p. 10 | SOUTH AMERICA AND THE PAPACY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 6, 1893

SOUTH AMERICA AND THE PAPACY.

By Rev. George W. Chamberlain, D. D.

BY REV. GEORGE W. CHAMBERLAIN, D. D., BRAZIL.

MEMBERS of the congress of all American nations visiting in the "City of Brotherly Love" said to the gentleman who led them in worship at Girard College: "There is not a man of us who does not know that the greatest foe of liberty of our nations is Rome," not Rome of Victor Immanuel, but Rome of "his holiness." "The Pope and the Council" has been allowed to run out of print in its English edition, which is only one of the many symptoms of the blindness which has happened to English-speaking peoples. A Portuguese edition lies before me, translated and edited, with a notable introduction, by a foremost statesman of South America. "Of all emergent questions," he says, "none equals in reach, none exceeds in urgency, the religious. . . . No one ignores that the pontifical church is an organization universal, an ambition universal, a plan universal. . . . The evolutions of her tactics are reproducing themselves in America with the same strategy as in Europe. The features of the Papacy will be always identical with those of to-day, and each time more accented, because on the one hand its spirit, child of a gestation multisecular, incarnated in the most marvelously wise of all centralizations, and chained to the interests of an innumerable caste, can by no man be transformed; and on the other, the galvanic life of this institution, inwardly decomposed by the vices on which it feeds, has its secret in the reactionary audacity which constitutes its type. The Papacy goes its way; . . . it can perish more easily than go back." Availing himself of the book of "Janus," "the most notable product and the most expressive symptom of Christian re-birth of the nineteenth century," "one of those rock books of perennial tempestivity which abide, transmitted from generation to generation," this writer contributes some solid material to the maturation of religious liberty in the South American States. He speaks, not from the religious, but from the political standpoint, when he says: "It may be seen there (in 'Janus') with noonday clearness how from that millennial superposition of vices, abuses, and crimes, . . . from a system of falsification, employed indefatigably upon the Holy Scriptures, upon canonical and patristic collections, upon acts of synods, the liturgy, and the imperial history, arose and was formed that idolatry of pontifical infallibility, which places the whole invincible abysm of the gospel between the Church of Rome and the

Christ. . . . The substantial character of the book ["The Pope and the Council"] is a rigorously historic demonstration of the intimate and exclusively political nature of the Papacy." It is demonstrated that Romanism is not religion but politics, and the most vicious, the most unscrupulous, and the most pestilent of all politics. Sketching rapidly the "incursions of the pontifical primacy in national churches, its usurpations in the bosom of States, and the repeated and peremptory denials of Catholicity to the infallibilist presumptions of the tiara," evidencing "the absolute identity between the idea of infallibility and that of omnipotence in the jurisdiction of heaven and in that of earth," proving "the incompatibility, philosophically and practically irreconcilable, between the syllabus—that abominable symbol of papolatry—and any modern constitution," he ventilates the religious question in all its relations, and indicates the natural and definite solution of the problem.

A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE.

A State free from the dominion of the church and the church free from the Papacy is an aspiration of young South America. For three centuries she held her breath at the bidding of the pope, but her breast is heaving with the breath of the Almighty. It becomes articulate in the language of South American statesmen: "A curia Romana has been at all times a potency only nominally religious, and always intimately, essentially, and indefatigably political. Religion, moral authority, for long centuries has not been for the Papacy anything else than the occasion, the means, or the pretext for interference in the temporal administration of the State."

"The heresy of domination is the greatest of heresies against the cross, because it transforms into a word of discord for human societies the word of Him who, to bring them peace, instituted the universal city in the higher world."

"Rome has not renounced the principle that the pope is the lord over crowned heads, and has power to release subjects from their oaths of fidelity." "Gregory VII. left in his doctrines to Papal Rome a tradition which has not ceased until now to be the soul of the Roman Church." "If the holy see received from God the power to pronounce sentence in spiritual things, why not in temporal things also? The episcopate is as much superior to royalty as gold is superior to lead; well did Constantine know it when, among bishops, he took the last place."

"The prince (or in modern States the government, parliaments, and cabinets) who incurs in heresy loses all authority. Subjects can, and ought when they can, rebel against him. This theory is a point of faith admitted by all theologians worthy of note in Rome. . . . It is to be noted that Rome has not repudiated these principles. She has left them in reserve, because she lacks coercitive resources."

"Papal centralization, . . . the continual invasion of the temporal authority by the church, gave us Protestantism. The 'heresy' dominant in the sixteenth century was resistance to the abusive Roman unity. . . . A counterblast was needed. The Jesuits appeared. Instituted in a century full of vital energy, in a century of intellectual, political, and religious resurrection, they consubstantiated in themselves in an unheard-of degree all the principles hostile to these three vivifying forces of the world. Rome breathed her soul into the company. The order is not the evil genius of the Papacy, but its delectable offspring. A rule of evangelical wisdom, proverbial everywhere, teaches us to know the tree by its fruit. Wherever Jesuitism has taken root, no one can find any difference between its fruits and those of the soil where the Papacy reigns directly, absolutely, visibly."

"Cast your eyes on the states of the church before the fall of the temporal power—sad evidence of the sterilized virtues of the theocracy. There the observer encounters the most authentic and instructive example of the absorption of the individual conscience by absolutism exercised in the name of heaven. The social state, wherever their principles have been filtered in during generations, was never anything but the lowest."

"There is Paraguay—Paraguay, the prime work of the Jesuits, their boast, the miracle of their beneficent propaganda, the mysterious land of blessing, with which they deluded, in Europe, even sincere and illustrious men like Chateaubriand! Even to this day they describe that as a paradise. 'Paraguay,' says Padre Sabin, 'presented marvels similar to those of the first Christian centuries.' 'In a few years,' says another Jesuit, praising his own order; 'the most savage tribes formed, under their influence, model societies, such as philosophy could never create in the bosom of civilized peoples, the most perfect reproduction of Eden which it has been possible to obtain from our fallen nature.' 'These marvels,' he adds, 'the Catholic apostolate created in the past century in Paraguay, and can yet renew them.' Says the Brazilian author: 'Yet five years of war, in which our armies (the allied forces of Brazil, Argentine, and Uruguay) penetrated the interior of that country, enabled us to judge of the Edenic state idealized and desired by Jesuitism.'"

"Everyone knows what we found there,—a nation of creatures debased below slavery, without law, without rights, without tribunals, without government, without morality, social or domestic, without family, without instruction, without industry, without commerce,—a tribe of fanatics poor to penury, savage even to ferocity. This is Jesuitic Catholicism, which Roman Catholicism boasts of as the most perfect image of heaven on earth, as an ideal superior to all civilized peoples. . . . Behold the prosperity which our Catholic party (political) reserves for their fellow-countrymen."

I have quoted largely from the book, "O Papa e O Concilio," by the eminent writer and patriotic Brazilian senator, Ruy Barboza, that the readers of the Missionary Review of the World may see, not through the eyes of a missionary, but of an enlightened South American statesman, what Papacy has done and is expected to do in this region of the world.—Missionary Review.