Again, Masses

Restlessly Apostolic Delegate Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores awaited at the President's Palace, Chapultepec, last week. Pope Pius XI's final word on the settlement of Mexico's three-year-old Church v. State feud.

President Emilio Fortes Gil had announced that he would leave Mexico City for the national palace at San Luis Potosi that evening, which meant an irritating postponement of negotiations unless the message arrived at once. Meanwhile Secretary Sergio Montt, of the Chilean Embassy, was furiously decoding a cable received in his office from the Vatican. Hurrying to the palace he presented it to the Archbishop. It was Pope Pius XI's sanction of the plan of settlement, in clear, definite terms. A few hours later two statements were issued, one by President Fortes Gil, one by Archbishop Ruiz y Flores, confirming the report that churches would reopen and Roman Catholic Mexico again be baptized, married and buried with the sanction of Holy Church. The church-going Mexican populace which had been praying day and night for this issue, raised its voice in pious rejoicings. Archbishop Ruiz y Flores and his assistant, Bishop Pascual Diaz of Ta basco, hastened from Chapultepec Palace to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, five miles from the city, knelt in prayer for ten minutes. In his prayers Bishop Diaz, huge and dour, a full-blooded Jalisco Indian, had cause to be grateful to the Pope, who had signalled the peace by appointing him Archbishop of Mexico City, Primate of all Mexico. Correspondents in Mexico remembered that the Indian Archbishop had been the bitterest opponent of President Calles' religious laws, the sturdiest fighter for the old ways of the Church.

"The Church will win, it always wins in the long run," Tabasco's Diaz had said, when exiled to the U. S. in 1927. Now the Church had won, and Rome was putting her champion in command.

President Fortes Gil's statement, endorsed by the Vatican, established three points as a basis for a permanent agreement:

1) The Church shall have the right to select its priests, who will then be duly registered with the Ministry of the Interior (TIME, Feb. 25).

2) Although parochial schools are prohibited, ministers may teach their doctrines to children and grown-ups "within the church confines."

3) Priests and lay members of the Church may petition to the government for amendment, repeal or passage of any law.

The majority of Mexicans call it a "dignified compromise." Dissenting were the radical anti-clerics. They protest that it is a world defeat for the forces of Liberalism. An unnamed politician said: "The Roman Church will strengthen its hold, especially on the Latin-American countries, which are watching Mexico's test and are anxious to follow her example . . . to free themselves from the yoke of the clergy."

The settlement returns to the Church independence in religious matters taken from it in 1926 by President Calles' hard-fisted anticlerical laws (TIME, July 26, 1926, et seq.). It allows native priests, who have been in hiding, and foreign priests exiled three years ago, to return to their churches. What will be done about the problem of church property is left for future negotiations. It is understood that though the law of 1857, revived and enforced in 1926, by which the government seized all church property, will stand, the clergy will be made custodians of their cathedrals and temples.

June 29 was the tentative date fixed for reopening all Mexican churches. The Archbishop explained that the great number must be opened simultaneously because: "If there should be services in only one or two, the masses would be so enormous that they might break down the buildings."

A prompt effect of the settlement was the release of 100 women held at the penal colony of Las Tres Marias for breaking religious laws. Omitted from this order was Madre Maria Concepcion de la Llata, who is serving a sentence of 20 years as "intellectual author" of the assassination of General Obregon.

Credited by both sides for aiding the return of peace was U. S. Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow, who in May, at Washington, persuaded Archbishop Ruiz y Flores to announce his willingness to negotiate (TIME, May 13). Opportunity for this had been given by President Fortes Gil's tendering of the olive twig in an interview, also thought to be Morrow-inspired. Last week Mr. Morrow, in bed at Mexico City with indigestion, received threatening letters from Mexican diehards.