Papal Infallibility by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 12, 1872

Papal Infallibility.

By Editor

WE are coming to think that the infallibility dogma is a good thing. It isn’t working, to be sure, exactly as the pope designed; and that is where its value comes in. He designed to show himself infallible; but his course on this question is simply proving the prophetic scriptures infallible; for it is alienating all his national supporters, and giving a new impetus to the decadence of his influence, which the Scriptures foretold should take place in the last days. The Detroit Post, says:—

The declaration of infallibility has, in Europe, created a schism in the church, and the pope finds himself doctrinally, at least, at the head of a faction opposing the traditions of the church.

This is probably the just view to take of the situation. The pope has now no friend, as his adherents complain, on any throne in Europe. Thiers, quasi-president of a semirepublic, offered his protection; but evidently that was only an imitation and continuation of Napoleon’s policy. In accordance with his policy—borrowed from the fable of the old man and the ass—of obtaining the support of every class for his presidency, Thiers hoped to conciliate the ultramontanes. The German government will not tolerate the Jesuits. The police have already broken up an establishment at Posen, and Bismarck’s war upon them is begun in earnest.

The Catholics themselves feel that the modern world is against them. The pope in his syllabus of 1864 denounced pretty nearly everything characteristic of the age.

In Detroit, a short time ago, one of their clergy devoted the whole of a public lecture to showing that this was an age of retrogression, not of progress; and that the only hope of its salvation lay in the triumph of the Catholic church. In a recent Chicago lecture, another member of that church complains that there is scarcely a book or paper published in this country which does not fling, or sneer, at the Catholics. The Catholic religion, he said, has not a single friend among the daily newspapers, which are filled with false statements about that religion, and Catholics have no opportunity to reply to them. The New York papers have a combined circulation of half a million, and are “spreading the poison” among a million and a half or two million readers. The sectarian press is occupied in the same enterprise, and this immense power is daily used against the Roman Catholic Church.

This, perhaps, is the most notable confession of the decadence of the Catholic Church recently put on record.