Mexico and Public Opinion
MEXICO AND PUBLIC OPINION NOBODY really believed that the Boylan resolution, calling for the suspension of diplomatic relations with the Calles government, could be passed. When...
...the Senate resolution of 1919, requesting the President "to withdraw from Carranza the recognition heretofore accorded him...
...Her report, simply a link in the long chain of evidence heaped up by the past ten years, could not rightly suggest any kind of governmental action...
...All of this was hopelessly muddled, and has proved incapable of remedying so much as one wound in the thousands under which Mexico has staggered...
...that no more dastardly blow could be delivered to Mexican culture than to strike at the props of morality and spiritual life which alone have kept it from death in the mud...
...Pledged as we are to a definite theory of social reform, the principles of which are universally binding, it seems to us a matter of great moment that remedies should be found for the social ills of Mexico...
...She had no mission beyond the custody of the souls of little children...
...Still more important, however, is elemental justice...
...Here was no woman adventurer interested in a career or money, but a simple servant of the poor exactly like thousands of other nuns whose kindly helpfulness is an essential part of daily American life...
...Years of unrest in which every hour was horrible with fear...
...It must be a call to action...
...So that now Mexico must be a symbol of something more than anger or mere talk...
...Wilson, saying "with the utmost frankness that I should be gravely concerned to see any such resolution pass Congress...
...There is no making peace with them...
...And when the clique which is now dictating to Senor Calles imposes its appalling annulment of conscience, we know with whom we are dealing...
...He may be content to accumulate no more knowledge of Mexican history and economics than he can post with a one-cent stamp...
...Is not the lesson of the past sufficiently clear r We all remember the debacle which led to the precipitate recognition of Carranza...
...In such action, moreover, we certainly do not believe, for the reason that we trust federal power to reform other nations as little as we trust that federal power to reform ourselves...
...Mother Semple had nothing startlingly new to say...
...Perhaps the plain American citizen himself stands apart from religion...
...and that a code of law which, systematically and explicity, aims to remove the Catholic Church from Mexico is calamitously wrong...
...The generation which preceded us saw them rousing to action the young Centre party in Germany...
...And then, finally, there came the decree of death for her work—a decree written, not because the work had not been done well or because others could do it better, but simply because the sign of the Cross was upon it...
...When representatives of the American Catholic body spoke their mind before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, those who testified were not so much interested in the result of the resolution as in giving their fair-minded fellow citizens an opportunity to know what has actually been going on in Mexico...
...We ourselves have caught glimpses of their shadows in parades of spectral hoods and Washington lobbies...
...Years of constant battle with those spurred on to the assault by their lust or greed...
...and the reply of Mr...
...We want here to help formulate such a reasoned opinion...
...No, this is not a question of government action—of all the dilly-dallying of officialism...
...We have seen them before...
...But the plain American citizen will understand, when he comes to think over the matter, that no need of the Mexican populace is greater than its need of women teachers like Mother Semple...
...But whenever blindness does not wholly rob him of his perspective, he realizes that the poor, illiterate, misgoverned, and despoiled peon has no greater treasure than his spiritual faith and the good which is done in its name...
...However that may be, he will view with sympathy a determined movement on the part of American Catholics to formulate a reasoned opinion about Mexican affairs, to help shoulder the burden of the neighboring republic, and to oppose—precisely as they would here—the abrogation of conscience by government...
...They realized that they themselves, no less than the 20,000,000 who break spiritual bread with them, would have failed in duty and charity if they had not risen to protest against unwarranted persecution and against the complacency which so often prevails when only the goods of faith are at stake...
...They are the same people who closed the schools and convents of France...
...Its value lies in the cumulative character of the evidence it presented...
...No honest American can turn a deaf ear to the account given by Mother Semple...
...He may believe what he likes about the to-be-or-not-to-be of oil wells...
...And what was her experience...
...It would constitute a reversal of our constitutional practice...
...Whenever they appear, we either muster our forces against them or suffer them to strip us of all we have...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 23
