Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, FRIDAY, SEPT. 24, 1926. THE STRUGGLE IN MEXICO

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LII, Issue 17147, 24 September 1926, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, FRIDAY, SEPT. 24, 1926. THE STRUGGLE IN MEXICO

< ’ivilis.at ion makes slow progress in Mexico. That backward and troubled eouiiiiv is passing- through another phase of turbulence tit the present tiny'. Church and State are locked in :i bitter embrace of hatred. The struggle between the two has been going on with but little intermission for three-quarters of a couture.. The Calles Government is but following up the anti-clerical decrees of Pre.-mlent Jaurez, who made wholesale confiscations of church lands and expelled the Papal Nuncio and live bi-hops, and has revived persecution in some of the most odious forms. A deadly contest for supremacy has arisen between the civil authorities and the hoirarohv of the Catholic Church. Calles professes to lie merely enforcing tlit; Constitution of 1957 and the reform laws of ISo9 and 1917, but lie is doing so with regulations so'stern that if successful they would leave the church without the shadow even of its ancient hold upon the .Mexican people. The reply of the church is a boycott u f the State. The faithful—-and that means the great: mass of the people everywhere except in the larger cities—are virtually engaged in a hunger strike against the Government. The struggle, as we have said, goes back a long while in Mexican history. The edicts of suppression, against which the Catholics arc invoking the conscience of civilisation, and for the revocation of which the Pope has enjoined the prayers of Catholic Christendom, wore for the most part promulgated in the liberal constitution of 3557, but while they yore partly enforced for some years, for a long time past they have been a dead letter. They would probably have remained a dead letter but for the fact that the Calles Govornunient came into power on the wave crest of a great resurgence of nationalism after twenty years of anarchy and conceived it their duty to wipe out their opponents, who included the clerics. They are proceeding to do so hv verv uncompromising methods. The Catholic church is nut mentioned in the regulations, lint the very first of them, namely, that no foreigner may exercise the religious profession in Mexico, is aimed directly at the Pope himself, and the Vicar of St. Peter’s has been in no doubt that if these edicts stand there will be no place for his church in Mexican country. The least of the cdii-ts is severe; the most of them are crushing. Church schools are prohibited; none but lay teachers are allowed. Marriage must bo civil to be legal. Religious orders, convents and mom. astries are dissolved. No religious older may possess or administer property. Churches and nearly all the buildings belonging to the church boot.mo the property of the nation. Ministers of religion may nut vote, or hold political office, or wear clerical garb. No political parry tuny take a name which indicates the holding of any religious beliefs. The Legislature may determine how many ministers of any creed shall be permitted to officiate in any community. Priests are required l" go to the civil authorities For permission to celebrate religious riles and administer the sacraments. Only milive-born Mexicans are to serve in the priesthood? They are forbidden to criticise the laws, either in public or private. They are not to celebrate any rite outside the churches. By a latei decree all Roman Catholics are to lie disarmed, on the pretext of preventing bloodshed, and President f'alles den unices the resistance of the clergy to his measures as “an act of bad faith and treachery. ’’ The church as represented by the Pope abroad and by all the priests at home, and supported by a great part, if not the majority of U>e Mexican people, is resisting with all the weapons in its power. Anticlerical shopkeepers are being buyout ted in the towns. Religious emotions are finding vent in stone-throwing and rioting. There has been a sudden cessation of all religious services, for the church authorities refuse to accept the humiliating conditions imposed upon them, and Iho country is tineplaced under a sort of interdict in the hope of forcing the Government 1; mitigate its decrees. The State, as represented Ivy the Gallos Government, denies that the regulations are especially aimed at the Catholics, and says they are a reasonable attempt to bring about that divorce between church and Slate which obtains, foi; instance, in the United Stales and France. But the character of the struggle is not obscured either by protests or apologetics. It will be watched with great interest and sympathy' throughout the world. Whilst a Trades Union Congress president in England lias gone so far as to declare that the Workers Republics in Mexico and Soviet Russia are “the two countries which are leading the wav to a higher development of democratic welfare than the world has known, ” thero can be little doubt that the at tempt to banish religion will be as futile in Mexico as it has proved in Russia, where despite the massacre of bishops and elergv, not by tens ant! hundreds but by thousands, the horrid defilement- of the churches am! the declaration of Lenin that religion is the opium of the people, there lias been a steady but certain restoration of church life. The Mexican people may not have been lifted to a very high order of civilisation by their religious beliefs, but it will be difficult to erndieate the instincts for religious observance which are part, and parcel of their lives, and certainly persecution such as the Calles Government is practising will not do it. Persecution, it has always been said, proves to lie the seed of the chureli, and the historic church which supplanted the priests ot .Montezuma and replaced the temples ot the Azlee with the missions of the good Las Casas is not likely to be easily deprived of the vast authority which it has exercised in Mexico tor dose on four hundred years.