Archbishop Up, People Down

In Mexico City last week the huge front doors of the nation's chief Cathedral groaned on their hinges, swung open as they do only when an Archbishop is installed or dies. In walked a lean, dark man with horn-rimmed spectacles, Archbishop-elect Luis Maria Martinez y Rodriguez, raised by Pope Pius XI from bishop coadjutor of the provincial diocese of Morelia to be Catholic primate of Mexico (TIME, April 5). Within the Cathedral were hundreds of clergy, wearing habits and vestments rarely permitted them in public during recent years, and thousands of poor, pious Mexicans, mostly Indians and mestizos.

Under a canopy of gold and silver the Archbishop-elect marched with a procession to the high altar where a papal bull was read to him, formally announcing his appointment. After Mass, Archbishop Martinez began to sermonize. Just as the primate, whose cheerful grin for photographers belies his sober preoccupation with canon law and theology, reached the point where he promised "to comply with the desires of the Catholic people of Mexico," the floor directly in front of him fell in. With a terrible snapping and crackling, the ancient planks parted and 70 people dropped 18 feet into the 364- year-old crypt below. While brown-faced Boy Scouts scurried after the injured, helped the unharmed scramble from the pit and calmed the other worshipers in the hot Cathedral, Archbishop Martinez quickly descended from his pulpit, bestowed blessings on the ten worst hurt. The installation then continued as planned.

With the installation of Archbishop Martinez--a Mexican-educated friend of President Lazaro Cardenas and a moderate, law-abiding churchman--Mexico's religious situation remained comparatively tranquil, the long-term outlook became more favorable to the Church than it had been in years. In Vera Cruz, where an unconstitutional statute forbidding any priest to exercise his office is still on the books, Catholics had opened ten churches, were negotiating to install ten priests. Father Jose Maria Flores, who stirred Vera Cruz Catholics to action when a 14-year-old girl had been shot dead after attending Mass in his house, has applied for permission to pursue his calling openly. Throughout the Republic, Mexican Catholics looked forward to new clarification of their status after a general election next July.

Buffalo's white stone St. Joseph's Cathedral is probably the only one in the world whose steeple is in its cellar--placed there some years ago when faulty construction necessitated pulling it down. In St. Joseph's last week New York's Archbishop Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes presided at the installation of Buffalo's seventh Catholic Bishop, Most Rev. John Aloysius Duffy, 52. A strapping, twinkling-eyed onetime boilermaker who, it is said, still holds a union card, Bishop Duffy taught at Seton Hall College in South Orange, N. J., whence he used to tramp twelve miles weekly to visit his mother in his native Jersey City. He rose to be chancellor, then vicar general of the diocese of Newark, was made Bishop of Syracuse in 1933, transferred to the larger see of Buffalo last January.

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