Why Are They Persecuted? by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 24, 1914

Why Are They Persecuted?

By C. M. S.

AN eloquent appeal is made in the September 12 issue of the Catholic journal America on behalf of the Catholic priests and nuns who have been expelled from Mexico by the Constitutionalists and are now at Vera Cruz under protection of the United States government, and at San Antonio and El Paso, Tex. While we sympathize with all who are in distress, we cannot help wondering why these people should be suffering at the hands of Mexicans, just as we wondered why the friars of the Philippines suffered at the hands of the Catholic Filipinos.

The Roman religion has been the favored religion of Mexico and of the Philippines for centuries. It dominated these countries and controlled the public and private activities of the people. As long as it was possible, that religious system reserved those fields to itself, and permitted no other faith to reach the people. With those fields entirely to themselves for hundreds of years to control and to mold, it seems wonderful that the members and leaders of that denomination should suddenly feel the heavy and relentless hand of persecution and be compelled to flee such countries in haste to save their lives. Concerning the condition of the Mexican priests and nuns the article in America says:—

‘A long-drawn cry of distress has gone up from many suffering people. Men and women are in agony, and they are pleading for help. The fire of tribulation is upon them, and they are calling for assistance. . . . Their cry . . . is from out hearts ground in the mill of agony, crushed in the press of tyranny. It comes to us freighted with sobs and tears and blood. . . . They devoted their lives to God without stint: their work Christianized Mexico and gave to it culture and faith and hope of eternal life. And now these laborers of God’s vineyard are hunted, friendless, penniless, starving things. The wild beast of the mountain fastness is more welcome and comfortable than they. . . . The bones of many a murdered priest are whitening in the land beyond the Rio Grande; the hot, scalding tears of outraged sisters, spouses of Christ, have fallen on Mexican soil. . . . Villa proclaims them immoral. . . . Carranza denounces them as enemies of progress and enlightenment.

But these who are thus persecuted are Catholic leaders, Mexico is a thoroughly Catholic country, and the persecutors have been under Catholic influence all their lives, and most of them members of that church from infancy. Those whom they persecute have been their spiritual advisers since they reached the age of accountability, and have gone in and out among them as they who stood in the place of God to them, who could forgive their sins and release them from the pains of purgatory for a price, or could shut the gates of heaven against them.

Why have the people risen and thrust them out? It is the old story of a religion thrust upon an unwilling people, lording it over them, putting a yoke upon their necks which they were unwilling or unable to bear, securing the support of the state or of state officials, and ruling by the power of finite force instead of by the power of infinite love. Rome has had this hard lesson set before her many times, but she will not learn; and in the United States, where she has made gigantic strides under a frame of government that gives her an unrestricted field, she clamors for that “patronage of public authority” which has proved a thorn in her side in Mexico and the Philippines.

If it were Methodists or Lutherans or Confucianists who were persecuting Catholics in Mexico, killing their priests and exiling their priests and nuns, then might the Catholic Church with reason complain; but when Catholic Mexico does it, we are bound to conclude that there is a reason. Should the Methodists of the United States gather up a considerable portion of their Methodist pastors and deaconesses and expel some of them from the country and take the lives of others, we should have to conclude that there was something wrong with

Methodism or with those who were expelled, or both. And we should come to a similar conclusion were Seventh-day Adventists to rise up and slay some of their conference presidents and ministers and exile hundreds of their ministers and teachers. The fault would not lie with those who saw it done, but with the organization or those who did it, or both. We sympathize with the sufferers, but we cannot sympathize with a system which bears such fruit.

Nevertheless, the author of the appeal lays the blame for the sorry plight of these sufferers upon the United States. The country is not named, but his words are so plain that it is not necessary:—

Their persecutors leaned on strong arms, hid themselves in the shadow of great names, and carried through their nefarious work by alien influence. Yes, the enemy of priests and sisters was made strong by borrowed forces: the victims were lashed by whips lent from without.

It is true that the importation of arms and ammunition from the United States enabled the Constitutionalists to win; but that was not the cause of the hatred and distrust of the clergy which resulted so disastrously for them. That cause lies within the system itself — the union of religion and the state. And they who foster such a system, whether they are Catholics or professed Protestants, are planting thorns in their own path, and carrying in their bosom serpents whose fangs will yet sink into their own flesh. A union of religion and the state has always borne the fruit of oppression and persecution, and it is not surprising that it should sometimes plague the planters themselves. Let Americans judge the tree by the fruit it bears. C. M. S.