Note and Comment by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 28, 1903

Note and Comment

By Editor

As substantiating what is said on another page about the Protestant world making obeisance to the papacy, we quote a few paragraphs from two papers we have had occasion to examine, one The Catholic Mirror, the other the New York Sun. Very many other papers have spoken to the same effect. The Mirror makes note as follows:—

Perhaps the most remarkable thing in connection with the pope’s illness, more so even than the vitality which has enabled the venerable pontiff to rally at critical periods, has been the outburst of genuine sympathy and sincere affection and admiration which has come from men of all creeds and of none in all parts of the world.

A few days ago we read that the Methodists in camp-meeting at Ocean Grove, N. J., had prayed for the recovery of Pope Leo, whom they eulogized in glowing terms. On last Sunday prayers were offered for him in many non-Catholic churches in all parts of this country. In some he was made the subject of pulpit eulogy, and many were the tributes paid to him, and indirectly to the grandeur of the organization of which he is the head. The mere fact of the existence of a feeling which in this country makes it possible for a Protestant ministry to pay tribute to the virtues and ability of a Roman Catholic pope is the most striking tribute to the beneficent character of the influence exercised on religion and humanity by the dying Leo that it would be possible to find. It is a far cry from the shouts of “antichrist” to panegyrics of “Leo the Good.”

The Sun observes:—

On Sunday prayers for the dying pope were offered up in several Protestant churches of whose services we have particular reports, and, probably, in many more. . . . They were indicative of a change in the attitude of Protestantism toward the Roman Catholic Church, which is one of the most remarkable religious developments of recent years. Even not more than a quarter of a century ago that church, by far the greatest in Christendom, was usually excluded from consideration by Protestants when they were discussing the means and agencies for the propagation of Christianity. The article on the pope in the Westminster Confession, in which he was described as “that antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition,” represented the prevailing Protestant belief.

Twenty-five years before, this whole country had been stirred by a political agitation against the Roman Catholic Church, which seemed to some prophets ominous of a religious war. That church, then comparatively feeble, has now grown into the strongest in the republic, yet, instead of the bitterness of hostility against it proclaimed and predicted by the old Know-Nothingism, there have come harmony and respect. In Protestant churches prayers were offered up for the suffering and dying pope. The Roman pontiff has become a Christian brother, and Protestants join with Catholics in celebrating the spiritual exaltation of his character, and the services he has rendered to Christianity. He was described by a Methodist preacher of New York on Sunday as “a leader of the great army of the Lord’s hosts,” a “spiritual commander-in-chief,” a “champion of the faith who has never wavered from the Catholic position and the theology of Thomas Aquinas,” “who has done much for the progress of civilization.”

Such a tribute to a pope from a Protestant pulpit would have been impossible when Leo XIII ascended the papal throne. The bitterness of the old Protestant controversy, as expressed in the article of the Westminster Confession to which we have referred, had been moderated even then, but it had not been mitigated to an extent which would have made possible such expressions in a Methodist pulpit, or in any other Protestant pulpit.