Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [99]
Calles had greater firepower, but the vast sweep of lower Mexico posed a huge logistical challenge. The Cristeros reacted “against the social lawlessness that was becoming the rule … It was neither conservatism nor revolution, but reform.”44 As the battles intensified, bishops who fled (many to San Antonio, Texas) were aghast at soldiers wearing Christian crosses who cut off the ears of Communists. Fernando M. González writes pejoratively of Cristero priests who died in battle and were turned into martyred saints decades later.45 Despite the small number of clerics who actually fought, and the scorn of some intellectuals for its “orthodox utopia,”46 the Cristeros drew unlikely allies, campesinos and hacienda owners, forging religious liberty as a common cause.
In 1929, six months after the Vatican’s Lateran Pact with Mussolini, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, brokered a truce after discussions with the Holy See. Mexico agreed to respect Catholic rights without purging its anticlerical laws. Excluded from the talks, Cristero leaders disbanded because of a treaty endorsed by the pope. Degollado protested by telegram to Pius XI; he spent several years in hiding as other Cristero leaders were systematically murdered. Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory is set in the Cristero struggle. “The peasants got into the churches in Veracruz,” Greene wrote on a 1937 research trip, “locked the doors and rang the bells; the police could do nothing, and the governor gave way—the churches were opened.”47
In 1941, with Mexico comparatively calm, twenty-one-year-old Marcial Maciel Degollado organized a community of thirteen boys in the basement of a house in the capital. Their families had no idea he had been expelled from two seminaries for reasons never disclosed. No Mexican seminary would accept him, despite his quartet of uncles in the hierarchy. The house belonged to Talita Retes, a benefactress who guided Maciel to well-to-do families with memories of clandestine Masses and priests shot by goons. In 1944 Bishop Arias ordained his nephew. “Maciel had this incredible charisma,” one of the original disciples recalled.48 To the affluent Mexicans, Venezuelans, and Spaniards living in Mexico he approached, the idea of an elite order of priest-educators—soldiers for Christ—had powerful appeal. In 1947 the textile-manufacturing brothers Guillermo and Luis Barroso helped him purchase an estate in Mexico City’s Tlalpan area that had previously been owned by Morones, the labor potentate and Cristero enemy. With fields for sports and lagoons for boat rides, Maciel named it Quinta Pacelli, honoring Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli).
In the 1950s Maciel gained the support of Flora Barragán de Garza—a precursor of the widow Mee and Roberta Garza’s mother (no relation). Flora’s late husband, Roberto Barragán, a Monterrey industrialist, left her a fortune. She gave Maciel a Mercedes and funds for expansion. From Spain, Legion seminarians wrote her letters on their progress. After she died, her daughter Florita, embittered, told José de Jesús Barba Martin that Flora had given the Legion $50 million over the years. A college professor in Mexico City, José Barba cannot verify the figure, but says, “Flora’s support was substantial.”49
Like many of the apostolic schoolboys, José Barba came from a family of Spanish ancestry. Barba was eleven when he entered the Legion in Mexico City in 1948. He left the order in 1962 and later earned a doctorate at Harvard in Latin American literature. He has done extensive research on the Legion. “Maciel was in the habit of buying things in cash,” states Barba. “He was twenty-seven when he purchased the Morones estate. In 1950 he began construction