CHAPTER XXVIII.

The Church of Mexico.--Its present Condition and Power.--The Number of the "Religios."--The Wealth of the Church.--The Money-power of the Church.--The Power of Assassination.--Educating the People robs the Priest.--Making and adoring Images.--The Progress downward.

The Catholic Church of Mexico is a peculiar institution. Its historical antecedents have been considered in previous chapters in connection with other subjects. Men no longer whisper their unbelief with trembling, nor have they any longer to dread inquisitorial fires if they refuse to pay tithes to the bishop, or if they neglect to bestow rich gifts upon the priests. Still the Church survives the losses of this important engine of piety, and continues unmodified by passing events. In the midst of revolutions it stands unchanged, a relic of the last century. It stands like a great showman's wagon from which the horses have been detached, and children, great and small, are collected around to look at its images. Unfortunately, there is an abundance of full-grown children in a country where, for centuries, a combination of spiritual and temporal despotisms have dwarfed the intellects of men down to the standard of a toy-shop religion, which had long rejoiced in crushing the human intellect, while it disdained to enlighten the humblest understanding.

Mexico is the only Catholic country in which the Church has remained unchanged during all the revolutions of the last half century. The French infidel armies, and the wars and revolutions that followed the French invasions, overturned the Church of Spain and Italy, so that the Church organization that now exists in those peninsulas is a new creation. Not so in Mexico. Its revolution was for the purpose of saving the privileges of the Church from the too sweeping reforms of the Cortes of Spain. And there it now stands, with all the properties and annuities which it enjoyed in the time of the idiot kings. The Inquisition no longer enforces with fire the censures of the Church, and men are no longer compelled by legal process to pay tithes. But for these losses the Church has received a heavy compensation. The priests and inquisitors who ruled the childish court of Spain would allow no independence to the Mexican Church, but supplied, by royal appointment, all the candidates for vacant bishoprics and chapters, while the Vice-king was allowed to fill the inferior offices of the Church.

By the partial separation of Church and state which took place in 1833, the Church of Mexico became independent of the state. The chapters acquired the right of electing their own bishops; the bishops, by virtue of their spiritual authority, appointing the priests and exercising control over all Church property as _quasi_ corporations-sole, at least over all property not vested in religious communities, if practically there could be said to be any real exception. What that newly-acquired power of the Mexican bishops amounts to, we in the United States, from our own experience of the same authority, can judge.

STATISTICS OF THE CHURCH.

That the reader may know how extensive is this money-power of the bishops, I subjoin an extract from a statistical chart[63] published by Senor _Lerdo de Tejado_, _First Official de Ministerio de Fomento_, the following synopsis of the clergy and their incomes:

"There is one archbishop, the Archbishop of Mexico, and eleven bishops, and one to be created at Vera Cruz. There are 184 prebends and 1229 parishes. The total number of ecclesiastics is 3223.[64] There are 146 convents of monks and 59 convents of nuns, and 8 colleges for propagating the faith. The convents of monks are inhabited by 1139 persons, and there are 1541 nuns in convents, and with them 740 young girls and 870 servants. There are 238 persons in the colleges for propagating the faith." This is less than half the number of the _religios_ under the vice-kings, while the riches of the Church have immensely increased, as we shall presently see.

REVENUE OF THE CHURCH.

I translate from the same author, in a note, statistics upon the much-agitated question of the wealth of the Church of Mexico,[65] from which it will be seen that the total amount consumed in the maintenance of these 3223 persons, is annually $20,000,000, besides the very large sums expended in the repairs and ornaments of an enormous number of churches, and in gifts at the shrines of the different images, which can not be appropriated to the maintenance of the clergy. This sum of $20,000,000, if fairly divided among them, would yield an abundant support, though not an extravagant living; but, unfortunately, the greatest portion of this immense sum is absorbed by the bishops, while the priests of the villages contrive to exist by the contributions they wring out of the _peons_. At the time of the census, 1793, the twelve bishops had $539,000[66] appropriated to their support; but now their revenues are so mixed up with the revenues of the Church, that it is impossible to say how much these twelve successors of the apostles appropriate to their own support.

MONEY-POWER OF THE CHURCH.

