Law or No Law?

On the large, untidy desk of President Pascual Ortiz Rubio one day last week lay a bill and a letter. The bill, passed unanimously by the Senate and House of Mexico (TIME, Jan. 4), provided that in the Federal District and Territories of Mexico no creed should be represented by more than one clergyman per 50,000 population. The letter was from Most Reverend Pascual Diaz, Catholic Archbishop of Mexico. It urged the President to veto the bill.

The President had received no similar request from such prominent Protestants in Mexico as Bishop Efraim Salinas y Velasco Suffragan (Episcopal), Bishop Juan N. Pascoe (Methodist), or the Rev. Charles R. McKean (Union, nondenominational ). Their churches have never had so many clergymen in Mexico as one per 50,000, while Catholics have always had vastly more. Tilting forward in his chair, President Ortiz Rubio signed the bill, then and there made it the law.

"In reality it does not merit the name of law," promptly declared Catholic Archbishop Pascual Diaz, in a pastoral letter to his flock. "It does not merit the name of law, since if it is judged from the Catholic viewpoint it is contrary to the 'just ordination of reason' of which every law should consist; it opposes the positive dispositions of God and the teachings of the Church, the authentic and infallible organ established by Jesus Christ our Lord. . . ."

Archbishop Pascual Diaz further contended that the law is in violation of the peace between Church and State arranged by the late Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow (TIME. July 1, 1929), under which Catholic churches (closed throughout Mexico for three years) were reopened. The peace agreement unquestionably authorized Mexican State legislatures to limit the number of their clergy, and six States have already done so; but Archbishop Pascual Diaz contended that the right to limit does not extend to the Federal Congress of Mexico.

"Neither you as citizens nor I as Archbishop of Mexico can accept the law," he stated flatly to his flock. For the special guidance of priests the Archbishop added: "We, therefore, remind you that the authority of God is the only power and the only absolute authority; others are powers that only share in this authority. . . .

"In view of the circumstances, and, after asking God for celestial light, we have been led to determine and command, as we hereby do, as follows:

"The clergy, especially those of the Federal District, fortified by your faith, your confidence in the justice of your cause and your love for the Church, shall remain in the posts confided to you for the care and salvation of the souls of the faithful, as though nothing adverse had happened or any danger menaced you. Demonstrations of violence or force can only serve to manifest the incontestable power of the spirit of God."

Prior to the Morrow truce this incontestable power was manifested in Mexico by demonstrations which took the form of guerrilla warfare between Mexican troops and persons who shouted as their battle cry "Long live Christ the King!" (TIME, July 30, 1928).

In a collective Episcopal letter all Spain's Catholic Archbishops urged Spanish Catholics last week to accept the Spanish Republican Government "merely as a government de facto" adding that this acceptance "does not imply approval, much less obedience of legislation which is opposed to the Church and to God."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.