THOSE national problems are most difficult of solution, because most heavily burdened with human passion, whose causes are embedded in the historical past of a people. A nation clings to nothing more closely than to its traditions, shaping its present hates and future fears according to its memory of past experience. The problem of Europe to-day consists not so much in its actual ethnological, lingual, and geographic differences as in its people's memories of their ancient hates and fears. It is relatively easy to solve the differences presented by race, language, or frontier, but it is impossible to rewrite history, and it is most difficult to still the apprehensions and the impulses which derive from the past history of a nation. Problems with such origins are fraught with danger and are almost impossible of equable solution.

This is why a 'modern' people, like the United States, for instance, starting as an advanced democracy, little burdened by tradition owing to its brief past, and singularly forward-looking in its attitude to life, naturally finds it most difficult to comprehend the apprehensions and animosities which sometimes sweep older nations into strange paths and along apparently illogical courses; but unless the observer can be induced to appreciate the deep significance of historical causes, he cannot have any complete understand

1 From the Month (English Roman Catholic review) October

ing of the conflicts that shake nations which have inherited immemorial traditions. The problem of the conflict between the Government of Mexico and the representatives of the Catholic Church is one of these; it is a problem, not of yesterday, but of centuries past.

The Church, the Catholic Church, was, from the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine until the Reformation, an organic part of the structure of the civil State of every Christian nation in the world. King or emperor was crowned by the ministers of the Church, nor did he feel the throne secure under him until the sacred oil had touched his forehead and his breast. Even in the dawn of the nineteenth century a Corsican genius must need seek to secure this form of sanction for his crown, Napoleon's wisdom recognizing how deeply it was embodied in the traditions of the nations of the world. Kings might at times rebel against ecclesiastical authority, yet never dared ultimately to challenge it. They recognized in it, and in the Church, the binding force which held together the social organism of which they were the heads. The Church was the teacher of youth, the guardian of the poor, the warden of orphans, the sanctuary of the persecuted, the spiritual organization which, recognizing no difference between the soul of prince and of serf, provided the checks and counterpoises in the social structure composed of crown, nobles, and com

moners, which held each group in adjustment and eased the friction that otherwise must have frayed them into anarchy and mutual destruction. To this day, a quaint survival of the days of faith, bishops sit in the House of Lords in England's Parliament.

If this historical significance of the rôle of the Catholic Church can be comprehended, many historical facts, otherwise liable to be misinterpreted, automatically fall into their proper place. For instance, in these days the State pursues unhesitatingly and punishes righteously, upheld by the full force of public opinion, any man guilty of seditious propaganda within its army or its fleet, and it does this because the State considers that it is its right and its duty to defend the nation against the agents of anarchy. With this comparison, it surely should not be difficult to understand that no less firmly did our forefathers believe that they possessed the right and the obligation to suppress and punish the heretic whose preachings were necessarily directed against the force which bound together and united the very State itself, the Catholic Church. If such conceptions as these can be clearly grasped, the modern problem of Church and State in Mexico, inherited from this ancient order of things, can the better be understood.

The Catholic Church in Mexico was, from the time of the conquest, an essential part of the social order implanted by Spain. Spain loosed the sword upon the unfortunate land, unleashed against it armies of conquistadores, who left their own land in a spirit of high adventure, mingled with the passion for the speedy acquisition of wealth; but Spain also tempered with a certain mercy her policy toward the subject races, whose evangelization she held it her mission to be. Amid the exploitation of the helpless Indian by

her sons, the voice of the Crown of Spain was lifted again and again, threatening penalties and imposing drastic punishment in order to restrain the seemingly insatiable lust of the conquerors. And, ever prompting the monarchy to this course, ever pleading with it for regulations and decrees which might cast protection over the helpless natives, were the representatives of the Church.

The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas fearlessly sent forth denunciations of the cruelty of his countrymen, flinging himself into the defense of the Indian with the zeal of a fanatic, bombarding the monarchs of Spain with his petitions, defiant of threats, reckless of consequences, so only that he might acquit himself of the duty which he had undertaken on behalf of the subject race. Less renowned, but even more truly constructive of permanent benefit to the Indians, were those Franciscan friars who came to New Spain immediately after the conquest-men who lived among the Indian communities in poverty and humility, to help them in the struggle with life, and to prepare them for a better eternity than that of their cruel and bloody gods. Zumarraga, first Archbishop of Mexico, and many a worthy successor, fought valiantly in defense of the Indians and sought to educate and assist them.

