trees if roofs be barred. By sacrifice of pleasure, by 
 Christian virility, let young and old, but the young men 
 foremost, fight God's battle ; and never yield nor falter 
 till every manacle of religious, educational and civic free- 
 dom is struck from Constitution and law. Thus will God 
 lift His chastisement for their culpable suffrance of wrong 
 and bring them from the catacombs to the sun of liberty. 
 
 This brave prelate's arrest and imprisonment, with 
 cruel indignities that still -continue, seem to have burnt 
 his appeal into the heart of Mexico. x Declaring accep- 
 tance of the Calles decrees apostacy, the Bishops of Mex- 
 ico not only ordered suspension of Church service from 
 the date of their enforcement, but directed the faithful on 
 the lines of Bishop Manriquez' appeal. The universal re- 
 sponse in sacramental devotion on the closing days of 
 service and monster petitions against the laws, held no 
 alarms for the Calles clique; rather deepened their reli- 
 ance on Protestant prejudice, which this striking Catholic 
 manifestation would further enkindle. In fact, their prop- 
 agandists and Protestant alliance sympathizers still util- 
 
34 
 
 ize this as an argument that United States action against 
 Calles would be intervention in a merely religious conflict 
 to save Rome from the champions of liberty. 
 
 But another Mexican manifestation did gravely alarm 
 them. The existing Catholic lay societies became active 
 and, having welded the young men and women of all Mex- 
 ico into a well knit League of Religious Liberty, pro- 
 claimed a boycott against buying. Calles’ governing 
 agencies, particularly his Red Army of the Crom, had 
 been kept in hand by heavy payments and perquisites 
 drawn mainly from taxation on every industry and arti- 
 cle of commerce. Hence business was at its nadir, and 
 a further slump in sales would be a severe blow to his 
 power. It would also put the Religious Liberty League 
 to a severe test ; but they met it unflinchingly. Harmon- 
 izing with the Bishop’s appeal for sacrifice the boycott be- 
 came, and after nine months remains, astonishingly effec- 
 tive. All luxuries were banned in food, clothing, amuse- 
 ment and travel, and co-ordinated leaders were assigned 
 to every state, district, city, street and square in order to 
 make and keep this self-denying system complete and uni- 
 versal. The resultant fall in revenues, as vouched in U. 
 S. reports, averaged more than 50 per cent; profits from 
 railways and government-owned industries were turned 
 into loss; general business has -become paralyzed, the ex- 
 change value of the peso continuously lower, and the gov- 
 ernment so bankrupt that it has failed to meet the inter- 
 est on its home and most of its foreign debts. 
 
 The leaders of the League were everywhere arrested 
 and imprisoned, often tortured and murdered, and women 
 were shamefully maltreated, but others had been provid- 
 ed to replace them indefinitely, and when all the Honest 
 journals were suppressed news leaflets were distributed 
 more numerously ; and the movement is still in full vigor 
 of unremitting and heroic endurance. Bishops, priests 
 and laymen have been held in filthy dungeons for ran- 
 
35 
 
 som or for hostage. This had been a rich source of rev- 
 enue, for the faithful collected the monies to save their 
 priests from death. It is so no more. Word has gone 
 forth that no ransom must be paid; and so martyrs mul- 
 tiply, lay and cleric, after the inspiration and example of 
 the Bishop of Huejutla. Priests administer the sacra- 
 ments feloniously in the homes, which are guarded as in 
 the Irish penal days, and the “hedge schools” have had 
 also reproduction. The mutual fidelity of priests and 
 'people at such a harrowing price has been the most tell- 
 ing refutation of the voluminous calumnies that so widely 
 defamed them, and the sturdy fight they are making has 
 stirred a sympathy in the States that is breaking the force 
 of prejudice and propaganda. 
 
 America’s Answer to Calles 
 
 Calles , calculations on Catholic inertia have also gone 
 wrong. An article by the present writer in 1914, expos- 
 ing the injustices, the Masonic provenance, and the anar- 
 chic consequences of the Wilson intervention, had wide 
 circulation in the Knights of Columbus organ and in 
 pamphlet, and Dr. Kelley, now Bishop of Oklahoma wrote 
 vigorously to like purpose for the million readers of his 
 Extension Magazine and in several brilliant and well-in- 
 formed brochures ; yet the Catholic public remained dor- 
 mant. They could not be convinced that the defamations 
 of the Mexican Church and people lacked substantial ba- 
 sis, and the numerous occupants of petty government of- 
 fices grew indignant over the imprudence and disloyalty 
 of “attacking the government.” Dr. Kelley had not been 
 open to this charge ; but now a prelate arose who as- 
 sailed the Administration's action directly and persist- 
 ently. 
 
