Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!

Part Two

by Thomas A. Droleskey

One can always count on the defenders of all things conciliar to take history and distort it to suit the purposes of the conciliar revolution.

Some of these defenders are, quite predictably, attempting to make the Cristeros War into a a precursor of the "Second" Vatican Council's embrace of a concept of "religious liberty" that had been called a "monstrous right" by Pope Pius VI and a heresy by Pope Pius VII and "insanity" by Pope Gregory XVI and by Pope Pius IX as responsible for permitting the spread of "babbling inanities" (see the appendix below for a reminder).

I have a question for these distorters of history: Did the "Second" Vatican Council call for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

Quite instead, the conciliar "popes" and their "bishops" have embrace the concept of the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict, contradicting the repeated teaching of the Catholic Church, told Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, that the civil state has no competency to recognize one religion as the true religion:

Under pressure, Rome gave in. On July 14, Cardinal Ratzinger received Archbishop Lefebvre at the Holy Office. At first the Cardinal persisted in arguing that "the State is competent in religious matters."

"But the State must have an ultimate and eternal end," replied the Archbishop.

"Your Grace, that is the case for the Church, not the State. By itself the State does not know."

Archbishop Lefebvre was distraught: a Cardinal and Prefect of the Holy Office wanted to show him that the State can have no religion and cannot prevent the spread of error. However, before talking about concessions, the Cardinal made a threat: the consequence of an illicit episcopal consecration would be "schism and excommunication."

"Schism?" retorted the Archbishop. "If there is a schism, it is because of what the Vatican did at Assisi and how you replied to our Dubiae: the Church is breaking with the traditional Magisterium. But the Church against her past and her Tradition is not the Catholic Church; this is why being excommunicated by a liberal, ecumenical, and revolutionary Church is a matter of indifference to us."

As this tirade ended, Joseph Ratzinger gave in: "Let us find a practical solution. Make a moderate declaration on the Council and the new missal a bit like the one that Jean Guitton has suggested to you. Then, we would give you a bishop for ordinations, we could work out an arrangement with the diocesan bishops, and you could continue as you are doing. As for a Cardinal Protector, and make your suggestions."

How did Marcel Lefebvre not jump for joy? Rome was giving in! But his penetrating faith went to the very heart of the Cardinal's rejection of doctrine. He said to himself: "So, must Jesus no longer reign? Is Jesus no longer God? Rome has lost the Faith. Rome is in apostasy. We can no longer trust this lot!" To the Cardinal, he said:

"Eminence, even if you give us everything--a bishop, some autonomy from the bishops, the 1962 liturgy, allow us to continue our seminaries--we cannot work together because we are going in different directions. You are working to dechristianize society and the Church, and we are working to Christianize them.

"For us, our Lord Jesus Christ is everything. He is our life. The Church is our Lord Jesus Christ; the priest is another Christ; the Mass is the triumph of Jesus Christ on the cross; in our seminaries everything tends towards the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. But you! You are doing the opposite: you have just wanted to prove to me that our Lord Jesus Christ cannot, and must not, reign over society.

Recounting this incident, the Archbishop described the Cardinal's attitude" "Motionless, he looked at me, his eyes expressionless, as if I had just suggested something incomprehensible or unheard of." Then Ratzinger tried to argue that "the Church can still say whatever she wants to the State," while Lefebvre, the intuitive master of Catholic metaphysics, did not lose sight of the true end of human societies: the Reign of Christ." Fr. de Tinguy hit the nail on the head when he said of Marcel Lefebvre: "His faith defies those who love theological quibbles." (His Excellency Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre, Kansas City, Missouri: Angelus Press, 2004, pp. 547-548.)

Quite unlike the courage of the Cristeros in Mexico (1926-1929) and the valiant Catholics of Spain who were killed by the Communists and their "Lincoln Brigade" American supporters during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939), one will never heard any call for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King by the conciliar revolutionaries as they not believe in such a restoration. They are content with the "pluralism" wrought by the American concept of "religious liberty" that served as the foundation of conciliarism's world view.

Many examples of this have been provided on this site. Perhaps the boldest effort to distort history was from the great distorter of history and theology himself, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who dared to blaspheme the Catholic martyrs of the first three centuries of Holy Mother Church in his infamous address to members of his curia on Thursday, December 22, 2005:

Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change. Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.

It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.

The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church. By so doing she can be conscious of being in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself (cf. Mt 22: 21), as well as with the Church of the martyrs of all time. The ancient Church naturally prayed for the emperors and political leaders out of duty (cf. I Tm 2: 2); but while she prayed for the emperors, she refused to worship them and thereby clearly rejected the religion of the State.

The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one's own faith - a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God's grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all.

