Our Immediate Neighbor
OUR IMMEDIATE NEIGHBOR WHAT does Mexico mean to us? To judge from an editorial in The Nation for February 24, it is a string of oil wells which United States millionaires will tell any number...
...And if it is not just to use such rights and interests as a pretext for becoming indignant over Mexican treatment of religion, it is equally unjust to blanket that treatment with a reference to "oil...
...Efforts, we are told, are being made to secure some change in Mussolini's architectural scheme which will spare the historic buildings of the Venerabile college, and they are said to have strong diplomatic support...
...Utterly regardless of oil, the citizens of the United States have certain legitimate life and property interests established by common law in Mexico, and entitled to protection...
...The pious vision is not likely to be realized...
...In the interests of history and religion alike, it is to be hoped they will succeed, and that a fabric which has harbored so much devoted and generous blood will be spared...
...That hope is of some importance to this country...
...That sacrifice of American life was made, avowedly at least, on the principle that patriotic duty required the observance of certain international courtesies...
...Among their first pupils, and subsequently their loved rector, was that father of the English Catholic revival and link between two ages, Cardinal Wiseman...
...The feast which Cardinal Howard gave in 1688 to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Wales to James II and Mary of Modena, included "an ox, roasted whole, being stuffed with lambs, fowls, and provisions of all kinds...
...They refuse to cap to Spanish Philip's ambassador, and, after Parsons's attack on Elizabeth's right to the throne, "could hardly bear to hear his name...
...An article in a recent issue of the London Times gives an interesting account of the threatened college...
...Set in surroundings that were eloquent of past persecution and martyrdom, it brought home to them daily the lesson that the Kingdom of Heaven was still to be won by violence, and that the blood of martyrs had not ceased to be the seed of the Church...
...Is a constitution which permits such outrages a document which we care to commend...
...No one can afford to be indifferent to what is happening in Mexico for the reason that no one can remove the United States to a safe distance from Mexico...
...there are sometimes weaknesses in religious representatives which provoke enmity and discord...
...Ours is a generation with an intact belief in its own inventions...
...They objected to Jesuit discipline, to Italian government of any sort...
...Are worship and liberty being outraged by Calles...
...Somehow or other, however, we do not admire a neighbor who lives according to so enlightened a code...
...Villard will bravely see the issue as it is and cease to continue befogging with "oil" a question which is simply the old, plain issue of religious peace...
...The relative mental innocence of this point of view is pardonable only on the plea that the spectre of plutocracy has destroyed the writer's vision of reality...
...The present fate of Catholic priests may be the fate of the Episcopal bishop of Vera Cruz, or of the Methodist preachers, or of the Y. M. C. A. We are all of us faced with the same danger...
...Since every nation is entitled to enforce its fundamental law, we are asked to disregard "yarns" which, "wholly misleading in fact and implication," have their source in petroleum...
...the Puritan poet, Milton...
...They are now telling lies through the press...
...uThey are endeavoring to establish a sort of democracy," reports one puzzled Cardinal visitor, even while reporting that the lads are umodest, continent and of great piety...
...Suppressed for twenty years by Bonaparte and the French Directorate, the Venerabile resumed its task of training English seminarists early in the nineteenth century, under secular priests of their own race...
...The annals of the Venerabile make curious reading...
...But it seems rather obvious that if the Calles government proceeds to abrogate them it will be at least as much of a hostile nuisance as the robber who should so far forget himself as to hold up the estimable editor of The Nation...
...Villard, is obliged to tell the people of the United States that it is merely enforcing the Constitution which, signed in 1917, was the basis for our recognition of Senor Carranza...
...The Church must always be prepared to endure persecutions...
...To apply it is not to halt aggression upon oil...
...For this famous constitution was drawn up by a junta interested only in its own aggrandizement and probably too stupid to do more than revive an older law which, under Diaz, had mercifully been permitted to gather dust upon its insolent provisos...
...Confiscating ecclesiastical buildings and institutions is a benign preliminary step—because, as Mr...
...During the past year we have honored the memory of martyrs who succumbed to Iroquois torture, and the glory of that great throng of other loyalists who died together on the hill at Nagasaki...
...But neither the principle nor its corollaries proved abiding...
...Established in 1330 as a hospice for the relief of English pilgrims, who were being victimized by an earlier generation of profiteers, it was taken over by Henry VII as a residence for the constant legates and ambassadors who were passing between England and Rome in the stormy days of the early sixteenth century...
...At the time of the Armada they are openly antiSpanish, hurrahing for English victories and frankly grieving when any news of a Spanish success reaches them...
...Goldwell of Saint Asaph, the last English bishop whose orders were recognized as valid by Rome, and Dr...
...Nothing short of a miracle could have disturbed the supreme complacency with which we permitted ourselves to accept the fiction that the poor peon could create a better government and civilization than what the bearded arid bloated gamblers of Mexico City had in store for him...
...484 THE COMMONWEAL March 10, 1926 THE "VENERABILE" COME years ago Monsignor Hugh Benson, in one ^-*of his later novels, imagined for us a walled Rome, set apart and secluded from the rest of the world, and untouched even by the most plausible of its improvements, to which a generation that had obliterated the past might repair from time to time, for refreshment and relief when the multitude of its inventions became intolerable...
...We wish merely to say here that, as should be obvious even to the innocent, no great people can be indifferent to the rampages of ferocious nationalism in neighboring countries...
...and the prim diarist, Evelyn...
