Catholic Opposition to Protestant Missions

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 10, 1907

Catholic Opposition to Protestant Missions

THE real attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward the foreign missionary work conducted by Protestants in Catholic countries is made clear by the utterances of one of its own papers. Of a Methodist missionary who is declared to be “preaching the gospel of pharisaism and divorce to the benighted Catholics of Porto Rico,” the New World (Catholic) says:—

If Rev. Mr. George Milton Fowles and other globe-trotting advance agents of divorce would stay at home, and thereby confine somewhat the moral disease which follows infallibly in the wake of Protestantism just as trade follows the flag, or, better still, if they would follow some decent trade, one which would not demand more than the minimum of education, they would be at least contributing each one his share toward the up-building of “spiritual standards” and the “advancement of the race.”

This is the gospel of bitterness and sarcasm boiled down, and then preached in a spirit of extreme intolerance. And yet there are some who advocate a federation of the Protestant and Catholic churches. The spirit of Catholicism is the same now as in the sixteenth century, and wherever circumstances permit, it will be revealed in the same way.