At the same time, she assures peoples and their Governments that she does not wish to destroy their identity and culture by doing so, but to give them, on the contrary, a response which, in their innermost depths, they are waiting for - a response with which the multiplicity of cultures is not lost but instead unity between men and women increases and thus also peace between peoples. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

 

The martyrs of the early Church did NOT die for religious liberty. They did NOT die for freedom of conscience. They died to bear witness to the true Faith, hoping to plant the seed for the conversion of all men and of all nations to the Catholic Church. The first popes who went to their deaths at the hands of the Roman emperors did not want a world where there could be "peaceful coexistence" between the true religion and false religions. They were intent on proclaiming the fullness of the truths of the true Faith without compromise so as to end all pagan practices in Rome and barbaric superstitions there and elsewhere. Many of the Roman martyrs of the early Church could have saved their lives if only they had accepted the placement of bust of Our Lord in Pantheon to be placed alongside those of false gods, to whom they would offer some grains of incense. They refused. It was the Divine Redeemer and His true Church, nothing else. Nothing else at all.

Although some of those fighting in the Cristeros War in Mexico between 1926 and 1929, such as General Enrique Gorostieta, believed that a return to the principles of "non-interference" with the practice of religion according to the policies of President Porfirio Diaz's overlooking most of the anticlerical provisions in the 1857 code of Benito Juarez would have provided sufficient protection for Mexican Catholics given the fact that anticlericalism had taken such hold of so many minds in the previous century, most of the brave peasants who fought and died under the banners of Viva Cristo Rey! and La Virgen de Guadalupe wanted to make it possible to make Mexico free to restore her to the loving mantle of Our Lady. The Catholic Faith alone is the only means, although, given the vagaries of fallen human nature, never a guarantor, by which men can know a just social order. 

Moreover, the peasants fighting and dying under the banner of Christ the King understood that the anticlericalists did not constitute a majority of the population in Mexico and that the Catholics in the cities who may have been reluctant to supper the Cristeros openly would have been fully supportive if they saw them march into Mexico City. Plutarco Elias Calles knew this as well.

To wit, Father David Hewko of the Society of Saint Pius X delivered a sermon at Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God Church in Syracuse, New York, on Sunday, August 6, 2006, gave a very moving account that had been provided to him by an elderly man who had served as a Cristero during a pilgrimage that Father Hewko and the parish's prior, Father Timothy Pfeiffer, had made with some young members of the parish . The account provided by the surviving Cristero, as retold by Father Hewko, was as stirring as it was riveting. This man had not fought for "religious liberty." He had fought for the restoration of Mexico to the Catholic Faith against prototypes of the men from both organized crime families of naturalism that govern us today right here in the United States of America.

Do not be "conned" by the attempts of the conciliarists and the Americanists to distort history.

It is no accident at all that popular culture in Mexico has returned to many of the barbaric practices of the Aztecs that Our Lady came to eradicate when she appeared to Juan Diego and Tepeyac Hill in 1531. And it is no accident at all that Aztec liturgical practices, such as they were, have made their way into many conciliar churches in Mexcio, driving countless millions of good Catholics out of these dens of sacrilege and into the waiting arms of the devil's minions in the persons of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant sects.

The American concept of "religious liberty" is a lie from the devil in order to permit him to reign, albeit in a disguised manner, while Catholics shout hosannas of praise not to Christ the King but to the "founding fathers," men who had a founding hatred for Christ the King (no, I will never tire of reminding of you of this), thus making the rise of statists who hate the true Faith inevitable. The only check against the the rise of the civil state into a tyrannical monster that sees itself as the true "secular church" from which there can be no dissent.

This is something that General Enrique Gorostieta, as brave and as valorous as he was in battle as he fought with cries of "Viva Cristo Rey!," did not understand because he had but a limited understanding of the Faith. It is something that no one in the counterfeit church of conciliarism today understands, which is why so many of them are attempting to use For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada to blaspheme the Mexican martyrs as champions" of "religious liberty" and to minimize the great crimes of the government of the United States of America that made more possible their torture and their brutal executions.

American Anticlericalism Responsible for the Rise of Plutarco Elias Calles

Although the Constitution of the United States of America is officially "neutral" towards religion, even many of the men who framed the Constitution of the United States of America had a great contempt for the Catholic Faith, tolerating Catholics in the belief that they would be converted in time to their "new science of politics," a hope that has been fulfilled (see Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism), the hatred of the lion's share of ordinary Americans was notorious, manifesting itself in a variety a way in the Nineteenth Century, including riots and the burning of Catholic churches:

The Carbonari, then numerous in America, received their orders direct from European lodges. They edited a paper, L'Eco d'Italia, and labored unceasingly to prejudice the people against the Church and trammel the authority of the Bishops. In the hope of recovering their waning influence, the Protestant ministers made common cause with the revolutionaries. This was the beginning of a vast conspiracy, which imperiled, for a time, Catholic liberty in the United States.