There were qualities of grandness in these dauntless missionaries which are not excelled by the military fame of the conquerors themselves. Turning their eyes forever from their beloved Spain, and renouncing hope of comfort, affection, and human consolation, they lived lives of hardship upon the frontiers of the Spanish zone of influence, until the earth of their adopted land claimed their weary bodies. Beloved of the Indians, their memory lives to-day in remote village and town, where the Indian clings to his rude notions of the

faith imparted to him, even though often ignorant of the Spanish tongue. And Mexico, even anti-Catholic, official Mexico to-day, remembers these men as its greatest benefactors. Gante Street, one of the main thoroughfares of the capital, has been allowed to hold the name which it derived from Fray Pedro de Gante, and Motolinîa Street that derived from Fray Toribio de Motolinia, while all other streets around have been stripped of their old identity and ancient names. And the latest statue, the only one in nigh a score of years erected by the Government of Mexico, shows the gaunt, uplifted features of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.

The Church in Mexico, entrusted by the Spanish Crown with a special mission, namely, that of giving a spiritual character to the conquest and control of the peoples of the New World,

acquired in time, as a necessary means of defense and survival in her stern and bitter struggle for the Indian races of which she was the defender, privileges and prerogatives which gave her a position of unusual strength and wealth in the colony. This wealth was reenforced by the pious donations of the faithful in every generation donations which caused a progressive accumulation of temporal possessions in the hands of the Church, the more so that ecclesiastical thrift was in notable contrast to the almost universal tendency among the lay elements in the colony to stake upon any venture, to dissipate in a frontier expedition, a night's session at cards, or a scheme of revolt, all of the Creole's swiftly accumulated wealth. It was as inevitable that the prudent hands of the Church should accumulate vast wealth in the new territories as it was that the old Dutch families of tenacious habit should become vastly wealthy as the owners of sections of land upon which grew the

city of New York. Neither process was immoral, although both may have been in the result unfortunate.

Therefore the eighteenth century found the Church in Mexico vastly wealthy and strongly entrenched behind the privileges of tradition and of law. Yet, lest the impression be erroneously formed that she became submerged in the ease of wealth and love of power to the oblivion of her spiritual mission, it may be pointed out that it was in this very century that the barefooted friars founded and formed those missions which reach in the territory of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, surviving still in Texas, New Mexico, and California as one of the highest and purest expressions of a spiritual ideal in the tradition of the American people. These missions were founded at the time when the Established Church in England aye, and the Catholic Church in France, for that matter- had sunk to a most perilously low moral level and to almost complete forgetfulness of its spiritual mission. Historical perspective, we repeat, must not be lost, as too frequently it has been, in judging of the acts of the Catholic Church in Mexico. That the Church had become very wealthy in the eighteenth century, and used at least some of her wealth in God's direct service, is manifest to-day in the vast number of churches erected or sumptuously decorated in that century. But we cannot deny that this wealth produced a certain degree of corruption, and diverted much of the energy of the ministers of God from their proper purpose and mission. Even so, it was not so much her wealth as her traditional position in the social organism of the State which later put the Church out of date in a modern Mexico. The Church emerged into the nineteenth century enormously wealthy and enormously powerful, her wealth well

ministered for the most part and for the benefit of the masses, and her power mostly beneficent- and, under the existing social order, a necessary part of the political organism of the colony. But now there began to stir in the Mexican people the same desire that half a century before resulted in the United States a desire for freedom from European tutelage. It is not to be forgotten that the first leaders in this movement for Mexican Independence, Hidalgo and Morelos, the most renowned of Mexican patriots, were priests of the Church.

But the Church authorities themselves, clinging to their traditional mission from the Crown of Spain, instinctively ranged their influence on the side of what was then the established law and order of things, and they were, at times by active partisan effort, hostile to the effort for liberation from Spain. It demanded, indeed, an extraordinary, or rather an impossible, prescience on the part of any individual or group at that time to visualize in the turbulent outbursts, frequent betrayals, and crude license of the rebels the dawning of a spirit of independence and national consciousness, and well may ecclesiastics have sighed, and on occasions striven, for the renewal of those binding forces without which the State would become, apparently forever, the prey of a succession of adventurers, and be at times threatened with dissolution in anarchy.

