MUCH has appeared within the past few weeks in Catholic and pro-Catholic journals extolling Rome's Christianizing influence in such lands as Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, and Central and South America. The whole burden of these platitudes is to show the folly of Protestants opening up missions in those countries, and Catholic editors have severely denounced the preparatory arrangements being made by missionary societies to this end. They are stoutly maintaining that inasmuch as these are Catholic countries, Catholics alone should have charge of the rejuvenating work to be carried on there, religiously, socially, educationally, and—we have every reason to presume—politically.
We may query what the need is of a rejuvenating work being carried on there at all, after Rome's four hundred years of "Christianizing influence." Let Rome's own apologists tell us. Father Sherman, a Jesuit, who has recently traveled in Porto Rico, speaks of the Porto Ricans as a "people without religion." Father McHale, who has traveled in Cuba and Porto Rico, says of them, as reported in the Catholic Mirror of Feb. 18, 1899: "The human condition of these islands has been pretty thoroughly studied, and it must be confessed casts a rather dark shadow across the page of history. . . . As to religion, the Cubans are not saints. . . . The church was served by a body of clergy who appeared to them as merely servants of a dominant State, the tyranny and misgovernment of which drove them to rebellion. . . . Their religion appears, indeed, to sit rather lightly upon them. . . . The circumstances, political and otherwise, under which they have lived for centuries, together with climatic influences, appear to have emasculated their religion and reduced it to the merest shadow of a sentiment."
A Catholic chaplain of an American regiment, who returned to San Francisco recently from the Philippines, in a published interview stated that, tho he had gone to the islands prejudiced in favor of the Filipino, he had come to the conclusion that the Spaniards had given them about what they deserved, and, further, that most of the officers of the army were of the same opinion.
And all this after several centuries of "Christianizing influence" by that power which claims to be the depository of all the Christian graces; by that power which regards as an insult the determination of the Protestant denominations to plant missions in those islands.
For four hundred years Rome has been monopolizing the Christian influence among the Porto Ricans, and yet she acknowledges them to be a "people without religion." During all this time, four centuries of teaching, she has taught only a small portion of them to read and write.
For four hundred years Cuba has been under her solitary tutelage, and yet the religion of the Cubans sits upon them lightly; their "human condition casts a rather dark shadow across the page of history;" the circumstances "under which they have lived for centuries . . . have emasculated their religion and reduced it to the merest shadow of a sentiment." Yet who but Rome had charge of those centuries of "circumstances"?
For four hundred years she has been the sole expounder of faith and morals in the Philippine Islands; and yet she has left them in such a barbarous condition that one of Rome's own priests could say the atrocities practised upon them by the Spanish were "about what they deserved."
In the face of all this, however, the Catholic News, in speaking of Protestant criticism of Catholic work in these islands, says, "They must admit, however, that Catholic priests have made Christians out of the natives of these islands." The Protestant can not refrain, then, from asking what kind of Christians they must be to merit the oppression and butchery practised upon them by Spain.
If, after four hundred years of labor among this people, Rome has brought them where they are, what hope have we for their betterment under the continued operation of that medieval system? She has forfeited her right of tutelage on every count; and by the very example she has given us in this thing she proves her work to be but a monstrous counterfeit of the work which Christ assigned to His infant church. She is neither the Gamaliel of the globe nor the legitimate successor to Peter's apostolic commission.
"The isles shall wait for His law." They are still waiting; and it is the business of the Protestant missionary to see that they do not wait in vain.