 Archbishop Curley of Baltimore, in whose primatial 
 See Washington is situated, determined to put the respon- 
 sibility where it belonged. Seeing hundreds of priests and 
 
36 
 
 religious despoiled and outraged and thousands of refu- 
 gees cast helpless on our borders, among them not a few 
 Americans seeking vainly their government’s protection, 
 he concluded that private appeals to “this or that adminis- 
 tration when it is a question of persecution of Catholics” 
 were useless. For ten years each in turn had given un- 
 broken support to the Red rulers of Mexico and had kept 
 unbroken silence on their systematized outrages on hu- 
 man rights. 
 
 In a series of crisp articles in the Baltimore Catholic 
 Review , the Archbishop unfolded for the first time the 
 naked facts of the Washington-Mexico relations. Hav- 
 ing reviewed the Wilson interventions and the horrors 
 that ensued, including the organic monstrosity of 1917, 
 he detailed, with names and dates, the negotiations by 
 which the natural rights of men, Americans as well as 
 Mexicans, were callously bartered for oil and money and 
 minerals in the interest of the influential few, and how 
 persecution was condoned for the placation of bigots. He 
 was asking, not that we intervene in behalf of Mexican 
 Catholics, but that we cease to intervene against them; 
 that our Administration reverse its policy of regarding 
 the Mexican problem solely through the eyes of the 
 money interests while disregarding the ideals of justice 
 that should govern the interrelations of nations. Allud- 
 ing to powerful influences exerted to arrest his disclos- 
 ures, he declared that as Bishop and as citizen he would 
 not be silenced while the misuse of our power and the 
 subversion of our principles were crucifying a Catholic 
 people before his eyes. 
 
 The Archbishop’s speeches and writings, equally co- 
 gent and fearless, put the administration apologists on a 
 retreating defensive. Another effect was a Catholic re- 
 surgence from the inertia that had comforted Calles. Two 
 lay Catholic magazines that affected the role of leader- 
 ship had been stressing the perils of bringing the Mexican 
 
37 
 
 question into politics, and other pious pacifists of political 
 connections had also been interpreting the Holy Father's 
 call to prayer as a prohibition of further action. Stigma- 
 tizing these counsels as “the prudence of cowardice" and 
 “the weak-kneed attitude that has perpetuated our weak- 
 ness," his Grace insisted that since Catholics, as Ameri- 
 can citizens, were largely responsible for the ruthless war 
 on religion and liberty in Mexico, it was therefore their 
 civic as well as religious duty to organize their twenty 
 millions in united protest against their country's collab- 
 oration or connivance with such persecutors. 
 
 In July the Knights of Columbus National Conven- 
 tion, representing 800,000 members, unanimously en- 
 dorsed this policy in resolutions presented to President 
 Coolidge, and created a million dollar fund towards en- 
 lightening the American people on our Mexican rela- 
 tions. Their organ, Columbia , a monthly magazine of 
 800,000 circulation, has been contributing effectively 
 thereto in a series of frank and well informed articles ; 
 and besides numerous pithy brochures of their own, they 
 have given wide circulation to the recent admirable Pas- 
 toral of the American Episcopate, a luminous analysis of 
 the Mexican situation and the civic and religious conse- 
 quences involved. Thus, the Catholic laity have at last 
 been put in the way of realizing their national responsi- 
 bilities. 
 
 The American Federation of Labor has proved an 
 equal disappointment to Calles. Their National Conven- 
 tion a month after the K. of C. meeting, felt its reaction, 
 and President Green was called to account for his friendly 
 transactions with the Crom, which was denounced as a 
 subsidized political band of grafting gunmen, “redder 
 than the Russian Reds," who cowed and forcibly domi- 
 nated the workers. A resolution was forced on the exec- 
 utive to ascertain the real character of their Mexican af- 
 filiation, and the President was constrained to write to 
 
38 
 
 Morones, head of the Crom and Calles’ Secretary of La- 
 bor, dissociating the American Federation from, its perse- 
 cuting activities. As a result of the discussion the large 
 Catholic membership is now in a position to repress the 
 Federation’s communistic elements and tendencies, and 
 Calles can no longer count on American labor. 
 
