Rome Never Changes by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 5, 1914

“Rome Never Changes”

By C. M. S.

THAT hope upon which the Christian hangs with greatest comfort and consolation is the unchanging purpose of our loving Heavenly Father. We know that he is the embodiment of love. His tender dealings with his children in all ages prove it beyond any question; and the peace of soul that comes with full surrender to his will is a sweet confirmation of the Christian’s trust and hope.

God has not left us to arrive at this conclusion through our own guessing, or philosophizing, but has declared the truth plainly, that we should not be harassed by doubts as to the certainty of our trust. Let us hear him:—

“I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” Mal. 3: 6.

And the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, in urging upon Christians the necessity of steadfastness in their profession and in their lives, declares:—

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yea and forever.” Heb. 13: 8.

A counterfeit always proclaims itself to be such by the evidence it bears of its maker’s attempt to imitate the genuine. Counterfeits are merely imitations of something else that is true. The endeavor of the counterfeiter is to make them appear genuine. That is just as true in spiritual affairs as in temporal. The hypocrite is a counterfeit Christian; and the false church is a counterfeit of the true. The hypocrite pretends to be and do all that the true Christian is and does; and the false church professes to

have all the characteristics and do all the work of the true church.

A system has come into the world which professes to be even more than a true church,—in fact, to be the very kingdom of God on earth; and as one of the most comforting attributes of God is his unchangeableness, that system claims to be unchanging also. That system is the Papacy; and that claim is put forth to prove her genuineness and at the same time to prove all other churches counterfeits of the true. It is worth while therefore to examine the claim of the Papacy in this particular.

In the work “Faith of Our Fathers,” by Cardinal Gibbons, those outside the Catholic Church are told that—

in coming to the church, you are not entering a strange place, but you are returning to your Father’s home. The house and furniture may look odd to you. But it is just the same as your forefathers left it three hundred years ago. In coming back to the church, you worship where your fathers worshiped before you; you kneel before the altar at which they knelt; you receive the sacraments which they received, and respect the authority of the clergy whom they venerated.—Page 17.

On page 29 of the same work we read:—

Her creed is now identical with what it was in past ages.

Again, on page 31 we have this pronouncement to the same effect:—

And so the church proposes the doctrines of faith, such as they came from the lips of Christ, and as the Holy Spirit taught them to the apostles at the birth of the Christian law,—doctrines which know neither variation nor decay.

Concerning the same matter a clerical contributor to the Catholic journal America, in giving the substance of a discussion with a Protestant, contributes the following:—

A Catholic lady with whom he had recently talked had told him with a great deal of pride that the church never changed. This had made a great impression on him. He had failed to see the difference between an unchanging body of religious and moral truth and an institution whose methods might be adapted to the conditions of a special day. His Catholic friend had spoken proudly of the changeless body of religious and moral truth, and he had understood her as referring also to all the methods and activities of the church.—America, Oct. 17, 1914, page 8.

The affirmation of unchangeableness in religious and moral teaching is so frequently and authoritatively made that it is not necessary to cite others. Now as to the facts in the case, what are they? Is Rome unchangeable? Are her doctrines the same as they were in ages past?

If Rome in her teachings is unchangeable, we should very naturally expect to find that the infallibility of the Pope had been held as one of the dogmas or tenets of that church; for it is so held now. It must, therefore, have been so held ever since the days of the apostles; for “Rome never changes.” As a matter of fact, it was never adopted as the belief of that church until the year 1870, and even then there was the most strenuous opposition to it on the part of most brilliant and consistent thinkers and leaders of the Roman Church. On this very point, Dr. Doellinger, the noted Catholic theologian, says:—

To prove the dogma of papal infallibility from church history, nothing less is required than a complete falsification of it [church history]. The declarations of popes which contradict the doctrines of the church, or contradict each other (as the same pope sometimes contradicts himself), will have to be twisted into agreement, so as to show that their heterodox or mutually destructive enunciations are at bottom sound doctrine, or, when a little has been subtracted from one dictum and added to the other, are not really contradictory, and mean the same thing.—“The Pope and the Council,” pages 49, 50.

The proof of unchangeableness, purchased at such a price, is far too expensive. But in adopting the dogma of papal infallibility Rome did, in 1870, make a complete and radical change. The proof of this assertion is furnished by the same Catholic writer above quoted:—

Some explanation is imperatively needed of the strange phenomenon that an opinion according to which Christ has made the pope of the day the one vehicle of his inspirations, the pillar and exclusive organ of divine truth, without whom the church is like a body without a soul, deprived of the power of vision, and unable to determine any point of faith—that such an opinion which is for the future to be a sort of dogmatic Atlas carrying the whole edifice of faith and morals on its shoulders, should have first been certainly ascertained in the year of grace 1869, but is from henceforth to be placed as a primary article of faith at the head of every catechism.

For thirteen centuries an incomprehensible silence on this fundamental article reigned throughout the whole church and her literature. None of the ancient confessions of faith, no catechism, none of the patristic writings composed for the instruction of the people contain a syllable about the Pope, still less any hint that all certainty of faith and doctrine depends on him. For the first thousand years of church history not a question of doctrine was finally decided by the Pope.—Id., pages 63, 64.

But now all questions of doctrine are decided by the Pope; and when he speaks ex cathedra, Catholics are to believe that he is speaking as the very mouthpiece of God. From that dictum in matters of faith and morals there is no appeal, and they are heretics who doubt. Before 1870 the Roman Church looked to the councils as final authority. After 1870 the council sank out of sight as the authoritative teacher of the church. In fact, at the General Synod of Constantinople in 680, Pope Honorius I was pronounced a heretic, and his dogmatic decision of the Monothelite controversy was declared heretical, and his name was struck out of the liturgy. Pope Hadrian I, in seeking to have the church approve of and adopt the decrees of the second Nicene Council on image worship, was energetically snubbed by the great assembly at Frankfort in 794, and “in 824 the bishops assembled in synod at Paris spoke without remorse of the ‘absurdities’ of Pope Hadrian, who, they said, had commanded an heretical worship of images.”

There was no thought in those days of the Pope’s being infallible; he was not looked to then as the one great teacher of the church from whose dictum there was no appeal. Between the attitude of the church then and the attitude of the church now upon this question there is a vast difference. There has been a change—a remarkable one. The declaration that “Rome never changes” is thus demonstrated to be unwarrantable and untrue. Thus, while Rome claims this attribute of divinity, she is unable to substantiate the claim; and her claim being untrue, she proves herself farther from divinity than she would be if she had not made it. In another article we will show that upon another important count her claim is untrue.

C. M. S.