Judas' Burning Day

1909

This the day when that arch-traitor who betrayed his Lord is burned in effigy here in Mexico — Judas in a hundred fantastic forms, made of cheap pasteboard, grotesquely painted and most ugly of feature, sometimes a mere caricature of a person hated by the populace, a personal enemy — even female Judases in skirts. Full of malodor and cheap gunpowder, the Judas goes off in smoke amidst shouts of derision, burned to make a small boy's holiday.

Modern whitewashers of the great criminals of history, who transform noted poisoners, murderers and the scourges of mankind into near-saints, have tried in learned works to prove that Judas the Bad was a Jewish patriot, mistaken, no doubt, but a would-be benefactor of his people. The vast majority of people, however, simply won't let it be so; they have long ago made up their minds about him, as they have about Nero, the imperial artistic assassin; about the fat and lascivious Henry VIII., and about Benedict Arnold, the brave, hot-headed and sensitive turncoat, who betrayed his country's cause and proved anew the ancient proverb that a renegade is worse than ten Turks.

Mankind demands for the edification of the young a fair share of historical villains, who furnish texts for sermons and enable preachers and orators to turn a sentence neatly.

The Judas-burning custom is gradually falling into desuetude here at the capital, along with other traditional practices, and more's the pity. But in bystreets, in humble neighborhoods, Judas gets his desert, which in a direct way impresses a lesson on the youthful mind. Somewhere beyond the stars, in some perchance solitary place, amid great gloom, the traitor is expiating his crime. He may have repented, and so some day may fall once more into the interminable and always upward struggling human procession, for there is no setting of bounds to the Divine mercy. He fell far; he may rise to immense spiritual heights. The star of hope never sets for the soul of man. — Mexican Herald.