 Nor has Masonry been as helpful as was hoped. The 
 Masonic and allied societies’ leaders and mouthpieces 
 have supported the Calles policies virulently, but they 
 have no such control of the general membership as Latin 
 Masonry can exercise. The vast majority of 'the three 
 million U. S. Masons are more American than Masonic, 
 being both too numerous and too traditionally imbued 
 with the principles of true liberty to be fully inoculated 
 by the Masonic virus. Hence they are prone to take the 
 American rather than Masonic viewpoint upon questions 
 of national import ; and some new developments gave the 
 Mexican question more distinctively such an aspect. 
 
 Calles’ Defiance; Washington’s and Mexico’s Reply 
 
 These arose from Calles’ withdrawal of the American 
 concessions which had secured him, with recognition, his 
 own succession to Obregon, and from his further procla- 
 mation that the Constitution’s reversion of all property to 
 the state remains intact; that therefore a majority in- 
 terest in all oil and other properties shall be held by Mex- 
 icans, and the titles of all foreign claimants who should 
 not have applied for and been granted leases on these 
 terms by January 1, 1927, would be ipso facto null. This 
 defiance of the United States was forced on Calles by the 
 bankruptcy his policies had created. The robbings of the 
 few remaining Church properties had yielded little, and 
 the confiscation of the large estates and haciendas had 
 eliminated productive farming till land became valueless, 
 while the consequent loss of revenue was more than 
 doubled by the economic boycott. Hence there was noth- 
 
39 
 
 ing left to satisfy or gratify his expensive army and hun- 
 gry Crom supporters, but confiscation of the rich reve- 
 nue producing oh lands. Calles’ necessity was the Cool- 
 idge administration’s opportunity to recede gracefully 
 from its former position. Secretary of State Kellogg 
 protested in such language against the retroactive and con- 
 fiscatory decrees that in consequence the American oil 
 companies and most foreign property holders made no 
 application for leases ; and while awaiting the first overt 
 act against American properties, the secretary forbade 
 transmission of war materials which the Calles govern- 
 ment had purchased in the United States. 
 
 This action was partly occasioned by Mexico’s pro- 
 motion of a Red revolution in Nicaragua against the con- 
 servative government of President Diaz which the United 
 States had recognized. Large Nicaraguan interests, in- 
 cluding lease of a projected Canal strip and of naval 
 bases for protection of the Panama Canal, made a sane 
 and friendly government desirable. The Calles faction 
 were more than suspect of promoting their Bolshevistic 
 system in other Central-American States, and on January 
 10 were charged by President Coolidge with supplying 
 munitions and forces and inspiration to , the Nicaragua 
 rebels. Hence American contingents had been sent to 
 protect American interests, munitions were declared open 
 to Diaz and closed to the rebels, and U. S. cruisers were 
 ordered to intercept supplies from M’exico. Secretary 
 Kellogg significantly branded such Mexican activity “an 
 unfriendly act,” and on January 10, President Coolidge 
 said that the faction disturbing the legitimate and friend- 
 ly government of Nicaragua was recognized by Mexico 
 alone, and his government would continue such action as 
 the protection of the lives and properties of their nation- 
 als should require, and of those of Italy and England, 
 whose embassies had requested it. Later, when a Con- 
 gressional resolution commended arbitration, the Presi- 
 
40 
 
 dent insisted that as good faith and the right of owner- 
 ship and other rights involved are inalienable, there was 
 nothing to arbitrate with Mexico. 
 
 Meanwhile Mexican events were pointing in the di- 
 rection of these utterances. While hesitating to execute 
 his decrees against American properties and playing for 
 anti-Catholic support through a self-appointed “Peace 
 Committee” of American partisans, Calles arrested Bishop 
 Pascual Diaz, secretary and executive of the Episcopate, 
 and two American correspondents who sought to interview 
 him. As a Mexican of Indian ancestry and American ex- 
 perience, Bishop Diaz commanded wide influence in both 
 countries, and in every encounter with Calles had the bet- 
 ter of the argument. To shut off this influence and si- 
 lence the voice of the episcopate at this juncture, he was 
 spirited away to Guatemala ; for the character of a new 
 uprising, coincident with American unfriendliness, had 
 put Calles in a panic. The revolt of the Yaqui tribes, 
 and numerous local outbreaks, and de la Huerta’s an- 
 nouncement of a projected revolution for civic and re- 
 ligious liberty, could be disregarded while American arms 
 and recognition were exclusively his ; but the new move- 
 ment was more serious. 
 
