Present Conditions by Juan Orts Gonzalez

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 30, 1913

Present Conditions

By Juan Orts Gonzalez

I CAN not understand how American Protestants can endure silently and without shame the present conditions.

Catholics to-day may not only attack, but even slander Protestant people and doctrines, and no important paper even depreciates their abusive language; but we Protestants in a Protestant country can not preach Protestant doctrines without being accused of being bigots and called narrow-minded.

Catholics can organize a religious order like the Paulist Fathers, which stands chiefly for the conversion of Protestants, and such attempts have never been denounced, as far as I know, as a bigoted proselytism; but no Protestant can go to preach among Catholics without being accused of bigotry and base proselytism.

Catholics have organized a society like the Knights of Columbus, which counts already about three hundred thousand citizens who are bound to defend the Roman Catholic Church even in social and in political spheres, and no important paper denounces such organizations as unfair and un-American.

Catholics are taking the Bible out of our public schools, and then discrediting this greatest of American institutions by calling it ungodly and pernicious. Finally, they are establishing their parochial schools (wherein the most bigoted Romanism is taught, since foreign friars and foreign nuns are largely the teachers), and no important paper has warned the nation of the tremendous and sinister influence that must thereby be exerted in the near future on American ideals and civilization.

Catholics dare to say to a Protestant party, By no means can you marry a Catholic, unless the marriage is performed by a Catholic priest and an oath is made that all children springing from the union shall be Catholic, and there shall be no interference with the religion of the Catholic party; but no important paper therefor accuses them of narrowness and sectarianism.

Catholics can say from the confessional box, from the pulpit, through their books, and even through bulls of the popes, that the children of Protestant marriage are not legitimate children. They can say that when a Protestant minister performs the marriage ceremony, he merely authorizes concubinage. They can insult Protestant daughters and wives since they do not consider them canonically and legally married at all, and no one finds such conduct unfair and un-American. But we Protestants can not speak of the Syllabus without being accused of attacking the Roman Catholic people and church.—Juan Orts Gonzalez, in the Presbyterian of the South, Jan. 15, 1913.