It is no wonder then, that after the
revolution against Diaz, in many places, as soon as the peons were told
they were free, their first act was to climb up the church steeples and
smash the bells. After that, they rushed inside the churches and
destroyed the statues and paintings of the saints. During the whole
period of havoc and exploitation, _not once_ was the voice of the Church
heard in behalf of the downtrodden. Illiteracy amounted to eighty-six
percent. But the Church helped the further enslavement of the workers.
There was not a church ceremony, birth, marriage, or death, that did not
cost money. The worker had to borrow for each; and the more he borrowed,
the more closely he riveted upon himself the chains of peonage.... The
present conflict started in February, 1926, when Archbishop Jose Mora
del Rio, head of the Church in Mexico, issued a statement in the press
declaring war against the Constitution."
Gideon Chen, speaking for Chinese Labor asserts: "The Christian Church
in China, brought up in a Western greenhouse, with all its achievements
and shortcomings, does not speak a language intelligible to the labor
world."
Karl Kautsky, the Austrian representative of labor, takes the attitude
that, "The less Labor as a whole has to do with Church questions and the
less it is interested in the churches, the more successful will be its
strife for emancipation."
Otto Bauer, another representative of Austrian labor, makes the
assertion: "Capitalism forces the worker into the class struggle. In
this class struggle he comes across the clergy and finds it the champion
of his class adversary. The worker transfers his hate from the clergyman
to religion itself, in whose name this clergyman is defending the
social order of the middle classes. In Austria the bourgeois parties
take advantage of the belief of hundreds of thousands of proletarians in
a Lord in Heaven to keep them in subjection to their earthly masters."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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