Diaz, from Mexico

Fifty Manhattan Roman Catholics climbed about a United Fruit steamer in New York Harbor last week and kissed an amethyst ring. It was on the thick powerful finger* of a medium-sized cask of a man, whom two Mexican "very, very courteous" police sergeants a month ago had escorted out of Mexico, over the Guatemala border--Pasquale Diaz, Bishop of Tabasco, now exile. Newspapermen marveled at how, in the serenity of Catholic priesthood, this man's face had acquired its strained lines of truculence, combat and domination. He is a Jalisco Indian, born 1876 in Guadaljara, Mexico; trained by Jesuits in Spain and France; ordained priest in 1899, bishop in 1923. His face showed no benignity save when he smiled. In the civilian clothes that he wore-- soft hat, grey suit, knitted tie--he looked like a superintendent of a railroad construction project, one long inured to directing gangs of stalwarts at rough work.

Bishop Diaz is secretary of the Mexican Episcopate and has long denounced President Calles for trying to subordinate the Roman Catholic Church to the Mexican Government. President Calles--solicitous for his poor, degraded, mean electorate--wants to cut down on the vested interests of the comparatively rich Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and of the very rich foreign corporations. From every oil well he sees rising a dour genie, and in every baptismal font he sees swimming a school of vermin. For the business interests U. S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg has been the nervous advocate; for the Church, Bishop Diaz has been the obstreperous protagonist. President Calles has been sending Secretary Kellogg temporizing notes; Bishop Diaz he threw out of Mexico. In the U. S. Bishop Diaz will wait until Mexican Catholics can organize an effective political party and throw out President Calles and his party.

Said the Bishop, as his boat pulled to its Manhattan dock last week: "The Church will win. It always wins in the long run. It will win by defending its rights in a legal way--and prayer will help."

* Manhattan newspapers, pretending to have sent reporters to interview Bishop Diaz in "Spanish and French," described him wearing his bishop's ring on his left hand, as though it were a wedding ring. Roman Catholic bishops wear the episcopal ring on the ring finger of the right hand, the hand with which they confer the episcopal blessing.