nto schools, hospitals, and orphan asylums.
Civil marriages were made obligatory. Pope Pius IX immediately issued a
mandate against the Constitution and called upon all Catholics of Mexico
to disobey it. Ever since then, the clergy has been fighting to regain
its lost temporal power and wealth. It has been responsible for civil
wars and for foreign intervention." Under the rule of Diaz, the
constitution was disregarded and the Church was permitted to regain most
of its lost privileges. "The Church bells rang out at sunrise to call
the peons out, with nothing more to eat than some tortillas and chili,
to work all day long in the burning fields, until sunset when the Church
bells rang again to send them home to their mud huts. During their work
they were beaten. On Sundays they were lashed and sent bleeding to Mass.
After Church they had to do Faenas (free work) for the Church, in the
name of some saint or other--either to build a new church or do some
special work for the priests. It is no wonder then, that after the
revolution against Diaz, in many places, as soon as the peons were told
they were free, their first act was to climb up the church steeples and
smash the bells. After that, they rushed inside the churches and
destroyed the statues and paintings of the saints. During the whole
period of havoc and exploitation, _not once_ was the voice of the Church
heard in behalf of the downtrodden. Illiteracy amounted to eighty-six
percent. But the Church helped the further enslavement of the workers.
There was not a church ceremony, birth, marriage, or death, that did not
cost money. The worker had to borrow for each; and the more he borrowed,
the more closely he riveted upon himself the chains of peonage.... The
present conflict started in February, 1926, when Archbishop Jose Mora
del Rio, head of the Church in Mexico, issued a statement in the press
declaring war against the Constitution."

Gideon Chen, speaking for Chinese Labor asserts: "The Christian Church
in China, brought up in a Western greenhouse, with all its achievements
and shortcomings, does not speak a language intelligible to the labor
world."

Karl Kautsky, the Austrian representative of labor, takes the attitude
that, "The less Labor as a whole has to do with Church questions and the
less it is interested in the churches, the more successful will be its
strife for emancipation."

Otto Bauer, another representative of Austrian labor, makes the
assertion