 Men of character and influence untainted by factional 
 connections, had issued a call to arms against the Calles- 
 Crom regime in various States and districts, and pro- 
 claimed a Provisional Government. Knowing that with 
 a free hand such men would rally all Mexico to the ban- 
 ner of the Cross and liberty, Calles gathered and impris- 
 oned in Mexico City all the priests and prelates he could 
 reach, partly as proof to Protestant America that this 
 was a purely Catholic movement of their instigation, but 
 chiefly to hold them as hostages against its impact; and 
 in March alone scores of priests and hundreds of laymen 
 have been shot or hanged, solely as a terrorizing meas- 
 ure. 
 
41 
 
 But the leaders made it clear that the revolution was 
 specifically a national movement for civil, religious and 
 social liberty, born not in Rome but in Mexico, and Cath- 
 olic only in the sense that the Mexican people are Cath- 
 olic. Petitions for freedom of worship and schools and 
 press and political action, signed by over five millions of 
 voting age, had been flouted by the Calles Chamber. The 
 people must have voice, and unlike former revolutions of 
 political and military adventurers with a following, this 
 uprising draws its power and resources from the people 
 themselves. The leaders are men of high caliber, neither 
 politicians nor professional soldiers ; but with growing 
 volunteer forces and regular army accretions, they ex- 
 pect to weld the wide-spread local insurrections into one 
 unified movement, and gradually but soon, establish their 
 government firmly in all Mexico, and with very little 
 fighting. This prediction seems safe, provided the Wash- 
 ington Government sets a practical if not formal embar- 
 go against munitions to the Calles faction. That its refu- 
 sal to renew the anti-smuggling treaty with Mexico points 
 in this direction was noted by Calles who at once made 
 overtures to readjust his Constitution to the satisfaction 
 of the land and oil interests of the United States. It was 
 also noted by the Mexican Hierarchy, who have issued a 
 statement that the moral and religious interests of the 
 Mexican people are still more exigent. “The religious 
 conflict,” they insist, “is also an international question, 
 since it deals with the rights of liberty of conscience, of 
 worship, of association and of the press, which are and 
 should be the heritage of all peoples” ; and they urge 
 their people to renew' their previous monster petitions for 
 amendment to that effect. As the content of these peti- 
 tions coincides with the guarantees demanded by the U. S. 
 Sub-Committee on Foreign Relations as the basis of any 
 acceptable settlement, the administration will doubtless 
 insist on their acceptance, should it continue to maintain 
 
42 
 
 its present attitude against the forces of compromise. 
 
 Recognize Countries That Recognize Right 
 
 Herein lies the danger for the present and the future. 
 The Catholics of Mexico seem miraculously to have risen 
 above the allurements of compromise which invariably 
 betrayed them in the past ; but such an evolution is not so 
 evident in the United States. Though the active inter- 
 ests working for compromise with Mexico are few and 
 mainly motived by bigotry, the pacifists and neutrals that 
 give them potential force are numerous, perhaps a ma- 
 jority. President Coolidge expressed surprise, January 
 23, at the general ignorance of and indifference to the 
 fundamental questions involved; and the same day Con- 
 gressman Gallivan presented a resolution to Congress re- 
 questing the administration to furnish detailed informa- 
 tion on Mexico’s violations of various American rights, 
 and on the forms and methods of its American and even 
 Congressional propaganda, with the instruments and pay- 
 masters thereof, employed “to alienate the American peo- 
 ple from support of their administration.” 
 
 This information, if furnished, will enlighten and as- 
 tonish the public, and doubtless repress the indignation 
 aroused by the first action of a Washington administra- 
 tion which, though motived by self-protection, benefits in- 
 cidentally the Catholic people of Mexico. But there it 
 will stop, if those who have brought this happy change 
 about will not continue their enlightenment and civic in- 
 fluence till the principles of fundamental justice become a 
 permanent policy in our dealings with the South Ameri- 
 can republics. Since the days of John Adams, U. S. ad- 
 ministrations have usually favored the radical, free-think- 
 ing, church-hating minorities who seized and held power 
 by armed force. The lesson the present administration 
 has learned from patronizing such a faction in Mexico 
 affords solid basis for the demand that hereafter we ac- 
 
43 
 
 cord the fullness of friendly recognition to no govern- 
 ment that does not make civil and religious liberty and 
 justice the basis of its laws. 
 