...It is the fate of the Eternal City to be a perennial city as well, renewed and refashioned unceasingly, where every spadeful of earth that is excavated turns up to the sky the reproachful mask of vanished ages...
...To them the "Venerabile," as it has always been called, has been a household name for four centuries...
...Mexico, through its representatives and the righteous Mr...
...Villard's idea of a "serene and peaceful" country that faith should end in rtiartyrdom, and sacrifice in ruin...
...For the students who reinforced the hard-pressed Church, it was something more than a mere seminary...
...To the lover of the past there is something almost heartrending in this constant boring and tunneling through a compost of human life that has swarmed at the highest pitch of civilized intensity for 3,000 years in one circumscribed area...
...We do not clamor for an armed defense of these...
...It was Cardinal Allen, that great pilot of the English church through the hurricane of the second Reformation, who, in 1579, transformed the foundation into a seminary for the education of priests "for the mission," as a sister house to Douay and Rheims...
...Nor do we believe that United States intervention in Latin-America is desirable, whatever reasons may be advanced...
...indeed, every day that passes seems to set it further and further from actuality...
...Is it Mr...
...But what has been said here has been uttered in the hope that representative citizens of the stamp of Mr...
...If Mexico is destined to war upon the kingdom of Christ, it would in all likelihood be impossible for us to impose a peace by armed force...
...In 1721, the "old Pretender" (who is James III anywhere legitimism is respected) is their guest of honor, and present at a Mass celebrated by Pope Clement XL Strangely enough, leading Protestants from persecuting England seem to have made a point, throughout penal times, of visiting the college where the young men whom they would hang, draw and quarter so soon as they set foot on its shores, were being trained for martyrdom...
...It may be too much to expect of the American people that they should be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood in the news reports...
...They insisted on heavy, sweet puddings of sound English texture...
...Cardinal Pole, Cardinal Allen, Dr...
...It is true that some Americans, adherents of nonCatholic churches, have professed to welcome the day when the Faith which the Spanish missionaries had planted at the cost of enormous sacrifice, would be blotted out...
...Even Catholics in whose traditions England plays no part, will not contemplate the disappearance of the venerable fabric without regret...
...It is even yet abysmal...
...The "improvements" will entail the disappearance of a sanctuary associated with the most tragic days of their faith...
...John Lind blew a private trumpet for "progress," in the name of that illuminated Minnesota coterie to which he so fittingly belonged...
...We do feel that in fairness to Catholics in the United States, our government should cease favoring those whose position in the groping nation to the south of the Rio Grande is based upon nothing better than the worst indecencies of materialism...
...Villard seems to feel in the depths of his humanitarian soul, it is always beautiful to see "reform laws" being observed...
...A separate article in this issue of The Commonweal deals with the background of the Mexican offensive against March 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 483 the Church...
...To English Catholics it is particularly ungrateful tidings...
...But we do hold the time to be ripe for a definite, realistic attitude toward Mexican affairs...
...There are forces in human nature which rise to kill what is kindly...
...But, though one or the other of these may have—as Bishop Kelly once declared—done what he could to promote the dissolution of Catholic enterprise, the great majority of citizens in the United States are too fully aware of the difficulties which beset workers in the cause of religious culture to let the fact that they themselves are not Catholics stand in the way of their detestation of an attempt to destroy what has been done—in the name of one of the most besotted cliques ever to have appropriated the good name of a Latin-American people...
...The news that improvements, which include a public market, are now threatening the English College in the Via Monserrato comes as something of a shock to all lovers of Rome whose interest does not, as is too often the case, end with the overthrow of the ancient world...
...It was almost inevitable that we should be hoodwinked into underwriting the Carranza Constitution...
...Yet, one hundred years later, their loyalties are all for the exiled Stuarts...
...We believe that most of our fellow-citizens join in the feeling that bravos are out of place...
...Nothing short of a miracle could have disturbed this complacency, we say, because our ignorance was abysmal...
...For centuries it has reminded them that what English Catholics endured for the sake of their faith, was but one phase of an ordeal that did not spare brothers by creed and spiritual allegiance in other lands...
...It is to carry out a grim attempt to rob the remnants of prestige and property still held iri the name of religion...
...To judge from an editorial in The Nation for February 24, it is a string of oil wells which United States millionaires will tell any number of lies to get...
...Fictions concerning the stand of the Catholic hierarchy and the purposes of Catholic education, as circulated by such papers as El Universal, find their credulous audience here...
...It is simply to proceed as far as possible toward the destruction of the Catholic Church in Mexico...
...For unless we are careful, we shall awake some morning to find that our neighbor's house is not merely in ruins but also, and terribly, on fire, and gravely menacing our own...
...Griffith Roberts, the Welsh grammarian and confessor of Saint Charles Borromeo, were all residents...
...Their insularity breaks out in one quarrel after another...
...In the pages of the guest book, we are told, can be found the signatures of Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood...
...But it can ill afford to lose a memorial so unique to a faith so sorely tried...
...It is impossible to forget what followed in the wake of the intervention which put an end to the Huerta government...
...They are sending out reports to the effect that a hideous persecution of the Church has broken out—when, as The Nation happens to know very well, "all has been serene and peaceful for months," and "notice has been given to foreign clergymen to cease their professional activities or leave the country...
...We forgot all about them, while Mr...
...The sturdy English lads who filled its walls, candidates for martyrdom as one and all were, refused to abate a jot of their national prejudices or patriotism...
...For their hunted priests it served as an asylum...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 18
