Catholics v. Daniels (Concl.)

By last week the Catholic cry for the recall or resignation of Josephus Daniels, U. S. Ambassador to Mexico, had reached thunderous proportions. The front page of the Baltimore Catholic Review was black with such headlines as:

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, WE CALL YOUR ATTENTION

A JOSEPHUS DANIELS COME TO JUDGMENT

Parish priests and eminent laymen were no less angry at the aging North Carolina Methodist who as Secretary of the Navy used to boss Franklin D. Roosevelt around. Cause of the Catholic outburst against Ambassador Daniels was a speech he made in Mexico City last July when he quoted a few ''Jeffersonian'' lines on education from an earlier address by Boss Plutarco Elias Calles (TIME, Oct. 15).

What made Daniels' words sound like blasphemy to U. S. Catholics was the fact that elsewhere in the Calles speech the onetime President of Mexico as a stout Revolutionary had taken his usual anti-religious position.

So many protests went to the State Department in Washington last week that Acting Secretary of State William Phillips telephoned the U. S. Embassy in Mexico City. What, he asked Ambassador Daniels, about that speech? Pious Ambassador Daniels made a reply which seemed to close the issue. He said that nowhere had he commented on controversial matters or quoted General Calles' violent anticlericalism or given approval to that Mexican's religious views. All he had done, explained the puzzled Ambassador, was to voice his faith in universal education, on which he believes the future of Mexico depends.

The excitement over the Daniels case plainly indicated that U. S. Catholics are by no means through with Mexico's Revolutionaries and their long war against the Church. But apparently Mexico's Revolutionaries are also not through with the Catholic Church and its long war to maintain its position in that country. In the Chamber of Deputies last week Luis Enrique Fierro uprose to move that all Catholic bishops and archbishops be forthwith expelled from Mexico. Argued he: "We must open the minds of the people by teaching them to see the world in the light of science. We cannot do this while the Church makes them believe in God. We must tell them that God is a myth, a word, a grotesque thing." The Deputies agreed, voted unanimously to petition President Abelardo Rodriguez to perform the expulsion of such of Mexico's eight archbishops and 25 bishops as have remained in the country since the persecutions of recent years.

In seeking to de-Catholicize Mexico, the Revolutionary Government argues that the Church has represented vested property and black reaction. But merely to oust the priests is not enough. An important corollary is to implant Revolution in the mind of youth, and the Government has long been planning to accomplish this by taking over all schools and universities, making Socialistic education compulsory for all young Mexicans. Last week the Chamber of Deputies unanimously voted to make this possible by submitting the necessary constitutional change to the 29 States, two-thirds of which must ratify to make it effective. Meanwhile, far from willing to be Socialized, thousands of students rioted. Closed were all the Mexico City schools, and the nation's three largest universities, in Guadalajara, Monterrey and Mexico City.

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