Rome’s Unchanging Attitude

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 14, 1907

Rome’s Unchanging Attitude

THAT Protestants, who imagine the Roman Church to be mellowing toward the rest of Christendom, and who are therefore coming to look with great allowance on her past record and with great leniency on her present purposes, may see the real attitude and feeling which she manifests, we quote a portion of an editorial utterance which appeared in The New World (Catholic) of November 2:—

What is there that a Fiji islander could consider ideal in the history of the state Church of England, or of any of its offshoots? That church, to adapt the words of a Protestant English historian, was founded by Henry VIII, murderer of his wives, and carried on by Elizabeth, the murderess of her relative and guest. It has been stained by rapine and sacrilege in every land and in every age; it has no claim to sanctity, even in the most attenuated signification of the term,

as one of its notes or characteristics. To-day, as in the days of its infancy, the Episcopalian Church lives and thrives by the patronage of those who sit in the seats of the mighty; of men who have become rich by exploiting the poor; of persons of both sexes, who, chaffing under the restraints of Christ’s moral laws, which the Catholic Church has proclaimed in season and out of season without abating one jot or tittle of their rigor, love to belong to an ecclesiastical institution which will serve to lull their consciences by the opium of sonorous hymns, compromising sermons, and exalted examples of libertinism and impiety.

There is nothing in the above that breathes love or even toleration for the organization specially attacked, or for the “offshoots” included in its denunciation,—nothing there to indicate that the Roman Church of to-day has changed in any degree from the Roman Church that through the Dark Ages made the exercise of individual religion a matter of life and death.