In place of the Inquisition which the reformed Spanish government took away from the Church of Mexico, the Church now wields the power of wealth, almost fabulous in amount, which is practically in the hands of a close corporation-sole. The influence of the Archbishop, as the substantial owner of half the property in the city of Mexico, gives him a power over his tenants unknown under our system of laws. Besides this, a large portion of the Church property is in money, and the Archbishop is the great loan and trust company of Mexico. Nor is this power by any means an insignificant one. A bankrupt government is overawed by it. Men of intellect are crushed into silence; and no opposition can successfully stand against the influence of this Church lord, who carries in his hands the treasures of heaven, and in his money-bags the material that moves the world. To understand the full force of his power of money, it must be borne in mind that Mexico is a country proverbial for recklessness in all conditions of life; for extravagant living and extravagant equipages; a country where a man's position in society is determined by the state he maintains; a country, the basis of whose wealth is the mines of precious metal; where princely fortunes are quickly acquired and suddenly lost, and where hired labor has hardly a cash value. In such a country, the power and influence of money has a meaning beyond any idea that we can form. Look at a prominent man making an ostentatious display of his devotion: his example is of advantage to the Church, and the Church may be of advantage to him, for it has an abundance of money at 6 per cent. per annum, while the outside money-lenders charge him 2 per cent. per month. The Church, too, may have a mortgage upon his house over-due; and woe betide him if he should undertake a crusade against the Church. This is a string that the Church can pull upon which is strong enough to overawe government itself.

This money-power of the Church yet lacks completeness and concentration to make it even a tolerable substitute for the power lost by the abolition of the Inquisition, as this wealth is distributed among 12 independent bishops. But, having succeeded in establishing the temporal power of her bishops in Mexico more firmly than in the United States, the Papal court made another step in advance. In 1852, Mexico was electrified with delight at the condescension of the Holy Father in sending a _nuncio_ to that city. For two full years this representative of the Holy See was _feted_ and toasted on all hands, as little less than the Pope himself, whom he represented. But last year all these happy feelings were dashed with gall and wormwood by an announcement that as the bishops controlled all this immense property by virtue of their spiritual authority, there was a resulting trust in his favor, or at least in favor of the Pope, whom he represented with full powers. It was Pandora's box opened in the midst of "a happy family." There was no disputing the nuncio's law; but to render to him an account of their receipts and disbursements, or to deliver over the bonds and mortgages to this agent of the Pope, was most unpleasant. The old Archbishop keeps fast hold of the money-bags, which, so far, the keys of Saint Peter have been unable to unlock. The battle waxes loud and fierce between the parties and their partisans, and Santa Anna stands looking on, dreaming of the happy time when, through the internal dissensions of the Church, these accumulations of 300 years of robbery and false pretenses will fall into the public treasury, and the people as well as the government will obtain their enfranchisement.

The money-power of the Church has proved sufficiently strong to save it from the hungry maw of a famishing government, and to stand unaffected by the revolutions that surround it; and now and then, when too bitterly assailed by some political reformer, it finds relief in the assassination of the assailant, as in the case of the eloquent member of the last Congress, who, after a violent philippic against the corruptions of the priests, was found murdered in his chamber. And, as in case of the inquisitorial assassinations, the crime was proved to have been connected with a robbery. The power to overawe courts of justice, proverbially corrupt, and the facilities with which assassinations are procured, are now the most dreaded weapons of the Church, and may account for the nominal conformity of the intelligent classes.

The unbelievers in Mexico, though considerable in numbers, are not organized with a positive creed. Theirs is only a negative existence--unbelief; and they are generally found conforming outwardly, as a more convenient and prudent course than running a tilt with the well-organized forces of the Church.

