Posted on 03/30/2011 6:26:10 PM PDT by Pyro7480
"A chronicle of the Cristeros War (1926-1929), which was touched off by a rebellion against the Mexican government's attempt to secularize the country. The film follows the stories of ordinary people from across the country who choose to stand up for their freedom. Caught up in a full-fledged civil war, they all must decide how far they are willing to go and what they're willing to risk."
This movie is about events that happened 60 years after Maximilian’s death, in the early part of the 20th Century.
Thanks. What do you think Mr. O’Toole’s role will be?
Interesting. It was a little-known conflict, but the viciousness of the secularists against the Christians made a big impression on Mexico-born William F. Buckley and IMO strongly informed his eventual political beliefs, a.k.a. the modern conservative movement. A fascinating butterfly-effect thing.
Nope. Seems unlikely it would be the Catholic side, though. I never expect positive treatment for the conservative/Christian side. I'm happy to just get recognition that those on this side acted in good faith.
"Started" only if you edit out the history of Spain and Mexico prior to the 20th.
In both countries the Church supported the aristocracy, the "right" in European terms, which is very different from the the American right, who would have been considered wild-eyed radicals in both countries.
In Mexico, for instance, and I believe in Spain, members of the Church and army officers were not subject to the same laws as the rest of the people. They had their own courts, which essentially made them above the law.
The revolutions in both countries were against regimes that were essentially the same as that in France prior to its revolution. The American Revolution, OTOH, was against a system that had already rejected the "old regime" of the middle ages.
I am perfectly well aware that horrible atrocities were committed by the revolutionaries in France, Mexico and Spain. At least some of the responsibility for this lies with the Church in these countries, which resisted reasonable reforms and caused pressure to build up to where it exploded violently.
The Left in Spain was not only attempting to destroy the Church; it was trying to destroy the middle and upper classes, as well as the army. Spain’s king had abdicated in 1931, and they had a republic. After the election of 1936 one of the first actions of the new Communist government was to outlaw the Falange, an opposition party from the right - could you imagine if Obama’s first actions in 2008 had been to outlaw the Republican Party? Also, the Church had its problems with Franco as well.
You are applying American values in terms of democracy and secularism that had no place in Spain ot its former colonies; they have a very different history and culture than the US or England. While the Church had a hand in unfolding events, that can’t justify the mass killings of average Catholics simply for practicing their faith. In the end, after saving “Uncle Joe” Stalin in WWII, we eventually went to Franco with our hat in hand asking for help in the Cold War; he consented, and gave a moving speech at the time about how sad it was for us to so belatedly realize what he had fought against alone years before - he literally had the first victory against Communism.
Our military is not subject to the same laws as we are, either.
Peter O Toole is still alive????
O'Toole plays a priest in the movie. From the trailer it appears they are going to put the priests and people in a postitive light.
Here are a few of the sentences in the trialer.
When the government made faith illegal.
The people became outlaws.
In the name of FReedom.
Might be worth watching. I'll see what EWTN says about it.
I was just trying to point out that the violent reaction against the Church in Mexico and Spain didn't just pop up out of nowhere as a similar reaction in this country would.
There were reasons, many quite legitimate, why so many people hated the Church in Mexico and Spain.
The repression of the common people in Mexico and Spain was far more severe than that in the American colonies which led to our revolution. Their revolutions, when they eventually came, were therefore more or less by definition far more extreme than ours.
Our military is not subject to the same laws as we are, either.
Unless I'm quite confused, an American army officer accused of murdering a civilian in Denver will be tried in CO criminal court. His military status is irrelevant in such a case. In Mexico and Spain prior to their revolutions he would have been tried before an army court and almost always set free to kill again.
Similar situations applied in Church courts.
Good call. You’re probably right. I still like to watch him in Lion in Winter from time to time.
He’s a good actor, but I think O’Toole’s movies lately have been unworthy of him. Lawrence of Arabia was once one of my favorite movies.
