The Roman Curia by Lord Robert Montagu

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 25, 1913

The Roman Curia

By Lord Robert Montagu

THE Curia is a Cabinet of long standing, great practise, experience, and knowledge of affairs. It never goes out by the action of an adverse majority in a representative Chamber. It never suffers change, except as one member or another drops off by old age and death. Like the Russian Cabinet, it comprises all the best intellects of Europe and the New World. It combines the astuteness of the Italian, the solidity of the Englishman, the inventive genius of the American, the clear subtlety of the Frenchman, the dogged perseverance and persistence of the German, the duplicity of the Oriental, and the falsehood of all. All these varied intellects have been carefully trained for their work, and been experienced in diplomacy; while from the intimate reports derived from priestly confessors all over the world, the best and most detailed knowledge of the characters and intentions of statesmen and the passions of people, are ready to their hand. The Vatican is the center of all the intelligence and information of the world; and every bishop has periodically to visit Rome, in order that his inmost soul may be probed, and his continual reports may be tested. Such is the Cabinet with which Protestant statesmen hope on equal terms to cope!

Now consider the other point—the character of the Roman Curia to which the Romish bishops all over the world have sworn implicit obedience, just as the priests also have sworn entire submission to their bishops. The Church of Rome is, in fact, not a body of theological doctrine or belief, but a huge and intricate system of government. It is an empire; it is an absolute monarchy, with its College of Cardinals, or Privy Councilors—a monarchy which rules not only by means of force, and which governs not only the bodies and outward actions of its subjects; but which rules the conscience by means of spiritual terrors, and insures the most abject obedience by means of superstitious feelings. As a study of the Syllabus of December 8, 1864, will show, the Papal Government is a conspiracy of the subtlest and best informed minds, against the fortunes and liabilities of mankind. It has agents in every land and every nation; for every priest, every monk, every nun, every member of a religious confraternity, is an agent of that Government. And every one of these—the whole body indeed of the Romanists—move as one army, in accordance with the orders from the Vatican. By all the allurements of sense; by the feigned terrors of the unseen world; by artifices nicely calculated on an intimate acquaintance with each man's idiosyncrasies, tendencies, antecedents, and present frame of mind; by the power acquired through the knowledge of some secret crime; by enticing young persons of mark to commit themselves in perpetrating some disgraceful act so that their fair name and fame, their honor and their liberties are placed in the hands of the agents of Rome; by memories of the past, and poignant stings of remorse; by offers of preferment, office, glory, and fame, with assurances of safety and secrecy in exchange for services rendered clandestinely to Rome;—by all these means, and many others, the Vatican is ever increasing, in every land, its body of adherents, who must implicitly obey, while they hate her. Nor can honor or patriotism or even family affection intervene. Conscience is goaded, and oaths compel them to discard the laws and the welfare of their nation, with the love of kindred, the entreaties of a wife, the paternal instincts of a father for his children, in order to submit to and obey the mandates of the Pope.

A Marvelous Mechanism

The system of the Church of Rome is a wonderful mechanism. Its center is the Pope. Yet it is independent of the Pope. Many a Pope has been a dotard; very many have been debauchees. Yet the machine works on, irrespectively of his idiosyncrasies. It is the Cabinet, the Privy Council, the College of Cardinals, that governs. That body never dies. One old man and another falls away, like a sere and yellow leaf, but the tree remains; the traditions and the knowledge of centuries are still there. The records of the past are added to the daily experience of the present; and that experience is being ever gathered in every corner of the earth, wherever there is a priest or a missioner. From every race, from every land, from every people, nay, from every family there stretches a telegraphic wire of secret intelligence to the central station of the Vatican. There the intelligence is used by free minds, who are destitute of family, without all the affections which are natural to man, without a country or a home, without patriotism; without restraint of obligations, oaths, moral principles or divine laws; because the word of the Pope is supposed to tear those holy fetters away as gossamer webs, and priestly absolution is held to wash out even the slightest taint of sin. That is right which is done to advance the power of the Pope. That is true which the Pope may please to assert ex cathedra. That which favors the interest of the church is good. Even crime is commendable if it be done for the church.

Coleridge, the poet and philosopher, said that there are two kinds of strong persons who must always prevail over men that vary in their aims, and sometimes move in one direction and sometimes in another: he is strong who acts always in accordance with the will of God, and allows no consideration, no passion, and no interest to make him deviate from the path of rectitude and simple justice, and he, too, is strong who puts before himself one end, to which he constantly aims without swerving to one side or the other, allowing no considerations of right and wrong, no soft or benevolent feeling, no passion, no natural affection, to intervene or deter. Forte nihil difficile. The latter succeeds in this world, the former lives for eternity. Hence the success, for centuries, of

the Vatican. Emperors have resisted it, and fallen. Ministers have framed their policies to curb the pretensions of the Pope, and have been overcome. The devices of premiers are weak, in opposition to the intrigues of the Curia.

The advance of the Papacy has always been as the advance of the plague, irresistible, unsparing, remorseless, and deadly. Its myriads of secret agents overmatch armies and dispose of their generals. Its purposes are fathomless as the sea and silent as the grave. Its action is in every state, setting nation to hamper nation, and exciting one statesman against another; breaking up, dividing, crumbling its enemies; while its own party is always united, conspiring everywhere toward one object. Ever victorious, it will triumph until the great hour for the doom of the harlot which sits upon the nations of the earth, has struck; until the warning voice has been heard through the world: “Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. . . . For she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.”—Lord Robert Montagu.