This attitude was the more justified that the attaining of independence from Spain found the Mexican people wholly unprepared to exercise the functions of a free community, still dominated by the instinct of acceptance of tutelage—in contrast to the American colonies, where the robust spirit of self-government had been developed prior to actual revolt. In independent Mexico after 1822 the

powers of State passed from hand to hand, the sport of political ambitions of the time, the spoil of the individual controlling for the moment the strongest military power. It is hardly to be wondered that the Church, amid such apparently meaningless turmoil, where the basest passions were often only too manifest, exposed herself to the charge of being the opponent of independence and liberalism, the last manifestation of this political tendency being given by her sympathy with the ambition of the hapless Emperor Maximilian, in the vain hope that he might be able to consolidate the lost energies and disrupted organism of the State. Maximilian fell in the year 1867, and with the crumbling of the old idea of the State the Catholic Church in Mexico, in regard to her temporal power and possessions, at last stood revealed as the surviving relic of a bygone age. Monarchy had been routed, imperialism had vanished like a dream, ancient custom and privilege, title and tithe, were being swept away, and the political mission of the Church, her task of cementing and upholding the old civil organization, had for the time disappeared. She stood, in her temporal power and possessions, like some huge buttress which still rears itself, gaunt and purposeless, over the plain, after the ancient walls and edifice, which it was its task to sustain, have disappeared.

It was natural that there was a realization of this by the radical heads of the Mexican State, now stirring with ideas of liberty and democracy. It was natural that there were political hatred and distrust for this great mass which now cumbered space without supporting anything, which absorbed energy without giving out strength, which was opposed to programmes of reform. It was inevitable that a new form of government, elaborated outside the

Church, should regard her temporal power, privileges, and possessions as wholly out of place and even useless. A finer sense of justice would, while relegating the Church to the spiritual sphere, have respected her rights of property in so far as they were employed in the service of God and the community. But revolutionaries are generally extremists. The Church had to go the way of the State with which it had been so closely connected. She could not be immediately destroyed, but henceforth her power for good was grievously crippled. To charge against her the backward state of the Mexican people and say that, in her centuries of spiritual monopoly in Mexico, she failed to act worthily of her mission is to lose sight of historical facts. It is unfair to-day, for instance, to criticize the Catholic Church for the ignorance of the Indian population, when for seventy years the liberal governments of Mexico have been hampering the power of the Church, confiscating her places of worship, breaking up her humanitarian institutions, seizing her orphanages, schools, and hospitals, and thwarting her ever-organized effort for good. There were, in fact, more Catholic hospitals and orphanages in Mexico at the dawn of the nineteenth century, in proportion to the inhabitants, than there were similar institutions in Great Britain. There were proportionally more universities in Mexico, and more students in them; there was, strange to say, a higher proportion of literacy in the colony, a lower proportion of illiterates, than in the England of that time.

Judged then, by the only standardthat of the eighteenth century - which can fairly be applied to the work of the Catholic Church in Mexico in that century, she may be criticized for not having availed herself of her exceptional strength to do more for the people,

but at least she did more than did the Christian organizations in other lands for their flocks. The clergy's conception of the mission of education was not the modern one; their ideas, naturally in those times, were patriarchal and protective, not democratic and progressive. Religion they taught firstprayer, the use of the sacraments, the Commandments, obedience to the Church and State; secondly, the boy of the poorer classes was educated to his trade, the girl to her domestic task. Education was not then interpreted as 'uplift,' as affording an equal opportunity to all, but as being the equipping of the individual for the best discharge of his duties and the utmost efficiency in the sphere to which he had been born an ancient theory, a past order of things, but Church authorities are not more to be criticized for their patriarchal interpretation of the proper social order than is the vicar's wife in England of only a few decades back for her worthy ministrations to the poor, although to-day their fashion would be offensive and intolerable.

The representative of the change in social ideas who struck at the power and possessions of the Church in the middle of the last century was Benito Juárez, a pure-blooded Indian, with the uncompromising spirit and fanatical fixity of purpose of his race. It was he who refused to commute the death sentence of the Emperor Maximilian to any less bloody form of political reprisal. Juárez refused reprieve, not out of a bloodthirsty instinct, but quite typically because of his rigid conception of inexorable justice. A greater statesman and a broader mind would have seen the wisdom of not exacting retribution in a manner which has prejudiced the mind of the world against Mexico from the date when Maximilian's blood stained the ground of the Cerro de las Campanas at