Luis Navarro Origel: The First Cristero

[Stone]

LUIS NAVARRO ORIGEL: The First Cristero
Part II

Theresa Marie Moreau | Saturday, July 27, 2024

THE EXECUTION OCCURRED during the Revolution’s Rebellion of Agua Prieta, led by three generals known as the Sonoran Triumvirate, all self-declared Bolsheviks: Obregon, Calles and Felipe Adolfo de la Huerta Marcor (1881-1955), who initially grabbed the reins of power as the interim president, but stepped aside months later when Obregon claimed to have won the presidential election – with a suspicious 95.8 percent of the vote – and was inaugurated president, on December 1, 1920.

tWith the Sonoran Socialists in power, Catholic persecution not only continued, it accelerated, with some very notable, very public bombings by the rojillos, the pinkos: that of the Mexico City residence of Archbishop Jose Mora y del Rio (1854-1928), on February 6, 1921; and that of the altar of the Basilica of Guadalupe, on November 14, when, miraculously, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe escaped harm.

Those planned assaults preceded an international, diplomatic incident that made headlines around the world when Archbishop Ernesto Eugenio Filippi (1879-1951) was kicked out of the country. Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs Alberto Jose Pani Arteaga (1878-1955) had accused the Catholic priest of violating the Constitution as chief celebrant during an outdoor religious ceremony, when the first stone of Christ the King monument had been laid, on January 11, 1923, on Cerro del Cubilete, property owned by Jose Natividad Macias Castorena (1857-1948).

As a result of the breadth and depth of the hunger and the suffering of the people – some had only rags or no clothing at all and walked around nearly naked or completely naked – because of the pillaging and plundering and the ravaging and razing of the formerly established society, Navarro felt compelled to help alleviate the pain. The once-fertile fields had to be replanted, and the town infrastructure needed to be rebuilt.

Many times he had politely rejected the offer of an undisputed seat in the Guanajuato legislature. Instead, selflessly, with a generous, altruistic spirit of charity, he decided to run for the humble position of Penjamo’s mayor, and he legitimately won the election with an overwhelming majority, in 1923.

Instilled with the Catholic belief that all jobs have dignity, as mayor – with the help of others – he physically worked to upgrade the public utilities, to improve the nearly impassable dirt roads, to clear trails, to repair bridges and to widen the local dam. For charity work, each day he visited inmates housed in the city jail, where he shared honeycombs from his own hives, handed out leaflets with Catholic guidance, and personally instructed the men in Catholic doctrine and dogma. And to help the local prostitutes turn their lives around, he provided them protection in shelters – asylums established by Catholic nuns – keeping the women safe from their brutal pimps.

But there were always those who created chaos. Navarro’s troublemaking enemies – the Revolutionaries – falsely accused him and the City Council of Estradism, so named for the followers of General Enrique Estrada Reynoso (1890-1942), who allegedly plotted – along with General Guadalupe Sanchez Galvan (1890-1985) and General Fortunato Maycotte Camero (1891-1924) – to overthrow Obregon, then-president of Mexico.

In response, Obregon ordered that the Penjamo City Council be dissolved. Immediately. He sent his enforcer, General Jose Gonzalo Escobar (1892-1969), to fulfill his command. Once he flexed his muscle in Penjamo, Escobar quickly received resignations from council members, but not from Navarro. So the general instructed his troops to escort the independent-minded mayor to the military train’s traveling headquarters.

“I have orders from the president of the Republic to dissolve the City Council,” Escobar brazenly explained to Navarro.

“The president of the Republic does not have any power to issue this type of order,” Navarro bravely answered.

“The president of the Republic is the supreme authority.”

“The supreme authority is the law, and Article 115 of the Constitution mandates that the municipality be free and governed by a directly, popularly elected City Council. Penjamo is a free municipality, and I am a mayor elected by the people.”

The well-educated, well-read Navarro knew the law.

“You are accused of being an Estradista.”

“I cannot be accused without evidence. Do you have any?”

“I follow orders.”

“Well, I cannot fail in my duties.”

Undaunted, Navarro remained in his elected office.

Still, after accomplishing all that he could to better the lives of residents, rather than run again for a second term, he decided to devote all his spare hours to organize a spiritual counterrevolution to the material Revolution that had created so much death and destruction and promoted lawlessness and immorality. His mayoral term ended in December 1924, the same December when Calles clawed his way to the highest seat of power: the presidential throne, on December 1, 1924.

