Roman Catholic Priests in South America.
At the Protestant Reformation Society recently held in England, Dr. Harry Guinness said, according to the Prophetic News of June:— “I have just returned from many lands where Roman Catholicism is undisturbed by Protestantism. On my way to Panama I met a young Roman Catholic who declared that it was a monstrous thing that Protestants should say Roman Catholic priests were not pure to the core. I said to him, ‘Wait till you get to Panama.’ There the depravity of the priests is awful. In the base of the bishop’s palace are the headquarters of all the gambling in Panama. Some prizes allowed the winners to have the soul of some friend liberated from purgatory. In Peru, out of many hundred priests, only eighty-nine came from Europe. On the coast I met some European priests from Spain, France, Italy, and Switzerland. I said to one of them, the head of a large monastery, that I thought the priests of Peru very depraved. The priest replied, ‘Sir, you are perfectly correct; there is not a sober, respectable priest among the lot.’ Another priest confirmed that statement.”