“Lawrence of Arabia” is the one perfect movie ever made.
This looks very interesting, with a terrific cast. Andy Garcia is one of the Right Guys; he’d be welcome at our Free Cuba party, if we ever get to have it.
“Lawrence of Arabia” is the one perfect movie ever made.
This looks very interesting, with a terrific cast. Andy Garcia is one of the Right Guys; he’d be welcome at our Free Cuba party, if we ever get to have it.
Is there any indication of a release date? I looked a bit, but I don’t go to Facebook and I didn’t see anything on the film site link.
This began long before the civil wars in Mexico and Spain. Perhaps we could say in both cases that it began with Napoleon, or at any rate, Napoleon in his character as sequel to French Revolutionary thought.
For Napoleon, the state was all. This applied to his followers, too; the Spanish “afrancesados,” that is, francophiles, who represented what we in the US would call liberals or the left, began to attack the Church even in the First (Spanish) Republic. This, in fact, was one of the reasons that the First Republic failed, because it lost the support of the people after its immediate attacks on the Church, which it realized to be its one rival.
However, it came back again in the person of “reformist” cabinet ministers, and the Church and its religious orders were soon stripped of their property and even evicted from Spain during the 1830’s and onwards. This eventually led to resistance from Catholics, expressed during the bloody events of the Carlist Wars at the end of the 19th century.
These currents were reflected in Spanish colonies, too, particularly in Mexico (which, remember, was originally called “Nueva Espana”).
In addition to the native leftist, statist politics, both Mexico and Spain suffered from foreign leftist intrusion, and they seemed to be magnets for radical left-wingers (remember, Trotsky died in Mexico, assassinated by a Mexican Soviet agent).
Interestingly, one of the first things done by the statist forces that you are defending was to attack Catholic education. In Spain, in the 19th century, the government virtually shut down education, because it could not meet the educational needs of the poor who had traditionally been educated by the Church but it was determined not to let the Church continue to teach them. At later dates, in both Spain and Mexico, Catholic school teachers were hauled out of their classrooms and killed by the leftists, and Catholic schools and social inititiaves helping the poor were virtually the first targets of the left.
The state will brook no rivals. This is not to defend violence on the side of the Church and the right, but you have to realize that this was the product of an anti-Church war of over 100 years on the part of the left.
Military justice still exists in the US, and whether a person is tried in a military or civilian court depends on a variety of factors.
The Church has always had canonical courts, but of course they were not allowed to impose certain punishments (this was one of the reasons that the State was involved in the Inquisition, since people were handed over to the State after their canonical trials). The level of jurisdiction depended upon agreements between the Vatican and the state in question.
Normally, the two functioned rather similarly: the Church did maintain “penitentiaries,” which were essentially harsh monastic jails for clergy convicted of crimes, and in certain cases would combine with the State to punish particular crimes. After the Cura Merino (a leftist activist, btw) tried to assassinate Isabel II, he was sentenced to be garroted...but only after Church officials had sliced and cut off the pads of his fingers, where he had received his priestly annointing. So sometimes this didn’t work out very well for the clergy...
If you watch the trailer, you get the distinct impression that they portray the Cristeros positively.
Between that and the train incident, which was partially a train robbery, he wasn't exactly a model character all around.
The anti-clericalism in Mexico was rooted in the same ideology that drove the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions in 1848, the Paris Commune, the Communist revolutions in Russia and Spain. The French enlightenment was animated by a hatred of the Church that soon spilled into hatred of Christianity in general. Even Protestant England and America was thunderstruck by the appearance of anti-Christ in France. The English and Scottish Enlightenment had no such animus. Even Gibbon, no friend of Christianity, was horrified by the slaughter. In their desire to uproot what the Jacobins called “Feudalism”—they stopped at nothing. There was no balance in their thinking, and one can find it today even in or own country as some seek to purge the public square of Christian influence.
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