The Decay of Romanism

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 30, 1875

The Decay of Romanism.

WHAT WAS Rome in 1790, and what is it now? Within these eighty years the Church-State and the temporal power of the German Episcopate have been dissolved. The possessions of the church in France, Spain, and Italy, have been sold as national property. Everywhere has Protestant heresy obtained civil rights. Protestant chapels flourish in Rome as well as in Madrid; the Protestant clergyman walks about unmolested, and disseminates his Bibles by thousands and tens of thousands. Had not—since Napoleon's Consulate in France, and in the other Catholic and Protestant States since the Congress of Vienna—political power steadily stood up for the church; had not, after 1848, political reaction leagued itself with ecclesiastical reaction; had we done what the spokesmen of Ultramontanism now so earnestly, so persistently demand—left the church to herself—the veil of the temple had long since been rent asunder.

The German Catholic movement of 1840 by no means foundered on Peter's rock; it was first hindered, then repressed, and finally strangled, through police measures, by State persecution. To the church's advantage, in the very heat of the contest, a pope pronounced from the pulpit the word “Reform”—a pope who at that time loved that his name should be connected with that of Ganganelli. The infallible Pope Pius IX. was in the year 1849 the ideal of Italian Liberals whom to-day he curses. The transformation which the world then hoped for at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church already cast widely before it its majestic shadow. “Wherefore secede from a church which intends to make its peace with modern culture and society?” so said quiet, thoughtful people—and remained. The Syllabus, the “Non Possumus,” and the Infallibility Dogma were necessary to prove that between modern society and Rome nothing real or durable can exist except war.

Roman Catholicism is being surely driven to take up that position which fifteen hundred years ago perishing heathendom occupied with regard to ambitious Christendom. It is the religion of the uneducated. . . . So long as Rome could dispose of the secular arm in her service, and the night of ignorance beshrouded the world, her mastery was easy. No intelligence was required to burn dissidents. The conflict in which we are now engaged in Germany derives the desperation of its character only from the fact that the State has too long favored and furthered the aggressions of the church. . . . The Liberals over-estimate the strength of their adversary. In the end, this battle must become a battle of intelligence; and upon that territory the Jesuits, ghostly as well as worldly, with all their dogmas and the miracles of the saints to boot, cannot but quickly come to grief.

Let Roman Catholicism look which way it will, it can claim as its own no great man of learning, no great poet or painter. Its most distinguished theologians have fallen away from it; the absolute contradiction in which, sillily enough, it has set itself against modern discovery and natural science, presses it hardly even upon its own special field—theology. No man of learning can approach the Bible now-a-days in the naive manner with which the book was wont to be interpreted at the beginning of this century. . . . The sorties of Ultramontane journals and orators against the professors of theology are well-known; but how much is wanting ere one of the partisans of Infallibility shall equal or surpass Dollinger in erudition! When they throw dirt at an artist like Kaulbach they truly manifest a vulgar vigor; but they cannot set up against him a painter of equal eminence. There were once a Catholic erudition, a Catholic poetry, a Catholic school of painting and music; but they exist no longer. The last blossoms on the life-tree of Catholicism were Manzoni, Chateaubriand, and De Maistre.—Berlin National Zeitung.