There is nothing peculiar in the spiritual powers of the Church of Mexico, as these powers are common to all Catholic countries, and vary only with the ignorance and brutality of the people; the more degraded the people, the greater is the power of the priest and bishop. The intelligent Catholic, educated among Protestants, looks upon his priest as a religious instructor, and interprets the _ego te absolvo_ as rather a matter of form, meaning little more than that he will intercede for him. He has caught and is applying a Protestant idea unwittingly. But with the gross multitude who constitute the mass of the Spanish-American population, the priest is the God of the people; his giving or withholding absolution is a matter of life or death; and, however corrupt and debauched he may be, he still holds jurisdiction over the pains of hell and the bliss of heaven. For a reasonable consideration in money, he will shut up the one and open the other. The offering in the mass of the bloodless sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as it is called, is not sufficient for the Catholic in a Protestant country, but the priest must also preach a sermon every Sabbath, like a Protestant minister, though he still holds to the efficacy of the mass in conferring blessings on the living and the believing dead. The preaching of the priest is a rare thing in an exclusively Catholic country. The mass is his livelihood, and if he be the head of a community, or a popular priest, he often makes a profit in taking in masses to say, and letting out the job at a discount. The whole matter may be summed up by saying that the more profoundly ignorant the people are, the more devotional do they become, so that the priest has always a pecuniary interest in the ignorance of the people, and if he makes any effort toward their enlightenment, it is an effort made directly against his own pecuniary interests and the income of his office.

WORSHIP OF IMAGES.

The most ancient anti-Catholic, I might with propriety say, Protestant sect, whose form of synagogue worship is congregational, and who are republican at heart, though too often submitting to a despotism, are the Jews. Between these two, the Jew and the Catholic, there exists an unmitigated hostility. The Catholic reviles the Jew with a sin of which, most likely, his own ancestors were not guilty,[67] and the Jew curses the Nazarene for the idolatry of his worshipers. He will make no allowances for the nice distinction between adoration and worship, and insists that the making the likeness of any _thing_ to be set up in a place of worship is idolatry, and that the image of the cross is as much an image as the image of Him who hung thereon. And in all this the Jew is right, if we are to obey the commandment of God. Yet the Jew forgets that a thousand years of trial were requisite to cure his ancestors of their proneness to idols. After their first mission, accomplished in the birth of Christ, God has preserved them a perpetual witness against paganism. But so subtle is this sin, that we find ourselves setting up sensuous representations, while we point the finger of scorn at the Catholic, who ascribes miraculous power to an image of the Virgin. And what is the difference, the Almighty himself being judge, between setting up a cross in a place of worship or ascribing miraculous power to an image, or, as is the fashion to say, some spirit acting through the image? Are they not different stages of the same disease, and each equally calculated to provoke the Almighty to jealousy.

SUMMARY OF EVILS.

Image worship has another curious aspect. It is a very tolerable thermometer by which to measure the downward progress of nations. Pagan Rome, in times of comparative purity, had her laws against idolatry; but as her higher classes advanced in refinement and sensuality, and the plebeians became debased and brutalized, the whole religious ideas of the nation degenerated into idolatry, associated with a despotic miracle-working priesthood, and soon followed by a political despotism. It is curious to witness how exactly it takes on the same form in different countries in traveling this downward road. The Buddhist of China, who has reached a thousand-fold lower level than the Catholic, has his unmarried priesthood, his monks, and nuns, and self-imposed penances, and tortures, and holy water, and a ritual in an unknown tongue (Sanscrit), so strikingly resembling the Catholic as to suggest the idea of a common origin, if such an idea were not impossible. Yet in the moral standard they seem to have reached the point of total depravity. Hence we might sum up the cause that have produced the Mexican of the present day by enumerating the absence of the scriptural idea of family relation; the despotism exercised by the priesthood with the aid of an Inquisition, and the unnumbered toll-gates they have placed on the road to heaven; the effeminacy of the higher classes and debasement of the peasantry; the absorption of half the revenues of the country in superstitious and idolatrous purposes, and the uncleanly habits superinduced by mental and physical degradation for generations, so that the word _leper_ is used to designate a poor man in the city where that loathsome disease has its victims.

[63] _Grando Sinoptico de la Republica Mejicana en 1850. Por Miguel M. Lerdo y Tejado_; approved by the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics.

[64] This number 3223 includes all of the 1139 monks, except the lay brothers. The two classes of priests, those who are not monks and those who are monks, are distinguished in Catholic countries as seculars and regulars (_clerigos_ and _religios_). Humboldt says the Mexican clergy are composed of 10,000 individuals (_Essai Politique_, vol. i. p. 172), and, including the nuns, and lay brothers and sisters, he puts the sum total of the religious at 14,000. But in a note he gives the numbers in five of the principal departments out of twelve, which foot up at only 5405 for the clergy of both orders.

