There is nothing peculiar in the spiritual powers of the Church of Mexico, as these powers are common to all Catholic countries, and vary only with the ignorance and brutality of the people; the more degraded the people, the greater is the power of the priest and bishop.
The intelligent Catholic, educated among Protestants, looks upon his priest as a religious instructor, and interprets the ego te absolvo as rather a matter of form, meaning little more than that he will intercede for him. He has caught and is applying a Protestant idea unwittingly.
But with the gross multitude who constitute the mass of the Spanish-American population, the priest is the God of the people; his giving or withholding absolution is a matter of life or death; and, however corrupt and debauched he may be, he still holds jurisdiction over the pains of hell and the bliss of heaven. For a reasonable consideration in money, he will shut up the one and open the other.
The offering in the mass of the bloodless sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as it is called, is not sufficient for the Catholic in a Protestant country, but the priest must also preach a sermon every Sabbath, like a Protestant minister, though he still holds to the efficacy of the mass in conferring blessings on the living and the believing dead.
The preaching of the priest is a rare thing in an exclusively Catholic country. The mass is his livelihood, and if he be the head of a community, or a popular priest, he often makes a profit in taking in masses to say, and letting out the job at a discount.
The whole matter may be summed up by saying that the more profoundly ignorant the people are, the more devotional do they become, so that the priest has always a pecuniary interest in the ignorance of the people, and if he makes any effort toward their enlightenment, it is an effort made directly against his own pecuniary interests and the income of his office.