The Know-Nothings, a new society, began to be organized about 1852. Theirs was a secret order, which bound its members by a solemn oath. It was formed, ostensibly, to defend the rights of the poor against European invasion. "America is for Americans" was its slogan. With this object in view, they endeavored to have severe naturalization laws enacted against the new arrivals from Europe, and exclude citizens born of foreign parents from holding public offices. In reality, these fanatics combated no so much the foreign immigration. as the fidelity of Europeans, especially the Irish, to the Church of Rome. To base calumnies they added murder, pillage, incendiarism, and, before long, found an occasion for opening the campaign. In the spring of 1853 the Papal Nuncio to Brazil, Archbishop Bedini, arrived in New York, bringing the Sovereign Pontiff's blessing to the faithful in the Untied States. He was charged, moreover, to investigate the conditions of Catholicism in the great Republic.

The Know-Nothings saw in this mission a grave attack upon American liberties. Their newspapers denounced the perfidious and ambitious intrigues of Rome. The apostate priest Gavazzi came from London and placed his eloquence at the service of his follow-socialists and friends. for several months he followed the Envoy form one city to the other, vomiting forth lies, threatening him with dire reprisals, and through fiery denunciation endeavored to stir up the masses against the "Papists."

From vituperation and abuse there was but one step to action. On Christmas day in Cincinnati a band of assassins attempted to do way with the Nuncio. Driven off by the police, they revenged themselves by burning him in effigy. This odious scene was enacted in several towns. Conditions pointing to renewed attacks, Archbishop Bedini was forced to depart after a short sojourn in the United States. But the hostilities did not cease with the departure of the Nuncio. The campaign lasted for three years, attended by violent outrages and attacks, and armed forces had presently to interfere to defend life and property. A witness of these disorders, Father De Smet draws a gloomy picture of existing conditions in his letters. "The times are becoming terrible for Catholics in these unhappy States. Nowhere in the world do honest men enjoy less liberty."

"European demagogues, followers of Kossuth, Mazzini, etc., have sworn to exterminate us. Seven Catholic churches have been sacked and burned; those courageous enough to defend them have been assassinated." "The future grows darker, and we are menaced from every side. If our enemies succeed in electing a President from ranks--until now the chances have been in their favor--Catholics will be debarred from practicing their religion; our churches and schools will be burned and pillaged, and murder will result from these brawls. During this present time [1854] over twenty thousand Catholics have fled to other countries seeking refuge from persecution, and many more talk of following them. The right to defame  and exile is the order of the day in this great Republic, now the rendezvous o the demagogues and outlaws of every country."

No laws were enacted for the protection of Catholics, and in some States the authorities were openly hostile. "The legislators of New York and Pennsylvania are now busy with the temporal affairs of the Church, which they wish take out of the hands of the Bishops. These States have taken the initiative, and others will soon follow. In Massachusetts, a mischief-making inquisition has just been instituted, with the object of investigating affairs in religious houses. In Boston, a committee of twenty-four rascals, chosen from among the legislators, of which sixty are Protestant ministers, searched and inspected a convent of the Sisters of of Notre Dame de Namur."

While making a tour of the Jesuit houses with the Provincial, Father De Smet more than once braved the fury of the fanatics. In Cincinnati, a priest could now show himself in the street without being insulted by renegade Germans, Swiss, and Italians. In Louisville, thirty Catholics were killed in an open square and burned alive in their houses. Those who attempted to flee were driven back into the flames at the point of pistols and knives. Even in St. Louis, several attempts were made in one week upon the lives of citizens. The Jesuits were not spared. At Ellsworth, Maine, Father Bapst was taken by force from the house of a Catholic where he was hearing confessions, was covered with pitch, rolled in feathers, tied, swung by his hands and feet to a pole, and carried through the city to the accompaniment of gross insults. (Father E. Lavaille, S.J., The Life of Father De Smet, S.J. (1801-1873): Apostle of the Rocky Mountains, published originally in 1915 by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, New York, and reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 2000 with the additions and the subtitle, "Apostle of the Rocky Mountains." pp. 262-265.)

Such attacks were not uncommon in the Nineteenth Century right here in the "free" and "civilized" United States of America. Anticlerical and anti-Catholic legislation was common in some of the more "progressive" states in the latter part of the Nineteenth and early part of the Twentieth Centuries. The current administration of President Barack Hussein Obama and Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is demonstrating this once again, albeit with the public support of millions upon millions of Catholics who, much like Biden himself, have continued in "good standing" in what they think is the Catholic Church even though they practice contraception and are fully supportive of the surgical assassination of innocent preborn children. Yes, history does indeed repeat itself.

The Blaine amendments, named after the virulently anti-Catholic James G. Blaine (R-Maine), who, in additional to being the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States of America in 1884, served in the United States House of Representatives (where he was the Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875) and the United States Senate and served two different terms in two different presidencies as the United States Secretary of State, that were passed by many state legislatures, including that of my own native State of New York, prohibited the use of public funding of any kind to subsidize schools operated by religious organizations.