[65] "The general revenue destined for the maintenance of the clergy and of religious services in the republic may be divided into four classes: first, that which appertains to the bishops and to the canons, who form the chapter of the Cathedral; second, those revenues which appertain to particular ecclesiastics and chaplaincies; third, those of curates and vicars; fourth, those of divers communities of _religios_, of both sexes.

"The first class is principally of tithes and first-fruits, the product of which was very considerable in times past, when they included a tenth part of all the first fruits which grew upon the soil of the republic, and the firstlings of the cattle. But lately this revenue has much fallen off, since by the law of the 17th of October, 1833, it is no longer obligatory upon the cultivators to pay this contribution. Nevertheless, there still are many persons who, for conscientious reasons, or for other cause, continue to pay this tax, so that it produces a very considerable sum. This part of the clergy also receive considerable sums which have been left by devout persons for the performance of certain annual ceremonies called _anniversaries_.

"The collegiate church of our Lady of Guadalupe has, in addition to a monthly lottery, which operates upon a capital of $13,000, certain properties and other capitals of which the government takes no account.

"Particular ecclesiastics and chaplains are supported on a capital generally of $3000, established by certain pious persons for that object, besides the alms of the faithful, which are given for a certain number of masses to be applied to objects of their devotion.

"The support of curates consists of parochial rights, viz., fees for baptisms, marriages, funerals, responses, and religious celebrations (_funcions_) which, in their respective churches, they command the faithful to make; and, finally, by the profits which they derive from the sale of _novenas_, medals, scapularies, ribbons (_madedas_), wax, and other objects which the parishioners employ.

"The income of convents of monks, besides the alms which they receive for masses, _funcions_, and funerals, which they celebrate in the convent churches, consists of the rents of great properties which they have accumulated in the course of ages.

"The convents of nuns are in like manner supported by the income of great estates, with the exception of two or three convents which possess no property, and whose inmates live on charity.

"Besides the incomes named, which pertain to the _personnel_ of the clergy, there are, in the cathedrals and other parochial [churches], revenues which arise from some properties and foundations created for attending to certain dues called "_fabrica_" which consist of all those objects necessary for the services of this worship (_culta_).

"From the want of publicity which is generally observed in the management of the properties and _rents_ [incomes] of the clergy, it is impossible to fix exactly the value of one or the other; but they can be calculated approximately by taking for the basis those data which are within the reach of the public, which are the total value of the production of the annual return (_movimiento_) of the population for births, marriages, deaths, and, finally, the devout practices which are still customary among the greater part of the population. Observing carefully these data, I assume, without the fear of committing a great error, that the total amount which the clergy to-day realize in the whole extent of the republic, for _rents_, proceeds of tithes, parochial rights, alms, religious ceremonies (_funcions_), and for the sale of divers objects of devotion, is between eight and ten millions of dollars.

"Some writers have estimated the properties belonging to the clergy at one half of the productive wealth of the nation; others at one third part; but I can not give much credit to such writers, as they are only calculations that rest on no certain data. I am sure that the total amount of the property of the clergy, for chaplaincies, foundations, and other pious uses, together with rustic and city properties, which belong to the divers religious corporations, amount to an enormous sum, notwithstanding the falling off that is said to have taken place from the amounts of former years.

"All property in the district of Mexico [federal district] is estimated at $50,000,000, the half of which pertains to the clergy. Uniting the product of this property to the tithes, parochial rights, etc., I am well assured that the total of the income of the clergy amounts to from eighteen to twenty millions of dollars."

[66] The Archbishop of Mexico $130,000 The Bishop of Pueblo 110,000 The Bishop of Valladolid 110,000 The Bishop of Guadalajara 90,000 The Bishop of Durango 35,000 The Bishop of Monterey 30,000 The Bishop of Yucatan 20,000 The Bishop of Oajaca 18,000 The Bishop of Sonora 6,000 -------- Total individual income of twelve bishops $539,000

--_Essai Politique_, vol. i. p. 173.

The reason why the Bishop of Sonora was limited to $6000 was that his diocese was so poor that he had that salary paid out of the king's revenue.

[67] Most of the Jews of our day are the descendants of the Babylonian Jews, who did not return to Jerusalem after the Captivity, but remained in the province of Babylon until they were driven out, some four hundred or more years after Christ; the Babylonian, not the Jerusalem Talmud, being most commonly in use among them.