The Double Doctrine of the Church of Rome

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 20, 1906

“The Double Doctrine of the Church of Rome”

There has appeared a book with this title written by the Baroness Von Zedtwitz, better known as Miss Mary Caldwell, a former communicant of the Roman Catholic Church who donated liberally to the founding of the Catholic University of America at Washington. The reasons for the author's repudiation of Roman Catholicism are given in this book.

The baroness claims to have been admitted to the inner circles of the church, and as the result of this intimate acquaintance with its teaching and practise, she declares that there are two kinds of doctrine advocated by the adherents of the papacy. She analyzes them thus:—

First, those for the uninitiated, or the sheep; second, those for the initiated, or the shepherds; in other words, there is exoteric and esoteric Catholicism. With the exoteric doctrines it finds means to defend itself against attack, and retreats always behind the bulwarks of Christian ethics. It proclaims charity, sincerity, justice, altruism, professes from the pulpits the gospel of Jesus Christ, and thus deludes its adversaries, who fall back disheartened, and abandon a systematic attack. . . .

Jesuitism is but esoteric Catholicism made tangible. It is the heart and spirit of the whole system; and whether or not there have been, and still be, popes and prelates who are covertly hostile to its necessary hegemony [leadership], they are aware that if Catholicism and papacy are to last, Jesuitism is absolutely indispensable for their justification; were it otherwise, Rome, following the course she has always pursued in denouncing unsound doctrines of a theological nature, would have been forced to call upon the Jesuits in Vatican Council to disown and repudiate the unsound moral teachings of a whole host of Jesuit authors, or failing to obey this order, banish the Jesuits from the church. Rome has never attempted either. The Jesuits are the bold cynics who meet with a sneer the faltering Christian doubtful of his power to reach salvation; they are the mockers of those seeking more light on intellectual doubts. They, the modern Pyrrhonists [skeptics], emboldened by their Greek prototype, reply now to the seeker of truth, as Pilate once replied to Christ, “What is truth?”

This testimony, coming not from an official of the church who has some grievance, but from an intelligent lay member who has shown a sincere devotion to the advancement of Catholicism, is a forcible confirmation of the conclusion to which any unprejudiced investigator must arrive. The political intrigues of the papacy, covering many centuries, the methods of ecclesiastical administration, and the irregularities of conduct even among her clergy, are so much at variance with the Biblical standard of morals as to force the student of Roman Catholic history to conclude that among the initiated who shape the policy and plans of the papacy as an organization, the principle that the end justifies the means has more weight than the principles taught and practised by Jesus Christ. We know that there are sincere and devout Catholics who are following all the light which they have, and who, for this very reason, will be led into clearer light; but viewed as a system of doctrine and as an outward organization, popery and the papacy represent the kingdom of darkness under the forms and names of Christianity. Underneath the mask will be found “the man of sin.”

The gospel message which is designed to bring deliverance to those who are in the bondage of this false system of religion must, it is perfectly plain, be more than the proclamation of the theories of “charity, sincerity, justice, altruism;” there must be the exemplification of the life of Christ, not simply in the “uninitiated,” but also in the “initiated.” There should be no appearance of a foundation for the charge that there is exoteric and esoteric Adventism. “Organizations, institutions, unless kept by the power of God, will work under Satan’s dictation to bring men under the control of men; and fraud and guile will bear the semblance of zeal for truth and for the advancement of the kingdom of God. Whatever in our practise is not as open as day, belongs to the methods of the prince of evil.” Pretense and underhand dealing can have no place in those who are really giving the third angel's message.