ROMAN CATHOLIC INTOLERANCE.
A PROPOSITION in the Catholic party in the German Reichstag, the Literary Digest of May 21, tells us, aroused much debate “in the course of which Representative Sattler quoted from a work of a Jesuit father, Lucca, which appeared in Rome as late as 1901, in which death for heresy is asserted to be fully established by the church. The Cologne Volkszeitung, next to the Germania, of Berlin, the leading Catholic Church paper of the country, quotes this passage from Lucca’s “Institutiones Juris Ecclesiastici” (vol. i., p. 261 et seq.):— The church has decided upon various punishments for the heretics: (1) The secular government must, at the command and by the direction of the church [ex mandato et commissione ecclesiae], inflict the punishment of death on heretics, and can not refuse to take charge of those that have been handed over to the secular arm by the church for death; (2) this punishment is to be inflicted not only on the adults who have fallen away from the faith, but also on those who have been baptized and with their mother’s milk have imbibed heresy and when grown up pertinaciously adhere to it. The paper above, and other politicians, declare that this is not the doctrine of the church of to-day, because “ecclesiastico-political conditions have changed to such an extent. It regrets that a denunciation of the book has not appeared in journals of the order [of Jesuits].” There is reason why it is not denounced. Lucca is logically right, tho now practically wrong; that the logical action of the church of Rome against heretics can not now be enforced, and it would be folly to attempt it; but Lucca’s doctrine is true, and its logic, from the very nature and fundamentals of Rome’s claims, is inexorable. The Jesuits know this, and they hope to see the day soon dawn when the world-kingdoms shall have yielded to the voice of the siren of apostasy, and the doctrine will be both practical and timely. We readily, gladly, concede that there are many Roman Catholics who would not persecute or prosecute heretics, but they are better than their creed or its logic. The persecution is in the errors, the false theories, the false assumptions; and good men are transformed into demons by yielding to its perverted gospel. “Rome never changes.” Lucca is right in his statement from the standpoint of the Roman Church, and the time will come—a little season—when it will be demonstrated to be once more practical. It is in respect to this last recrudescence of the Papacy that God sends out to the world His last great threefold warning in Rev. 14:6-14.