Members of the Grand Orient Masonic lodge of Oregon, using all of their considerable clout, joined forces with their great ally, the Ku Klux Klan, and others to sponsor an initiative (a referendum that, if approved by voters, becomes law as though it had been passed by a state legislature) to amend the Compulsory Education Act to, in effect, outlaw Catholic schools in the State of Oregon by mandating that all children be "educated" in public schools. This effort was rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925. (See America's Concentration Camps).

The State of North Dakota, long a den of Masonic activity (Freemasons in the newly formed state legislature in 1889 sought to "liberalize" existing divorce laws as a means of destabilizing the family, something that was fought by the founding bishop of the Diocese of Jamestown (later Fargo), North Dakota, John Shanley), passed an anti-garb law in 1947 to require priests and consecrated religious to wear lay clothing when teaching in public schools. The Freemasons of North Dakota hoped to force a crisis of conscience for priests and religious that would prompt the two bishops of North Dakota from prohibiting their clergy and religious to teach in public schools. Bishops Leo Dworschak of Fargo and Vincent Ryan of Bismarck got permission from the Holy See for the clergy and the religious to wear lay clothing, thereby avoiding that crisis of conscience:

When the "anti-garb" campaign was waged in North Dakota in 1948, Bishop Ryan led in the defense of the rights of those wearing religious garb to teach in the public schools of the state. The opposition was well organized and had carried on vigorous campaign before the Catholics of the state were aware of their activities. Bishop Ryan rose to the challenge, and his efforts to defeat this measure were very nearly successful. In conjunction with Bishop Leo Dworschak of the Fargo Diocese, he appealed to the Holy See for permission for the sisters to teach in lay clothing. The victory for the anti-Catholics and the bigots was rendered empty when the Holy See granted their request. Friends and enemies alike had a new admiration for Bishop Ryan following this campaign. (History of Bishop Vincent J. Ryan.)

The authors of the Texas Declaration of Independence enshrined their hatred of the Holy Priesthood as an instrument of "eternal tyranny:"

“When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country [Mexico], which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.” (Texas Declaration of Independence, March 2, 1836.)

Lest readers shrug their shoulders in an attempt to convince themselves that this view was anomalous for its time in this land of "religious liberty" and "freedom of conscience," here is a dose of reality that demonstrates how Joel Poinsett, the Freemason from South Carolina, who helped to plant the seeds for the eventual rise of Plutarco Elias Calles one hundred years after he served as the American minister to Mexico, desired to extinguish or eliminate the Catholic Church in Mexico:

Poinsett was convinced that for his purposes this direction should tend towards the undermining of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The faith of the vast majority, Spanish or Indian or mixed, was and is, very real in its patriotic as well as religious implications. Even the political journals today frequently the fact that it is through the Catholic Church they are the heirs of a great civilization and a glorious past.

The domed and steeped temples that strew the land are a visible symbol of national unity and democratic brotherhood. Rich and poor, learned and illiterate, white and half-caste and Indian, can be seen kneeling shoulder to shoulder before its altars and reacting to the stimulus of the Christian civilization that hallows its holy places. The Mexican was seen to cling to his religion, as a buckler in defense of his traditions against the challenge of the materialistic giant of the North to crowd him from the land of his ancestors.

Recognizing that religion was not a matter of superstition or sentiment for peons and gentry, but by conscience and instinct the central issue of the entire nation in its struggle for self-preservation, Poinsett and the pro-American liberty party he had organized adopted in secret session of the Grand Lodge La Ruiz in New Orleans, 1827, the following preamble and platform:

"Convinced that the clergy, inasmuch as it opposes colonization (of Texas by Americans), is a permanent obstacle to reform; that it impedes the diffusion of light, provokes antagonism towards foreigners (i.e., Joel R. Poinsett); . . . the Mexican National Rite adopts in all its parts the political plan and program proposed by progressive men, which should be initiated in Congress as soon as possible by the Masons hold who seats there; . . . because, being based on the principles taught by Masonry, the Rite should redouble its efforts to make it effective in accordance with the terms in which it is conceived, namely:

"1. Absolute freedom of opinion and abrogation of all laws censoring the press.

"2. Abolition of special privilege for the clergy and the military.

"3. Suppression of monastic institutions and all laws recognizing the intervention of the clergy in civil business, such as the marriage contract, etc.

"4. Improvement of the moral condition of the people by depriving the clergy of its monopoly on public education, by increasing educational facilities and inculcating social duties by means of the foundation of museums, art conservatories and public libraries, by the establishment of educational institutions for classic literature, science and morals."

Every one of these planks, carpentered by our American agent [Poinsett] over a century ago, is now in the fulness of the sense intended a constitutional enactment, and our present supreme representative honored the enactors by his presence on the scene of their achievement at the moment of its completion. The first plank is legally concreted in the absolute freedom of anti-Christian press and speech, and the absolute suppression of all other. Planks two, three, and four are realized beyond even their expressed intent in the complete elimination of monks and monasteries and Christian teachers and clergy, and the confiscation of all Christian churches, schools, and institutions. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 42-44.)

