Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1886 — Downfall of the Mexican Church. [ARTICLE]

Downfall of the Mexican Church.

With the downfall of the “Maximilian” or the “imperial” goverment, Juarez became the undisputed and also, to all intents and purposes, the absolute ruler of the country. This portion of the more recent history of Mexico has been detailed somewhat minutely, because the series of events embraced in it led up to and culminated in an act of greater importance than anything which has happened in the country since the achievement of its independence from Spanish domination. For no sooner had Juarez obtained an indorsement of his authority as President by a general election thau he practically carried out, with the cooperation of Congress and with an apparent spirit of vindictiveness (engendered, it has been surmised, by the memory of the oppressions to which his race had been subjected), the provisions of the constitution which he had been instrumental in having adopted in 1857. The entire property of the Mexican shurch was at once “nationalized” (a synonym for confiscation) for. the use of the state. Every convent, monastic institution, or religious house was closed up and devoted to secular purposes; and the members of every religious society, from the Jesuits to the Sisters of Charity, who served in the hospitals or taught in the schools were banished and summarily sent out of the country. And so vigorously and severely is the policy of subjugating the ecclesiastical to the civil authority, which Juarez inaugurated in 1858, still carried out, that no convent or monastery now openly exists in Mexico; and no priest, or sister, or any ecclesiastic, can walk the streets in any distinctive costume, or take part in any religions parade or procession; and this in tbwris and cities where, twenty years or less, the life of a foreigner or skeptic who did not kneel in the streets at the “procession of the host” was imperiled. Again, while Catholic worship is still permitted in the cathedrals and in a sufficient number of other churches, it is clearly understood that all of these structures, and the land upon which they stand, are absolutely the property of the govern-, ment, liable to be sold and converted to other uses at any time, and that the officiating clergy are only “tenants at will.” Even the ringing of the churchbells is regulated by law. All those rites, furthermore, which the Catholic Church has always “classed as among her holy sacraments and exclusive privilege, and the possession of which has constituted the chief source of her power over society, are also now regulated by civil law. The civil authority registers births, performs the mar-

riage ceremony, and provides for the burial of the dead; and while the church marriage ceremonies axe not prohibited to those who desire them, they are legally superfluous, and alone have no validity whatever.” —j Popular Science Monthly.