The Church! What can we say about the Church in Yucatan? Does the reader remember those spittoons in Merida Cathedral which we mentioned in an earlier chapter? Well, those ugly etceteras of an ugly habit are a fitting commentary upon the Church. It was in 1867 that President Benito Juarez disestablished the Church throughout the whole of the Republic of Mexico. The effect has been simply disastrous as far as Yucatan is concerned. Her Church is so discreditable that the Pope would be really only consulting the best interests of Catholicism if he abolished the priests altogether. As there is no State provision, the padres must "hold their private dripping-pans to catch the public grease"; and right skilfully they do this. A set of dirty unwashed rogues, men whose faces are enough to hang them, men whom no father would trust with his girl or boy the other side of a glass door, they are most of them "carpet-baggers," wastrels from Spain, many expelled for very excellent reasons from their colleges, who come into Yucatan to find a living. Even the amiable Stephens, who looked at everything Yucatecan, except the garrapatas, through rose-tinted glasses, is obliged to confess that their morals were loose. But that was a long time ago. They are much looser now. The last incumbent of Tizimin was drunk every day, and kept twelve Indian girls in the parsonage. Even the Tiziminites rebelled at last, and this clerical Brigham Young had to go.
His place had been taken at the time of our arrival by a priest who had, it was said, means of his own, and had come from Spain especially to feed the "hungry sheep" of the poky little Yucatecan town. He was a little ratty man with a face suggestive of previous incarnations as a ferret and a money-lender. A blood-sucking, lecherous little thief: that is what the man looked, and we have good reason to believe we have done him no great injustice in this description. He was the hero of the "corner in candles" to which we referred in the chapter dealing with Tizimin. We had called in at the tienda to buy a candle by the light of which to eat our humble supper, but the storekeeper told us he had not got a candle left. To our astonishment he said that the padre had bought up every candle in the place: that, as it was fiesta week, all the Indians would buy candles to burn before the images of the Virgin and the saints; and that the wily curer of souls had, in short, made a corner in dips. The shopkeeper jubilantly announced that he himself had made a profit out of the deal of one hundred dollars, but that the priest would make at least three thousand dollars or three hundred pounds, enough for him to live on very comfortably for the rest of the year. There is evidently a great deal in candles in Yucatan.
The tienda-keeper assured us that the padre was a good man; but we had our doubts on this point. This cunning vicegerent of God had a young priest to help him in the duties, to whom he paid the handsome salary of a shilling a day, of course providing him with food and lodging. We saw the lad daily sitting at the window of the rectory, and it would be difficult to imagine a more saturnine, sensual face. The relations of these men to the girls and women are those of privileged lovers. They are in truth licensed libertines, whose "benefit of clergy" covers a multitude of sins venial and otherwise. It did not need great acumen to guess at some of these latter. Six priests were recently deported from Merida on the gravest charges: no prosecution being contemplated because one of the boys was the son of a very prominent official.
The priests, who are not allowed to wear clerical attire in the streets, are on the best terms with the haciendados, and do their utmost, by trading on the superstition of the unfortunate Indians, to keep slavery in being. There is no appeal for the hacienda slave from the action of master backed up by a priest. Friendly with the local slave-owner, the padre can, and does, seduce what girls he pleases. It is most unlikely that the bishop would hear of it. The priests must look for monetary support from the land-owners, so they are cheek by jowl with them all the time. In the train one day we saw a band of young haciendados elaborately mocking the intoning of the Mass, while a priest who was with them was holding his sides with delighted laughter. All the Yucatecans will gladly join in a jest at the expense of Mother Church. One night at a show in Merida where some very questionable cinematograph views were delighting the worthy townfolk and their children, the loudest guffaws and shrieks of joy were evoked by a view of a church in the course of repainting and cleaning. You first saw the worthy padre directing the workmen. Then the painter leaves a pot of black paint on the pedestal of a statue of the Virgin. Enter on the scene two ladies. They approach the image, reverently cross themselves, and, mistaking the paint for a piscina, dip their fingers in what they think holy water, crossing their foreheads and then their faces. The fun comes in when they catch sight of each other. This mockery simply enchanted the Catholic audience.
Talking of piscinas, at the south door of the Tizimin church was one. In it was a chipped enamel bowl, half full of water with a suspicious sediment. We just touched the edge of the cup, and the sediment began to move about "on its own." The water was alive with myriads of small worms and magotty creatures! The man who had faith enough to believe that the touching of his forehead with that stinking compound was a short cut to salvation deserves his faith. There was another of these tadpole basins in the church at Izamal; and judging from reports that reached us, holy water with some "body" in it seemed quite the fashion in the Yucatecan churches. Agua Sagrada indeed! Agua podrida would certainly be a better name.