Contrary to the "peace-loving" role that some conciliarist defenders of all things American contend, the persecution and martyrdom of thousands upon thousands of Catholics in Mexico was the direct result of the intervention of the United States of America and its effort to "engineer" a Mexico led by "progressive" men who could do amongst a people used to authoritarianism what could not be done by force in this country: the elimination the influence, if not the very existence, of the Catholic Church.

Dr. Kenny explained how, far from being the "citadel" of "freedom" that Enrique Gorostieta himself believed, that Benito Juarez, whom Americans helped to put in power in Mexico in 1857, created a constitution that served as the very foundation of the measures undertaken sixty-nine years later by Plutarco Elias Calles:

This fiendish "Human Panther" [Juan Alvarez, who was interim president of Mexico from October 4, 1855, to December 11, 1855], as he was termed, inaugurated his reign by the law "Juarez" [who was his Minister of Justice], abolishing ecclesiastical privileges; and he supported his successor Comonfort in expropriating under the law "Lerdo" all property and capital held in trust by the Church. The "Panther" further enabled the greedy Masonic minority to give this and its anti-religious conclusions a juridic entity in the Juarez code, which from 1859 to 1871 forms the basis and pillars of the constitutional edifice that Calles has but cemented and domed.

The Juarez laws abolished all religious orders and confraternities, dress, vows, teachers, and teaching, with practically all civil rights and legal personality; nullified Christian marriages, and penalized religious rites and insignia anywhere outside the Church walls. Churches and all religious institutions were declared the property of the State, which instituted a "National Church" of its own and invited United States sects to replace them; and "God" was eliminated from oaths and textbooks and civil formalities.

Under one of these edicts of 1858, the mayor of Saint Juan del Rio had several hundred pilgrims arrested in 1931 for reciting the Rosary in public, and in 1932 the Guadalajara authorities imposed a fine on laymen for appearing on the street on Ash Wednesday with a smudge of ashes on their brows.

But Church and State were not at all separated as Mr. Daniels implies. Constitutionally the State has swallowed the Church; it is but the physical swallowing that is now in operation. The public, to whom these laws had never been submitted, rose in violent reaction; and President [Ignacio Gregorio Comonfort de los Ríos, who was President of Mexico from December 11, 1855, to January 12, 1858] Comonfort, who withdrew from the storm, confessed that "the constitution was enforced solely by coercion. . . The Nation repudiated the new Constitution and the troops simply sustained the Nation's will." (Cuevas, V. 315).

While the United States Commissioner Forsyth, was negotiating for the cession of Lower California with Comonfort-Juarez party and advising [American] President [James] Buchanan to support that party in Mexico "until such as we are ready to Americanize her," the public reaction against the scheme brought the Conservatives to power.

The contemporaneous comment of the New York Times is instructive today [1935]:

"Before the fall of Comonfort various treaties had been negotiated with Mr. Forsyth, relative to a loan by the United States to Mexico, for the payment of which a mortgage was to be given on the State of Sonora, and arrangements made for a right of way over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. If the liberal party returns to power * * * all those treaties can easily be put into effect * * * The United States may expect nothing in the way of treaties from the Church party, and Mr. Buchanan cannot fail to comprehend that it is good policy to support the liberal party."

This support, without which no "liberal" party ever gained or retained power in Mexico, was extended by President Buchanan to Benito Juarez, who had fled to Queretaro and there declared himself President. Driven from city to city, he fled the country. Nevertheless, when the Conservative Government refused to negotiate with the American minister for the purchase of several States, President Buchanan, deeming it good policy to support the complacent "Liberal" minority, broke off diplomatic relations with the established government and recognized the exiled Juarez as President of Mexico. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 55-57.)

Although the Juarez penal laws were not enforced during the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, who governed between November 28, 1876, and May 25, 1911, and was generally sympathetic to the Catholic Church, recognizing that they could not be enforced without starting a civil war that would require the shedding of the blood of his own citizens, which he was not going to undertake, they came back with a vengeance after the Mexican Revolution overthrew him. Yes, once again, it was the United States of America that guaranteed the success of the revolution's anticlerical objectives, something that was near and dear to the heart of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson:

The peace and prosperity which Diaz established enhanced in the eyes of the Church his constructive toleration;  but his favor towards foreign enterprise begot jealousy of greedy natives and disappointed American exploiters. Hence, in 1910, when the riches of Mexican oil fields were realized, hostile factions, backed by our Masonic and other elements intolerant of his tolerance, filled the American press with the infamies of Diaz absolutism, and with American arms opened the Madero-Magon revolution on our borders. Had our United States Government exercised then half the energy it displayed in arresting the border movements against Obregon and Calles, the Madero-Magon operations could not have started.

But [Francisco] Madero disappointed his promised. He really wanted a free democracy by honest elections; and as these seemed certain to put the Catholic Union in control, a new revolution started on our border, again with American arms and munitions.

