p. 6 | A Bishop's Indictment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 28, 1907

A Bishop's Indictment

IN an article by the president of the United Society of Christian Endeavor, entitled “South America as a Mission Field,” which appeared in the November number of the Missionary Review of the World, the author quotes a letter written by the Catholic bishop of Cochabamba, Bolivia, describing conditions in his diocese. We quote the letter in order that those who are apologizing for Rome may see what a Roman bishop has found, and how it impresses him, in a country where Rome has been unhindered, for these many years. A priest had committed a serious misdemeanor and had been unfrocked. A distinguished man had interceded with the bishop to induce him to permit the priest to continue in his office. The bishop acceded to the request, but expressed his mind in the following letter concerning the priests under his charge:—

I have done all in my power to pull them out of the cesspool of ignorance and vice. . . . They are always the same—brutal, drunken, seducers of innocence, without religion and without conscience. Better would be the people without them. . . . The priests of these villages have no idea of God, nor of the religion of which they are the professed ministers. They never study. Their daily round of life is first to fill their stomachs, then the disorders of the bed, from these to the temple looking for more prey for their horrible sacrilege, then back to laziness, drunkenness, and the awful disorders of the bed again. You can not imagine the pain these things give me. I am sick and tired of it. There are exceptions, but so very few that they are not enough to mitigate the pain.

[Signed] ALFONSO, Bishop.

Concerning these conditions, President Clark says:—

It is admitted even by intelligent Catholics, that in South America the church is decadent and corrupt. The immorality of the priests is taken for granted. Priests’ sons and daughters (of course born out of wedlock) abound everywhere, and no stigma attaches to them or to their fathers and mothers. A number of South American prelates petitioned Pope Leo XIII a few years ago, on account of frequent scandals, to allow South American priests to marry, but the pope would not hear to it, and the old scandals go on and increase.