The spittoons in the cathedral at Merida had replicas, we found, in most of the churches. But the palm must surely be awarded to a "Don't Spit" notice which we saw on an altar in one church. That the notice was there was no mere accident either, for we saw it in December, and when we returned through the town in the spring it was still there. Evidently that was the permanent position of this offensive decoration.
But at least the clergy can plead a very real necessity for the spittoons and such notices. It is not a pleasant subject, but any one who wrote of the Yucatecans without mentioning the absolutely universal habit would be a faulty chronicler. At all times, everywhere, everybody, young and old, of both sexes, expectorate. They have not the excuse of smoking, for the children and young girls are as guilty of this horrible and unhealthy habit as their elders. The prevalence of the practice was so marked that we asked several Yucatecans to explain what seemed both climatically and physically inexplicable. They pleaded guilty to what really amounted to a racial custom, but they could not explain it. While we were being taken round the Museum of Merida, the eleven-year-old son of the curator spat the whole time on the floor. One day in the islands a baker-boy of about twelve came to our hut to sell us cakes. While we were looking in his basket, he spat on the floor by our hammock-side. He seemed absolutely amazed when we reproved him for it. Quite a gentlemanly ranchero who walked some miles with us one gloriously sunny day in Cozumel hawked and spat, not once or twice, but literally every half-minute till we wondered how his poor rasped throat stood the strain hour after hour. The queer thing was that the habit was not prevalent among the Indians. It seemed to be essentially a Yucatecan vice: it really amounted to that.
But to return to the Church. At the risk of appearing prejudiced, we must say that the Catholicism of the country is so decadent that its disgraceful services would be best done without. The drunken priest at Campeachy, with an unlighted cigarette in his hand, seated in a chair at the altar, his legs stuck up on the chancel rails, trying to take part in the intoning of Mass is not the exception he should be. Good padres there must be, men who would still deserve the high encomiums that Stephens found it possible to write of the Yucatecan clergy of his day. We saw nothing of them. We saw the prostitution of a great ecclesiastical institution, which, with all its terribly bloody history, its soul-choking bigotry, has yet numbered among its servants some of the noblest men who have ever lived. We saw Catholicism at its worst, and its worst is very bad indeed. Nobody, not the veriest Non-conformist, could surely speak without reverence and admiration of the noble old man who to-day rules over the Church of Rome. He, assuredly, would be the first to grieve over the decadence of his creed in this far-off corner of the Catholic world, as there can be no doubt he sorrows at the bloody past of a religion which has ever lived, and must ever live, on the ignorance—invincible in the case of the better educated—of its followers.
If graver charges lacked against Catholicism, there would always be the indelible blot on its teachings that they tend inevitably to encourage indifference and callousness, if not actually cruelty, towards the animal world. Everybody who has had the misfortune to visit the market of a French town, such as Dieppe or Havre, or has driven behind a Neapolitan cabman, knows more than he or she wishes of Latin cruelty. It is not really that they desire to inflict pain for the mere delight of inflicting it, though there are some fiends enough for that. No, their creed and whole upbringing rob them of that lively sympathy with God's creatures which He, but surely not for tyranny, has placed in our power.
This Catholic characteristic is very marked in Yucatan. The pleasantest Yucatecan families we met on our wanderings were living happily amid the victims of such cruelty as would keep an Englishman, if he were capable of it, awake at nights. These were the dogs. Every Yucatecan keeps—it is really absolutely euphemistic to use the word—not one or two, but a whole pack of assorted terriers and hunting dogs; but he never bothers to feed them. It is really a heartbreaking sight for a lover of animals to go into one of the huts or ranches and see the poor things. They hang round the doorways, sometimes so thin and weak that they cannot stand up. Some poor, halfbreed collie will raise its weary head to your knee-level and stare piteously up at you with eyes which are really hollow from starvation. In one ranch we counted a dozen of all sizes and ages and every one of them was a disgrace to their owner, who, as it happened, was quite a good fellow in other ways. No, he could not see why he should feed the dogs. They went out hunting with him, those at least that were not too weak, and then they got a square meal of peccary-guts or other offal. But the man could not see that the gaunt staring-eyed creatures, their ribs almost seeming to be on the point of piercing through their coats, their bellies one sorry flap of fur, were a real disgrace to him and his children. Wherever you go in Yucatan you see these spectres of dogs: they are really nothing else. As a witty fellow-traveller put it, they have to lean against a fence to bark and have to stand a long while to make a shadow.