Warning to America

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 9, 1873

Warning to America.

The Allocution pronounced by Pope Pius IX. on the occasion of the Revocation of the Concordat, and the enactment of liberal laws by the Government of Austria, is a document of too serious importance not to be recorded in full for the eyes of all our readers. We entreat the attention of thoughtful men to the bearing of it upon American institutions and American liberty.

It is a natural temptation, as we mark the calm and defiant contempt with which it is received by the Baron Von Beust and the great, emancipated empire which he represents, to sneer at the impotent malignity with which this brutum fulmen has been flung at the government of Austria, and to reckon it the last spasm of an exhausted and expiring tyranny.

But when we consider that more or less subject to the will of this moribund despot are the confessed majorities that rule the affairs of all the great American cities, and the solid mass of unintelligent and undivided votes which are used as the balance of power to determine the policy of our State and national governments, such utterances as this cease to be the mere scorn and jest of current history, and acquire a practical importance which we are far more in danger of undervaluing than of overvaluing.

This Allocution is not the venting of the idle petulance of one unfortunate, infirm, and cross old man. It was pronounced in the congregation of his seventy sagacious advisers in “secret consistory,” and comes to the light only with their well-considered approval. It is the deliberate reaffirming, in the face of all the world, of the policy of the Roman church. Where that church declines and fails, of course the manifestoes of its policy are waste paper. But how is it where it becomes dominant in society and politics? And what is indicated, in this document, with regard to the real designs of those whose plausible professions are set forth amongst us in so many a beguiling tract and volume?

Let it be distinctly understood, then, that the authorities of the Roman church have deliberately declared to be odious and abominable, and flagrantly contradictory to the doctrines, the rights, and the authority of the “Catholic Religion”:—

1. “Laws establishing liberty for all opinions, liberty of the press, and liberty of faith.”

2. “Laws granting to the members of all denominations the right of establishing schools and colleges into which members of all denominations are allowed to be admitted on the same footing.”

3. Laws permitting the intermarriage, on terms of religious equality, of Catholics and Protestants.

4. Laws permitting civil marriage.

5. Laws establishing public schools for secular education, that shall be free from the control of the Romish priesthood.

Let it be understood, furthermore, that the Roman church assumes, in this document, the right to declare such laws as these, wherever they may be enacted, to be NULL AND VOID.—Christian World.