A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the
fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth
of Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides
cattle and other property. They own six large sugar
refineries, worth from half a million to a million crowns
each, and making an annual profit of 100,000 crowns each,
while all the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own
only three small refineries. They have immense farms, rich
silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast
trade. Yet they continually intrigue for legacies--a woman
has recently left them 70,000 crowns--and they refuse to pay
the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this
authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at
Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to
engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely
maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It
should be added that the missionaries were still heavily
subsidized by the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop
says) only five or six Jesuits to each of their
establishments, and that they conducted only ten colleges.

#"Holy History"#

And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken away
from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of procedure. Write
a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and if the letter is not
published, go and see the editor and ask why; so you will learn
something about the partnership between Superstition and Big Business!

It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large
American city dares to attack the emoluments of the Catholic Church,
or to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine. As I
write, they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all
the newspapers of that graft-ridden city herald it as an important
social event. Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his
shepherd's crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal
fool's cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city with a
pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one of those
journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West "rodeo" one
day, and a society elopement the next, and a G.O.P. convention the
next; and always with his picture