Centenary of the Cristeros — when blood shed for the Catholic Faith faced bayonets

 You can read the original source (in Portuguese) here.

 

The execution by firing squad of Father Miguel Pro, SJ, on November 23, 1927.

One of the greatest and most beautiful sagas of the twentieth century was fought out in Mexico, the land of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, during the 1920s. It was the Cristero War — also known as the Cristiada — a true and immortal Crusade in defence of the Catholic Church that freed Mexico from Communist domination.

The Cristeros preferred death to denying Christ. They were the heroic counter-revolutionaries of the Catholic Faith; like new Davids, they challenged the Marxist Goliaths who sought to subjugate their homeland.

The principal tyrannical and perfidious ‘Goliath’ was an atheistic, Masonic, anti-Catholic and Marxist government. Among its chief leaders were the despot-general Álvaro Obregón and General Plutarco Elías Calles, regarded as “a new Nero”, who assumed power in 1924. His aim was to “de-Catholicise Mexico”, a nation so profoundly Catholic, and to establish a “Soviet Mexico”. To achieve this, he intended to perpetrate an ‘ecclesiocide’.

Thus, the persecution of the Catholic Church and her faithful was carried out cruelly and relentlessly by government authorities inspired by the Communist regime in Moscow. At any cost, they sought to exterminate the Church in Mexico, or at least to curtail her influence. Public religious worship, such as processions, was prohibited; so too was Catholic teaching in schools and the wearing of ecclesiastical dress — cassocks for priests, religious habits for nuns, and so forth.

Many churches and convents were desecrated, closed or destroyed; religious Orders were suppressed; ecclesiastical property was confiscated; bells were torn down from their towers and sacred images destroyed. Catholic observances, including the celebration of Holy Mass, had to take place in secret, in ‘catacomb-like’ settings, as did the administration of the Sacraments, the family recitation of the Rosary, and so on.

Public officials were compelled to renounce the Catholic Religion; those who refused lost their employment. Many priests and laymen were expelled from the country, imprisoned, tortured or executed without trial, their sole ‘guilt’ being that they stood in the way of the Marxist designs of the anti-clerical leaders.

At bottom, the revolutionaries’ programme consisted in the destruction of the Catholic and aristocratic civilisation built up over the centuries since the heroic conquest of Hernán Cortés, and in erasing from History an entire and magnificent legacy of Mexican faith and heroism.

In its defence arose the glorious epic of the Cristeros, which marks its centenary this month. Since this history is little known in Brazil, we asked the young Cesar Franco, a member of the American TFP, to prepare an article on the subject. It is the cover story of the August issue of the magazine Catolicismo [cover above]. His father is Mexican, born in Encarnación de Díaz — a small town in Los Altos de Jalisco, one of the regions most active in the epic Cristero resistance — and his maternal grandfather’s elder brother was a Cristero in Zacatecas.

Calles declared that he would destroy the Catholic Church... Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira made a statement that can equally be applied to the new Calleses of our own century:

“Calles will never destroy Catholicism. For God does not die, and the blood of the martyrs is still the seed of Catholics!”