p. 9 | The Empty Boast of the Roman Catholic Church

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 25, 1912

The Empty Boast of the Roman Catholic Church

By William Warren Prescott

ALTHOUGH France, Portugal, and Spain, long regarded as the most loyal Catholic countries, have to a large extent broken away from the domination of the Papacy, and although Rome itself, the city of the popes, has twice elected as mayor Signor Nathan, who is both a Jew and a Freemason, yet in the face of these disquieting circumstances the Roman Catholic hierarchy, with the greatest assurance, professes the utmost confidence in the future of its church. This statement is not based upon the irresponsible utterances of some local priest, but upon declarations published in influential Catholic journals. We will make an extract from one editorial of this kind. In its issue of Dec. 30, 1911, America, the leading Jesuit weekly of this country, makes a forecast of the new year as it relates to the Roman Catholic Church. We quote three or four paragraphs:—

The church alone, though beset on all sides, and supposed by her enemies to be overwhelmed and helpless and almost at an end, is at peace. She stands among the sepulchers of the nations, unterrified and undismayed. In her luminous and beneficent progress through the ages she has passed through more awful catastrophes than those which now surround her, but they have only brought out with greater splendor the divine power with which she is invested, not only of resisting the enemies that seek to destroy her, but of repairing all the material and spiritual havoc of which they are the authors.

When the empire of the Cæsars crumbled to the dust, she built up a mightier Roman empire than any Cæsar ever dreamed of; assailed by the barbarians, she dowered them with civilization and Christianity; terrified for a time by the Turks, she is now contemplating the dismemberment of the realms once lighted by the crescent, and is sending her missionaries into the lands which centuries ago were invaded by her crusaders. Protestantism is disintegrating before her eyes, and multitudes of its greatest representatives are hurrying to the temples which their forefathers had abandoned.

All the old enemies are gone, and she faces new ones to-day, not pagans nor

heretics nor Turks, but apostates and atheists, who hate the very name of God, and rail like madmen against the faith they have forsworn. They have seized on the machinery of governments, and by confiscation, robbery, and expatriation are striving with an almost satanic fury to efface from the souls of men every memory of Christianity. But the lesson of the past will be repeated. The church will be called upon to quell the tumult which these very men have provoked among the people and to save from ruin the very governments which were fashioned to compass her destruction.

In appearance she was never so weak, but in reality never so powerful as today. From the solitude of the Vatican, to which her recreant children have consigned her, she rules the hierarchy of every nation, selects her princes and prelates from kingdoms and empires and republics, with absolute unconcern for the statesmen or rulers of the nations, and her least word is listened to and obeyed with reverence and love at the uttermost ends of the earth as never before in the history of the world.

The voice from heaven sounding the final call to the people of God to come out of Babylon, declaring that “her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities,” thus foretells her doom:—

“Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her; for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.” Rev. 18:6-8.

The student of prophecy recognizes that the rehabilitation of the Papacy in the last generation is one of the signs indicating the nearness of the coming of Him whose right it is to reign, and foreshadowing the utter overthrow of the kingdom of Antichrist. One necessary condition of the fulfilment of the prophecies relating to these events is that the Papacy shall vaunt itself and proclaim its absolute immunity from any destroying power. This condition is being fulfilled before our eyes. Other specifications of the last-day prophecies are also being fully met, showing that the great consummation is just at hand.

There is no hope of the restoration of modern Babylon; her fate is sealed. When the dogma of infallibility was proclaimed in 1870, and the Roman Church was thus rendered irreformable, the utter destruction of that apostate body, as a whole, was just as certainly decreed as was the destruction of Jerusalem when the Jewish hierarchy refused the offers of divine mercy and finally rejected the Messiah. It only remains in this generation to call as many as possible out of Babylon by the preaching of the true gospel, just as many of the Jews were rescued from the impending extinction of the nation by the acceptance of the gospel in the generation which closed with the destruction of Jerusalem.

The threefold message of Revelation 14:6-12 is the only explanation of the present situation, and furnishes the only avenue of escape from the doom which threatens the whole world.

W. W. P.