The third leg in the Sonoran Triumvirate, Calles had terrorized his way up the ladder, rung by bloody rung. He had begun his professional life with a career as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant, but was disgracefully dismissed after caught stealing money from the teachers. After conniving his way to the position of municipal treasurer of Guaymas, again he was fired, accused of embezzlement. Then as manager of a hotel and a warehouse, both businesses burned to the ground, by a rumored arsonist: Calles.

But then his luck turned. In 1913, he began his military career, as a lieutenant colonel. He found his niche: a position of undisputed, unquestionable power and control. When subsequently appointed chief of police, in Agua Prieta, he stuffed his pockets with filthy lucre and freely attacked perceived foes. After he became governor of Sonora, in 1917, he expelled every priest from the state, closed every church and freely slaughtered political enemies, including Catholics. In 1920, Obregon appointed him as Minister of the Interior, one of the nomenklatura.

While the be-sashed president of Mexico, Calles surrounded himself with radical Socialists, such as Robert Haberman (1883-1962), a native-born Romanian who migrated to America and then relocated to Mexico, where he acted, officially, as the Director of Foreign Languages Department in the Ministry of Public Instruction but, unofficially, as the Chief of the Bureau of Propaganda. Haberman was also the attorney for the Regional Confederation Mexican Workers (Confederacion Regional de Obreros Mexicanos, CROM), a brutal federation of labor unions – headed by Secretary General Luis Morones Negrete (1890-1964) – filled with public officials and employees from government factories, who willingly, with unbridled violence, did Calles’ bidding to quench his ravenous thirst for vengeance born of racial and class hatred.

Calles also backed rabid anti-Catholic, Socialist politicians such as Tomas Garrido Canabal (1890-1943), who reportedly named two of his sons Lenin and Lucifer. Also farmer, he named one of his bulls God, an ox Pope, a cow the Virgin of Guadalupe and a donkey Jesus. When elected to the gubernatorial office, he plundered churches, ordered priests to marry and banned Catholic symbols and all references to God.

As Mexico’s supreme leader with a psychopathic, anti-hierarchical aggression, arrogant sense of entitlement and lack of empathy, Calles – a bastard with ancestral roots deep in the Middle East, who was never baptized and never attended Mass – was able to fulfill his monomaniacal hatred for all things Catholic.

Backed by unyielding power, on February 21, 1925, Calles attempted to rip the Church from the heart of the nation and implant Socialist ideology into the void by creating a State church, a common action by authoritarian regimes. After the violent, orchestrated takeover of the Church of the Holy Cross and Solitude, in Mexico City, priest Jose Joaquin Perez Budar (1851-1931) declared himself Patriarch of the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church. Met with protestors, the Calles regime dispatched firefighters and police to protect the squatters, but parishioners successfully fought the hostile forces and regained control of their church.

Exasperated, fearful and out of desperation, devout Catholics founded – in Mexico City, in March 1925 – the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty, to defend human rights and religious freedom. The League established itself as the coordination center for all Catholics throughout the entire country.

As soon as Navarro learned about the League, he joined right away. And after only a few days, he set up several local chapters, but he didn’t stop there.

He also established a chapter of the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth (Asociacion Catolica de la Juventud Mexicana), established on August 12, 1913, in Mexico City, by Father Bernardo Bergöend, (1871-1943, Society of Jesus), a French Jesuit dispatched to Mexico to organize Catholic youth to restore Christian social order. He modeled it after the French Catholic Youth Association (Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française), founded, in 1886, by Adrien Albert Marie de Mun (1841-1914). With its motto of Piety, Study, Action, the association gave the youth – looking for a purpose in life – a healthy and productive direction, which Navarro offered through study circles, libraries, soccer matches and hunting clubs.

A constant target of all the regimes was Catholic schools, not just to confiscate the property of the Church, and not just to behead the Church as the major spiritual influence in the children’s standards and morals, but, most notably, to steal and pervert the intellect of the youth and to use the mandatory, government-run schools as indoctrination camps to brainwash young, malleable minds, to remold their thinking with materialistic Socialist ideology.

Issued in February 1926, the Provisional Regulation of Private Primary Schools of the District and Federal Territories, contained the following:

Article 1. The teaching taught in private schools will be secular and the certificates used will have no value.

Article 2. Schools may not have names that indicate a religious nature nor possess a saint of any cult.

Article 3. In the buildings of private schools, there will be no oratories or chapels, nor religious prints or sculptures.

Article 4. It is a requirement to be a school director not to be a minister of any cult or a member of a religious order.

The ever-Revolutionary Calles believed that children belonged not to the nuclear family, but to the State collective, which he articulated years later in a public broadcast from Guadalajara, on July 19, 1934:

“The Revolution has not ended. The eternal enemies lie in ambush and are laying plans to nullify the triumphs of the Revolution. It is necessary that we enter a new period of the Revolution. I would call this new period the psychological period of the Revolution. We must now enter and take possession of the consciences of the children, of the consciences of the young, because they do belong and should belong to the Revolution.

