p. 16 | THE PAULIST FATHERS by T.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 8, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 10.

THE PAULIST FATHERS.

By T.

The Paulist Fathers, an order of the Catholic Church in this country, have been causing considerable discussion in Catholic circles because of certain views that they have been advancing in regard to casting off many of the old notions of the past, and bringing themselves into harmony with the spirit of intellectual freedom that characterizes this age. The matter has called forth a letter from the pope to the Catholics of America. There can be no mistaking the import of what Leo has to say. He holds strenuously to the ancient Catholic doctrine that the Catholic Church should do all of a man's religious thinking for him, and of course the logic of that is that his political and social and every other form of thought should be guided by the Papal Church.

Such a doctrine as this might still pass in countries filled with superstition, and holding an idolatrous reverence and dreadful fear of priests, but in free America it should be promptly rejected. Catholics should see this clearly. They should recognize that it is nothing short of turning the world back into the grossest mental and spiritual darkness to allow our thinking to be circumscribed. And while Catholics ought to see it, Protestants are blind if they do not see it and recognize it as one of the strong evidences that Rome still clings to her ancient notions of ruling the minds of men.

The despotic principles of the Papacy are wrong. And when the pope asks men to throw aside their mental faculties so far that they are allowed to think only in certain prescribed grooves it should be an eye-opener. Jesus Christ gives freedom. And the highest type and the only true type of freedom is freedom to think, and freedom to express those thoughts as one sees fit. Will we follow Christ, or will we follow mere men? T.