The Washington administration was said to have become unfriendly to Madero on the same ground that had made it grow hostile to Diaz. The latter had refused, and the former had failed in his promise, to ratify the lease to the United States of Magdalena Bay in Lower California. Disappointed political and concessionaire exploiters had also their influence. Again we sacrificed to our material interests the civil and religious rights of the Mexican people.

The scheme failed for the moment, when an attempted revolution by a nephew of Diaz resulted in the presidency of Huerta, who by his firmness and justice so satisfied so satisfied the orderly elements that he was recognized by England and Germany and the majority of stabilized governments; and United States recognition, urged by our American Ambassador and consuls, awaited only the inauguration of a new executive. Instead, President Wilson supported with army and navy the worst scoundrels that ever raped and pillaged Mexico; whence that orgy of anarchy and tyranny that culminated in Calles. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishes, pp. 64-65.)

It did not matter who was in power in Washington, District of Columbia, Republicans or Democrats. Our Catholic neighbor to the south had to be treated as a virtual colony in order to make it more plaint to American desires to exploit its people and its natural resources to maximize American wealth. In order to accomplish this, of course, it was necessary to see to it that the influence of the Catholic Church was decimated once and for all. If this meant replacing one leader with one more sympathetic to American desires for "liberal" "progress" in America, well, that was certainly just fine with the amoral President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who helped the complete the work in Mexico that had been begun by Joel R. Poinsett ninety years before.

Too strong? Guess again:

Victoriano Huerta had his faults; but it was not these that moved Woodrow Wilson to destroy him. A commission of Mexican and United States Masons, headed by Governor Reynoso of Guanajuato, called on President Huerta to assure him that if he rejoined the Masonic body and accepted their platform they would secure him United States recognition. Take a scapular from his breast, Huerta said, "No, I am a Catholic, if a poor one, and that is my platform." His opening of Congress, for the first time in the name of God, and his urging its members to pray and legislate so that God's law should reign, further hardened Mexican hostility.

Having crushed decisively the rebellions which these agencies and President Wilson's antagonism had exited, President Huerta proceeded to govern with such even-handed efficiency that Ambassadors Wilson and O'Shaughnessy reported a new era of peace and stability. They added that triumph for [rebel and murderer Pancho] Villa and [Venustiano] Carranza could only issue in anarchy; yet while these and their ruffiandom were everywhere desecrating, murdering, and plundering, holding and torturing priests for ransom or death, and raping even cloisters, President Wilson raised the arms embargo in their favor.

This, with a stringent and watchful embargo on their opponents, had been the usual American method of putting and keeping Mexican "liberals" in power; but it failed to make headway for Carranza. Then President Wilson launched an action which makes his name and administration hateful to decent Mexicans today and reft of hope the patriotic majority, who, at every crisis, feel the giant hand of the United States withholding them from recovering their country. Through his then Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, he sent the United States Navy April 21, 194, to seize Vera Cruz and later Tampico, Huerta's only channel for supplies; and so, by armed intervention, Carranza and spoilsmen were hoisted into power.

The pretext that Huerta murdered Madero seems as groundless as his constitutional insult to our flag; and execution of a predecessor did not preclude recognition from Carranza and Calles and many others to whom we had no scruple in extending it. But Lane Wilson shows in "Diplomatic Episodes" that Madero was spirited away and slain by friends of Generals Ruiz and Reyes in revenge for his brother's execution of these and other officers; and the actual assassin, Cardenas, was made a Brigadier by Carranza. The New York World had "scooped" the specific details for publication; but it was compelled to suppress them by order of President Wilson, who exercised a closure on the American press regarding Mexico that continued to our day and is but now beginning to be broken. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 65-67.)

Yes, yes, yes. The land of the "free." Well, freedom is but a slogan here in the United States of America. It always has been a slogan despite the delusional nationalism that passes for authentic patriotism that each of was immersed from the time of our birth. (See, for example, Fascists for Freedom.)

Woodrow Wilson would use these same means to suppress during American involvement in what we call now World War I, although at the time it was called the Great War or the World War. For all of Wilson's sloganeering to justify American involvement in this needless war of nationalism fought by the formerly Catholic countries of Europe on his desire to "make the world "safe for democracy" (which is not why young men, some just boys, died in the horrors of trench warfare in Europe prior to our involvement; they died there because they had been conscripted by their government to do so, and their leaders were not the least bit concerned about "democracy"), he was had the iron will and the heart of a tyrant.

This is why he fully supported Venustiano Carranza's crackdown on the Catholic Church and insisted that he be removed once he recognized, in 1918, that the anticlerical provisions of the 1917 Constitution be relaxed.

