Columns

For the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics – and for Latin America’s 483 million Catholics – Semana Santa (Holy Week) has been a surprising time of provocative and perhaps uncharted change.   The new pope is not only the first non-European to become heir to the throne of St. Peter in more than 1,000 years, he is the first pope from the Americas, the first pope from Latin America, and the first to take the name Francisco (Francis), after the humble, much revered Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order.

Suddenly it’s Jesuit season. A surprise for most of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and a puzzle for non-Catholics. The reason for the surprise within the Church is the fact, the media says, that in the Church’s 2,000-year history, no Jesuit has ever even been truly considered a candidate to take St. Peter’s throne. Actually, the Jesuits didn’t exist until 1534, and didn’t receive papal approval until 1540 (Pope Paul III – 1418-1549). Which means none were ever chosen in the 473 years of the order’s existence. That’s due in great part because Jesuits have actively shunned ambitions, or lobbying for such higher positions as bishops, etc.

Very few of my campesino friends read newspapers – or, actually, much of anything, besides the directions on livestock feed sacks, and medicines for both animals and their families. 

Among the gushers of government hyped news this week were reiterations that the January 31 explosion at the Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) tower complex was a gas explosion.  The government of Mexico’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto identified the gas as methane.

The debate (at least one of them) about James Knox Polk, the eleventh, and seemingly very efficient, president, has to do with his pro-slavery inclinations mixed with his eagerness for a “war of choice” – rather than one of necessity.  Most Polk enthusiasts tend to ignore the fact that he was both a good friend of Sam Houston and a long-time slave master.  And though he privately declared he would free his slaves (when the economic moment was right), one of the last things he did as he was dying of cholera in 1849 was to order the purchase, in secret, of six more young slaves.

Into this season of welcome and instructive Lincoln-mania comes an evidently political-dividing history of a war that Abraham Lincoln opposed when he was still a congressman.  Using the words of Ulysses S. Grant, who termed  the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, a “wicked war,” for her title, historian Amy S. Greenberg’s, “A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico,” brings our attention to an often ignored aspect of an early United States “war of choice.”  Mexicans called it then, and call it now, “The American Invasion.”