Doing Penance

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 5, 1908

ON Sunday, February 23, while a Catholic priest of Denver, Colo., by the name of Leo Heinrichs, was officiating at the altar of his church, he was killed by an anarchist, Guiseppi Alio. The funeral of the murdered priest was held the following Wednesday. While preparing the body for burial, a discovery was made that reads like a leaf from the history of the Dark Ages. We give the account of the discovery as published in the Washington Times of February 26:—

Priests and laymen alike are astounded by a discovery made in preparing the priest's body for burial. Next to the skin Father Leo had wrapped about his waist and upper arms heavy bands of linked steel chains, and to each link was a hook, sharpened to a needle's point, attached in such fashion that each movement of the priest caused the hooks to pierce his flesh and to remind him of the life and death of Him whose steps he struggled to follow.

Father Leo never spoke to his fellow clergy of his mode of penance, and no one in the monastery surmised it. His body and upper arms were entirely calloused, showing that when the pain became deadened because of the toughened skin, he had taken the network of claws and adjusted them so that the pain might come again with renewed force.

We have no desire to speak disparagingly of the dead, no sympathy with the cruel assassin who chose to dispense death while pretending to desire participation in the ceremony the priest was performing; but the discovery illustrates how completely the gospel is perverted in the teaching of the organization to which the murdered priest belonged. Doing penance for sin has always been a characteristic of pagan religions. The East Indian, enduring the agony of standing between burning fires, sleeping on a bed of spikes, holding the arm above the head until it withered and grew rigid, was practising the same kind of religion as that which put the belt of torture around the waist and arms of this priest. These all originated in the same idea as that which inspired the use of the instrument of self-torture discovered on Leo Heinrichs. If salvation be by such means, the Hindu has no need of the gospel, and Jesus Christ died to no purpose. He who could invent the keenest torture, and stand it, would be entitled to the highest place in the kingdom. Jesus did not die to open a way whereby men could torture themselves into glory. He said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matt. 11: 28-30. Again: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” Isa. 45: 22. How different is this from the doctrine of self-flagellation to win favor with God. In torturing the body for the sin of the soul, man makes himself judge of the enormity of his sin. In other words, he puts himself in the place of God to mete out judgment for his own transgression of God's law. Putting itself in the place of God—that is what the papacy was to do as an organization (2 Thess. 2: 3, 4), and wherever it teaches penance to purge away sin, it is teaching men to do as individuals what it is doing as an organization. Would that the murdered priest had learned what Martin Luther learned, that “without faith it is impossible to please” God, and having learned that, had stripped off his torture girdles, and trusted for the salvation of his soul in the efficacy of the life and blood of Jesus. Nowhere in the Bible are we commanded to torture our bodies to win the eternal reward, but the Bible rings from cover to cover with the blessed invitation, Come. The words of the Lord through Micah are applicable here: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”