Dr. Kenny described that Wilson ignored all evidence of the crimes being committed by Carranza regime in 1915:

It was said that their libertarian slogans appealed to him. They were the "Constitutional" party; for like their Calles continuators they were fluent in fine labels that belie the contents. Their gangsterism is labeled liberalism; their agrarian brigandage is peon emancipation; their state swindling is national finance; their Communism is concentrated Capitalism; their free education is compulsory de-Christianization; and their freedom of thought is atheism gone totalitarian. Carranza's "Constitutional" label was accepted by Mr. Wilson as genuine, despite his reply to [James] Cardinal Gibbons admitting the extent and enormity of that party's crimes against life, liberty, and religion. These were but regrettable incidents in the great cause of constitutionalizing Mexico by putting the Constitutional President out and forcing the most unconstitutional in. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 65-67.)

Father Francis Clement Kelley, later the founding bishop of the then named Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, was told the following to his face when he, representing the American bishops and the Extension of Society of which he was the first head, met with Wilson at the White House the anticlerical sieges of Carranza as early as 1915 after Carranza took his stolen office:

Wilson replied: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

Having thus instructed his visitor as to the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries. All efforts of Catholics to succor their coreligionists across the border were to prove fruitless, as they were to prove once again in 1924, when the fiercest persecution of all was begun by President Plutarco Calles. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1970, p. 274.)

 

Bishop Kelley described Wilson's steadfast support for the Carranza regime and justified his refusal to assist Catholics being persecuted in Mexico:

Carranza was chosen by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, to be the President of Mexico. When the Turks massacred the Armenians the Christian world shouted its protest. When the Russians murdered the Jews the shout was repeated. No people shouted louder against the massacres than the Americans and the English. About the horrors perpetrated against the Catholics of Mexico few voices were raised. President Wilson told an Indianapolis audience that he would allow the Mexicans to shed all the blood they wanted. He told me in his office in the White house that, as the inspiration of democracy had come out of the French Revolution, which had shed as much blood as Carranza and his men, perhaps something good would come out of the Mexican debacle. His words were offered in consolation. I thanked him and withdrew. (Bishop Francis Clement Kelley, Blood-Drenched Altars, published originally in 1935 by the Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, p. 237.)

Wilson did, however, write a letter, dated March 20, 1915, but most likely authored by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, shortly thereafter his meeting with Father Kelley to explain that he was, of course, opposed to the "treatment already said to have been accorded priests has had a most unfortunate effect upon opinion outside of Mexico" (cf. Kelley, p. 241). This is interesting as Wilson was plotting all along to using his own agents in Mexico to pave the way for a constitution with anticlerical provisions. The lady had protesteth a bit too much.

Wilson's motivations were, obviously, purely political. Even though he despised Catholics and was possessed of such anticlericalism that he addressed his own enthusiastic supporter, the arch-Americanist James Cardinal Gibbons, as "Mister" Gibbons, he was nevertheless conscious of the need to cultivate what had become a key constituency for his Democratic Party.

Thus it is that Wilson's letter to Carranza was issued as a means of mollifying Catholics, whose "foreign" roots he believed could prove them to be subversive, which is why Gibbons and his brethren fell all over themselves during World War I so as to "prove" that Catholic citizens, from being "subversive," were as "patriotic" as other Americans. And what so few historians have even considered, no less have written about, is the fact that Wilson's involvement of the United States in the establishment of the anti-clerical Mexican Constitution of 1917 that ushered in the crimes that led a decade later to the Cristeros War was largely out of the consciousness of most Catholics in the United States because, perhaps not by "coincidence," they were intent on "proving" their "patriotism" to the cause of the needless, immoral and thoroughly unjust World War I. What American Catholics won't do to indemnify their secular saviors, whether of the false opposite of the naturalist "right" or that of the "left.'

Dr. Michael Kenny explained the direct involvement of Woodrow Wilson in the drafting of the provisions of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, tracing Wilson's beliefs right back to those of Joel R. Poinsett and the actions of the cipher known as James Buchanan, who served as President of the United States from March 4, 1857, to March 4, 1861:

It has been shown by documented proof that our first United States Envoy organized a Masonic political machine for the dominance of Mexico by ousting the Catholic Church and its culture from school and temple and the hearts of its people, and by securing therefor the armed forces of the United States at the price of half its territory and of preponderance over all.

We have also seen how the price was paid, and how from Buchanan to Wilson we furnished arms and armies and whatever other aid was requisite to empower bandit factions to eradicate religion and culture and civil liberties.

Mr. Wilson differed from his predecessors in making his intrusions work directly to this effect by empowering and sanctioning the Carranza Constitution of 1917. Mr. Yon Lind had wried him to bring he rule of intellectuals to an end. His own confidential agent to Carranza, a Methodist preacher named Silliman, wrote in like tone; and The United States Foreign Relation Papers of 1914., sq., which make humiliating reading, show their principals eager following these agents' advices' but Duval West of San Antonio, their only gent that told the truth, was recalled.

There no intellectuals at what they called the Constitutional Convention of Queretaro, but there were ex-lawyers, who, like the other members, had won representative right by pillaging distinctions, and were keen to concoct a legal contrivance that would guarantee their plunder and perpetuate the plundering. This they did in the 1917 "Constitution," an extension into organic law of the worst enactments in the Juarez Code against religion and liberty.