“It is absolutely necessary that we dislodge the enemy from this trench where the clergy are now, where the conservatives are – I refer to education, I refer to the school.

“It would be a very grave stupidity, it would be a crime for the men of the Revolution to fail to rescue the young from the claws of the clericals, from the claws of the conservatives, and, unfortunately, in many states of the Republic and even in the capital of the Republic itself, the school is under the direction of clerical and reactionary elements.

“We cannot entrust to the hands of our enemies the future of the country and the future of the Revolution. With every artfulness the reactionaries are saying and the clericals are saying that the children belong to the home and the youth to the family. This is a selfish doctrine, because the children and youth belong to the community; they belong to the collectivity, and it is the Revolution that has the inescapable duty to take possession of consciences, to drive out prejudices, and to form the new soul of the nation.

“Therefore, I call upon all governors throughout the Republic, on all public authorities, and on all Revolutionary elements, that we proceed at once to the field of battle, which we must take, because children and the young must belong to the Revolution.”

On June 14, 1926, Calles lobbed a legislative bomb, designed to obliterate any rights of the Church.

That day, he signed the Law for Reforming the Penal Code – commonly called the Calles Law – that would not only ensure the enforcement of all anti-clerical laws against the Church as written in the 1917 Constitution, but the diktat included even more severe restrictions and penalties. It was the axe intended to forever cleave Church and State. Effective July 31, 1926, all churches were to have the 33 articles of the law posted on their main doors.

Calles described his Law as “a definite solution of the religious problem,” a legal maneuver to exterminate the Church and Her devout faithful.

Immediately, two major reactions from Catholics:

First, the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty called for a socio-economic boycott – to begin on July 21 – to weaken the regime by paralyzing the nation’s economic base that bolstered the authoritarian administration, which soon felt the ramifications. Concerned Revolutionary politician, Gonzalo Natividad Santos Rivera (1897-1978), revealed: “What we have called a ridiculous boycott is something very serious that is producing an economic crisis dangerous for the Revolution.”

Second, the Mexican Episcopate announced in their Pastoral Letter, of July 25, that, on July 31, all clergy would withdraw from the churches; otherwise, they would be colluding with the State against the Church. The churches would remain open, if possible, but only under the direction and care of the laity.

On the day services were suspended, July 31, the Navarro family walked to church around 8 that night to pray.

“Let us offer ourselves as victims, so that Jesus returns to the Tabernacles and our children will love Him and know Him,” a tearful Navarro whispered to his wife.

After that, he kept busy, attending local meetings, giving lectures, traveling to the capital city for more meetings with Catholics and members of the League, all the while keeping his wife in the dark, for her own protection, until, tearfully, he approached her, on September 2, 1926.

“I have to trust you with a secret. You see the situation of the Church; I cannot be oblivious to what She suffers. I feel a call from God inside, asking for my blood and my life. If I ignore this call, I will irrevocably condemn myself. Carmela, I'm going to take up arms. I am preparing everything, but before executing my project I want your approval, because you will sacrifice with me. Think about it before God, and decide after having thought about it.”

Overwhelmed with grief at the thought of widowhood and their children as orphans, she sobbed and prayed for strength whenever she was alone.

After two days, he could wait no longer.

“I’m dying of anguish to know your answer.”

“I’m willing to sacrifice. If He asks you, He asks me, too, because I am part of you.”

“I love you for this a thousand times more!” he exclaimed, between kisses, exuberant.

After that, he shared everything with her, and one day, faced with the gravity of the situation, he requested, “When my children grow up, tell them that their father died to leave them the faith.”

To those who condemned him for his choice, he responded: “I am going to kill for Christ those who kill Christ. And if no one follows me in this undertaking, I am going to die for Christ.”

In the early morning hours of September 27, Navarro kissed his sleeping children, one by one, held their heads in both of his hands and prayed, “Lord, if possible, take this chalice from me; however, not my will, but yours be done.”

That morning, the family attended an underground Mass celebrated in an oratory. After the liturgical service, Navarro turned and went his separate way, only to return home at dusk, to tell his wife that the time had arrived. He said goodbye, first to the children and then to his wife, who stood at the door. He stepped away, but soon returned.

“I didn’t say goodbye to the little one or bless him,” he explained, taking baby Rafael in his arms, holding him, hugging him, repeatedly kissing him. After blessing his youngest child, he turned and left, with his Mauser hanging from his shoulder.