Pope Pius XI protests one priest for 33,000 Catholics in Mexico's Michoacán

ROME, September 29, 1932 AD — Pope Pius XI told the bishops of Mexico in an encyclical signed at St. Peter’s on September 29, 1932 AD, that the state of Michoacán allowed one priest for every 33,000 Catholics. In the letter, Acerba animi (bitterness of soul), Pope Pius XI wrote that the promises of a settlement that had reopened Mexico’s churches three years earlier had not been kept.

The quarrel was over who decided which priests could serve. Article 130 of Mexico’s Constitution left each state to fix how many priests could minister, in public churches and private houses alike. No priest could lawfully exercise his ministry without the government’s permission. Pope Pius XI wrote that the government was using that power to remove the clergy and the bishops “gradually from the Republic.” The bishops wanted the Church, not the state governors, to decide which priest served where. The governments held the permits.

In 1926 AD the government began enforcing Article 130 with heavy penalties, and the Holy See protested “in the most solemn manner.” The bishops suspended public worship in every church. Nearly all of them were then driven out of the country. Writing to them six years later, Pope Pius XI recalled what exile had cost: “from the land of your banishment you had to witness the struggles and martyrdom of your priests and of your flock.” Priests went on giving the sacraments, “amid a thousand dangers and at the risk of their lives,” and many lay Catholics went through great hardship and sacrifice to help them. Many Catholics took up arms in the rising known as the Cristero war.

Sahuayo is a town in Michoacán, in the diocese of Zamora. A boy of the town, Saint José Sánchez del Río, served the Cristeros as their flag-bearer. On the night of February 10, 1928 AD, government soldiers took the fourteen-year-old into the Sahuayo cemetery because he would not renounce his faith. They stabbed him again and again and then shot him in the head. At the grave, before the shot, an officer asked him what message he had for his father. St. José Sánchez del Río answered: “nos veremos en el cielo. ¡Viva Cristo Rey! ¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!” (we will see each other in heaven. Long live Christ the King! Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!).

On June 21, 1929 AD, President Emilio Portes Gil and Archbishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores settled the conflict between the government and the Church with two public statements. President Portes Gil declared that the government had no purpose “to destroy the identity of the Catholic Church.” He promised that it would not register a priest his bishop had not named. Churches reopened, and Catholic fighters who gave up their arms were granted an amnesty. Pope Pius XI agreed to the return of public worship on the strength of that declaration. In Acerba animi he wrote that agreeing had never meant accepting Mexico’s laws on worship or dropping his protest against them.

Pope Pius XI wrote that in the three years since the settlement, bishops, priests and lay Catholics had gone on being punished and imprisoned. Not all the exiled bishops had been allowed home, and more had been expelled. In several dioceses the churches, seminaries and bishops’ houses were never handed back. Some governors closed seminaries and fixed which buildings and which district a licensed priest could work in. In certain states, Pope Pius XI wrote, the persecution “differs but little” from the one raging in Russia.

Then Pope Pius XI set down the numbers. The Constitution, he pointed out, required the number of priests to match “the religious needs of the faithful and of the locality,” and the 1929 AD declarations had recognised that the bishops could not be ignored in fixing it. Against that requirement he put the quotas three states had fixed: one priest for every 33,000 Catholics in Michoacán, one for every 60,000 in Chiapas, and one for every 100,000 in Veracruz. Pope Pius XI wrote: “Everyone can see whether it is possible with such restrictions to administer the Sacraments to so many people, scattered for the most part over a vast territory.”

Some Catholics held that a priest who asked the state for a permit was cooperating with an unjust law. Pope Pius XI ruled that he was not, so long as he asked against his will and under protest. Such a priest, the Pope wrote, was like a man robbed of his belongings who “is obliged to ask his unjust despoiler for at least the use of them.” Pope Pius XI paid “a special tribute of praise” to the clergy and lay Catholics who “have written glorious pages in the recent history of the Church in Mexico.”

Mexico’s answer came within days. The provisional president, Abelardo L. Rodríguez, said the encyclical’s tone did not surprise him “because methods filled with falsehood against this country are characteristic of the Papacy.” President Rodríguez warned: “If the insolent, defiant attitude… continues, I am determined that the churches will be converted into schools and shops for the benefit of the nation’s proletariat classes.” Archbishop Ruiz y Flores, now the Pope’s representative to Mexico, answered that he hoped President Rodríguez would read Acerba animi in full and find it “pacific and patriotic.”