 Make Civic Action A Religious Duty 
 
 The Catholic body has also learned a lesson in the 
 power they can wield when they demand their civic rights 
 imperatively and exercise their civic duties boldly. This 
 boldness was new and not easily excited. Catholics in 
 English-speaking countries were said, in civic matters, 
 to possess an “inferiority complex”, the enfeebling leg- 
 acy of persecution. Many tolerate or welcome a patroniz- 
 ing tolerance and shrink from demanding equality of 
 rights. They are affrighted, even when their religion is 
 assailed, of “bringing religion into politics”, whereas the 
 principles of religion is what most it lacks, and because 
 of that lack the Constitution, which is the main buttress 
 of both their religious and civic liberties, is in danger of 
 crumbling. Built firmly by religious minds on “the law 
 of nature and of nature's God”, the United States Consti- 
 tution can be vitalized only in a religious people ; and four 
 generations of religionless schooling have so sapped their 
 Christian vigor that half our people profess no religious 
 belief. If the Catholic body do not infuse this vitality 
 civically and socially into the laws and the heart of the 
 nation, the Constitution must fall for want of sustaining 
 force, and along with it Catholic liberties and influ- 
 ence. They seem to have failed to sense that such 
 civic activity is a religious duty. We are twenty 
 millions, almost one-fifth of the whole, and we are repre- 
 sented by about one-twentieth of the governors and of 
 the Senators, and one-sixteenth of the Congressmen ; while 
 of four successive administrations there has not been one 
 Catholic in the Cabinet, which determines the policies of 
 the nation ; not one to arrest the dominance of selfish in- 
 
44 
 
 terests over international justice and human rights in 
 Mexico and elsewhere. 
 
 The Mexican crisis has fortunately roused them from 
 this un-civic and neutral attitude. Inspired by the key- 
 note of the Primate of Baltimore, the Knights of Colum- 
 bus have moved the nation to reversal of a perverse na- 
 tional policy, and acquired thereby the consciousness both 
 of their power in the state and of their civic as well as re- 
 ligious duty to exercise it. They will no longer permit 
 selfish expediency to eradicate principle nor suffer the 
 Catholic body to remain a cipher in national affairs. 
 They are in the way of rendering also important inter- 
 national service. They are now engaged in a comprehen- 
 sive history of the United States, the first to enlighten the 
 nation on the proportionate contribution of Catholics to 
 its building. Their recent study has brought home to 
 them the general ignorance and historical defamation of 
 Catholic services and social conditions in all South Amer- 
 ican countries as in Mexico, and, therefore, the pressing 
 importance of supplementing the true story of the United 
 States by adequate histories of each of the South Ameri- 
 can peoples. This should beget a progressive betterment 
 in understanding of the Catholic Church and harmony of 
 international feeling and policy, and, while vitalizing the 
 United States Constitution at home, should extend the 
 essential principles of this soundest and wisest of demo- 
 cratic instruments to the governing policies of our 
 southern neighbors. 
 
 The solution of the Mexican crisis is in the future, 
 but its developments are pregnant with hopeful presage. 
 It has stirred the Mexican people and particularly its 
 manhood, whose religious fervor had required awaken- 
 ing, to a heroism of loyalty to their Church and a sacri- 
 ficial realization of their civic rights and duties that is 
 bound to be written into the constitution and laws of 
 Mexico. It has exhibited the character of the long de- 
 
45 
 
 famed Mexican clergy in a new and heroic light. It has 
 unified and vitalized the energies of American Catholics, 
 and it has brought the whole United States to better ap- 
 preciation of the Mexican people, and, for the first time, 
 to administrative harmony with their true ideals and in- 
 terests. Whatever its other consequences, the Mexican 
 crisis has proved a blessing, if in hard disguise, not only 
 to the Mexican people, but to all the people, and espe- 
 cially the Catholics, of North America. 
 
