~
~ THE PRESIDENT
SPEAKS ~
"Why be blind? Why fool ourselves about the role the Roman Catholic church has played in Mexico for four hundred years? There is no redeeming feature to justify her existence anywhere on earth; and she has been the curse of my country since her first priests came."
"One has only to study what the church has accomplished with the destinies of Italy, Austria, Spain, and Ireland. She has interfered in the politics, indeed she has been the politics, of every country she has sunk her talons in for nearly two thousand years. She made and unmade kings and dynasties. Her dignitaries helped a thousand ruling houses trample on the poor. She organized crusades, declared war, wrote peace treaties, and drew and redrew the map of the world."
"Where she could not convert, she murdered. Where she could not persuade, she tortured. Where she could not rule, she ruined. Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and Torquemada in Spain are perfect specimens of her cross bearers and her tactics. Today [in the 1920’s] she sulks and writes in the impotency of the tiny terrestrial area where the whole world has confined her on the Hill of St. Peter, just as the world has always had to confine menaces. But she watches and waits [for what are centuries to her program?] for a chance to recover her lost control. The whole world had better keep an eye on Rome!"
"And what a straight face she assumes when she talks to me of tolerance, of freedom of the press, of speech, of conscience! Shades of Saint Bartholomew! Read her red-stained, torch-blackened history~~and talk of tolerance, indeed!"
From an interview of Mexican President Calles by Sidney
Sutherland in ‘The Signs of the Times’, January 4, 1927.