The Pope’s Encyclical on Liberty
By Editor
A RECENT press dispatch from Rome states that Pope Leo has prepared an encyclical which, believing that his end is now near at hand, he designs to be his testament to the Catholic Church. It is published in the Vatican organ, The Osservatore Romano. Only a summary of the document has yet appeared in the American press, but in this it is stated that the pope presents a dark view of the prevailing religious and political conditions, declaring that never has humanity found itself in more miserable conditions than at present. Socialism and anarchism, he says, have been fostered by excessive liberty, and he declares that the governments of the civilized world must adopt decisive measures for the defense of genuine liberty, and must enforce the teaching of religion. Religious liberty is, according to Cardinal Gibbons, a competent Catholic authority, the liberty to worship God "according to the dictates of a right conscience." The church tells what a "right conscience" must accept as the truth, and every person is allowed the liberty to believe the doctrines prescribed, and to be governed by them in his worship of God; this is "genuine liberty," of the papal kind. And the governments of the earth, says this encyclical, must adopt decisive measures for the defense of this "genuine liberty." They must, it says, enforce the teaching of religion; by which is meant, of course, the Catholic religion, that only being the true religion, from the papal standpoint. To do all this would mean nothing less than that the civil governments of earth should join hands with the papacy. Then "excessive liberty" would be restrained after the approved methods of the Middle Ages; but socialism and anarchy would only spread the faster. We regret that we have not the full and exact text of the encyclical upon these points; this may appear in English later. But from this summary of its contents it is evident that Leo's "testament" to his church is an important and eminently Roman Catholic document.