 REFERENCES: Mexico: Crevelli, Catholic Encyc.; 
 Cornyn, The Americana. Historia de la Iglesia Mexicana, 
 Cuevas. Brevissima Relacion, Las Casas. Historia Ec- 
 clesia Indiana and Coleccion, Mendieta. Awakening of 
 a Nation, Lummis. Mexico and the United States, Ro- 
 mero. Historia de Mejico, Alaman. Obras Sueltas, 
 Mora. Essay on the Kingdom of Spain, Von Humboldt. 
 Juarez y sus Revoluciones, Bulnes. History of Mexico, 
 H. H. Bancroft. Pan-American Bulletin, 1917-1919. 
 Seward’s Mexican Policy, Callahan. United States 
 Treaties and Conventions, Smith. Mexico, Enock. Latin- 
 American Nations, Robertson. Book of Red and Yellow, 
 • Kelley. Pastoral Letter U. S. Episcopate, 1926. 
 
46 
 
 STATEMENT OF BISHOP PASCUAL DIAZ, 
 EXILED EXECUTIVE OF THE MEXICAN 
 HIERARCHY, ADDRESSED TO THE 
 AMERICAN PEOPLE, APRIL 7, 1927. 
 
 “I have been asked if I think there is any possibility 
 of settling the disputes between your country and the 
 Calles government in Mexico, or between that govern- 
 ment and the Catholic Church. A single consideration 
 forces me to answer ‘No’ to both questions. No settle- 
 ment is possible between any right thinking people and 
 an irresponsible tyranny. 
 
 “I have enjoyed the hospitality of your great country 
 long enough to know how clearly and rightly your people 
 think; I have heard enough of President Coolidge to be- 
 lieve firmly that he cannot be deceived by promises that 
 are on their face false. 
 
 “The Calles government does not represent the Mex- 
 ican people. Your people will never make friends with 
 the Mexican people by making friends with the tyranny 
 that oppresses them. Thousands of the Mexican people 
 are now in arms, in determined rebellion against it. Mil- * 
 lions, literally, are outraged by its actions, silent or im- 
 potent only because the government of Mexico is a tyran- 
 ny, a ruthless tyranny, with all the means of repression 
 in its blood-stained hands. 
 
 “Consider for a moment the suggested bases of settle- 
 ment of the disputes between that government and the 
 United States. The Mexican constitution, so-called, was 
 never submitted to or approved by the Mexican people. 
 It is only a loose and grandiose expression of a wild po- 
 litical theory set up by a selfish oligarchy to give color 
 to its evil deeds. The Calles government, under color 
 of constitutional enactment, seized the property rights 
 of your nationals, along with the property of thousands 
 
47 
 
 of our own people. They were bound to make these 
 seizures, the Calles government said; by this so sacred 
 constitution of theirs. Yet now it is suggested that the 
 provisions of the constitution may be suspended by some 
 device or other in order to meet the justified demands 
 of the United States and its injured people. 
 
 “Can the United States and its people rely on a sus- 
 pension of the so-called constitutional provisions with any 
 more surety than on the constitution itself? One has 
 only to state the question to reveal the ridiculous charac- 
 ter of the whole ingenious series of suggestions from 
 Mexico City. 
 
 “The so-called constitution itself enunciates a doctrine 
 of thievery. Until that doctrine is repudiated at its base 
 every suggestion of settlement must rest on these terms : 
 ‘Yes, we believe in thievery, but if you insist upon it 
 strongly enough we will not steal your properties just 
 now’. 
 
 “By all too bitter experience the Church in Mexico 
 knows how such a procedure works out. Eager only to 
 carry on its work of spiritual ministration to its millions 
 of charges and anxious to avoid trouble, it relied on the 
 promises of this and that politician that the constitution 
 and laws would not be enforced against it. Now it finds 
 itself and its people in a position where compromise is no 
 longer possible. 
 
 “The Church leads no armed rebellion. It is, for 
 instance, a fantastic falsehood to say that the venerable 
 Bishop Orozco y Jiminez is in the field at the head of 
 those who are so successfully resisting the government in 
 Jalisco. But it is good American doctrine, as set forth 
 in the Declaration of Independence, as it is good Catho- 
 lic doctrine, that forcible resistance to an unjust tyranny 
 is the righteous duty of the citizen. 
 
 “So it is with a certain pride in my people, despite my 
 pain at their suffering that, wherever I go, I can say that 
 
48 
 
 in Mexico they are true to the right and that they are 
 justifying their faith in the blood of martyrs, as Chris- 
 tians did in the early days, as Americans did in their 
 early days. 
 
 “Americans can afford to be patient. The Church 
 can afford to be patient. 
 
 “Eventually right will triumph in Mexico as it always 
 triumphs. 
 
 “It will not triumph thrbugh a COMPROMISE that 
 in its very nature bears the germ of corruption 
 
 \ 
 
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