Though devoid of every constitutional character, having been imposed by self-nominated bandit chiefs who pistoled the few moderates into silence and never submitted it for ratification, this monstrous instrument has living interest today as the basis for Calles' organic and executive monstrosities,  and as a Wilsonian legacy which no successor of Mr. Wilson had yet disowned and which the Secretary of his then empowering Navy is now sedulously guarding. How sedulously Mr. Daniels is caring in our name for the child of his fostering will appear when we have made some stud of this constitutional monster whose potencies Calles has actualized and applied systematically in totalitarian destructiveness.

The Juarez Code, though intentionally prohibitive of all religious rights, left loopholes here and there through which churchmen and others marked for despoilment might enter claims for possession or indemnity, and it failed to afford sufficient scope to the war chiefs of [Pancho] Villa pattern for legalized plunder. This the Carranza Constitution fully achieved; even though Carranza himself was more tool than the chieftain of the plunderers. Picked by the bandit chiefs whom our navy and army monies and diplomacies had lifted into power, the members of the convention represented but the motley forces we had armed and paid for, and certainly not a half million of the fifteen million population.

This crude misrepresentation achieved, however, one result of permanent and perilous importance. Dropping the smoke screen of "Constitutionalist," which had been thrown up to accommodate Mr. Wilson, they called themselves the National Revolutionary Party; and, claiming to represent all the people of Mexico they initiated the Calles dogma that the P.N.R. [later the P. R. I.] (Partido Nacional Revolucionario) was the one and only party permissible, and there cannot and must not be another. (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 69-71.)

Carranza, grateful to Woodrow Wilson for engineering his rise to power, may have abandoned the practice of the Catholic Faith. Murdered that he was, and he did murder his own fair share of political opponents, he asked the Mexican Congress to amend Article 130 of the 1917 Constitution to permit "liberty of conscience." his plea fell on deaf ears. He knew his time was up, attempting to to flee to Vera Cruz, found shot to death in a hut after the engineer of the train he was riding to escape from Mexico City had discovered that the track ahead had been torn up. Agents of Plutarco Elias Calles's immediate predecessor, Alvaro Obregon, are speculated to have bribed the three men guarding President Venustiano Carranza to shoot hit as he slept on May 21, 1920.

Bishop Kelley wrote as follows about this tragic man's end:

Later, when his portfolio was received by his family, they found in it a crucifix and a little religious medal. On the latter was the inscription: "Madre Mia Salve Me--Mother mine save me." He had done a brave thing to go before the Congress with a request to change the provisions of the Constitution and end the religious persecution. He must have known that it was a brave thing to do with enemies all around him, and Obregon, back by the C.R.O.M., in the filed against him. It can be said that for him that he kept his word to President Wilson at the cost of his life. Perhaps the memories of the old days in Saltillo when he ad respected religion, though he did not seem to practice it, had helped him to be brave. Certainly no revolutionist who understood the situation would have advised him to do what he did. Perhaps he felt that the end had come and that he could at last tell the truth. Perhaps he realized that since his own hand had unloosed the whirlwind, he had no right to complain if it sucked him into swirling death. (Bishop Francis Clement Kelley, Blood-Drenched Altars, published originally in 1935 by the Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1987, pp.244-245.)

 

The die had been cast, however. The forces unleashed by Joel R. Poinsett in the 1820s would be powerful enough to to seek a wholesale frontal assault on Christ the King and Our Lady of Guadalupe, who won Mexico for the Catholic Faith from the barbaric Aztecs, whose true ideological and religious descendants govern us in the "civilized" United States of America today to continue, albeit, at least for now, by less "nonviolent" means (although the innocent preborn and those being carved up alive in hospitals for their body members would disagree), the same crusade that was carried on with such zeal by the likes of Plutarco Elias Calles.

Then, as now, my friends, most Catholics in the United States of America went about their business without too much of a concern for the plight of the suffering Catholic Church in Our Lady's dear country, Mexico. Just consider the fact that For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada is in only 642 movie theaters across the United States, grossing a total of $928,321 this past weekend while something called Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted is being shown in 4,258 movie theatres and grossed $60,316,738 in box office sales upon its debut during the same time frame.

It's really the same now as it was then, which is why we must defend the Catholic Faith as we pray our Rosaries and seek to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins, which have brought down upon us our own chastisements, as we exclaim now what was exclaimed by the Cristeros:

Viva Cristo Rey!

Yes, my few readers, then, now and always: Viva Cristo Rey!

(The next part of this series will focus on American assistance to Calles and his puppets in the 1920s into the 1930s. Part four will concentrate on Vatican diplomacy and then the regrets of Pope Pius XI after it was apparent that Calles had broken his word. Part five will discuss contemporary applications of the situation in Mexico a century ago to our own plight today.)

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Anthony of Padua, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints