Roman Catholicism and the Reformation
By Editor
Just recently an encyclical letter by Pope Pius X recalled again the battles of the Reformation and the attitude of the Papacy toward that movement and the Reformers. It was objected to by certain Protestant members of the German Reichstag. Concerning that the "Western Watchman," in its issue of July 7, says: "She [the Roman Catholic Church] has never changed her opinion of the Reformers. She said four hundred years ago that they were bad, unprincipled, and immoral men; she proscribed their lives as vicious and their doctrines as of hell. She denounced Luther and his partners in heresy as the corrupt disseminators of a corrupt doctrine, and the methods they employed to overthrow the Catholic religion as blasphemous and satanic. She said so four hundred years ago; she has not changed her opinion since. The late encyclical was a mild reaffirmation of the encyclicals of all the popes since the Council of Trent. "Many years ago we stated that the greatest iconoclasm in history would be the demolition of all the statues raised to the heroes of Protestantism and their consignment to the dump heap of history; and we declared that the event was nearer than people suspected. . . . No one now regards Cranmer and Ridley and the other English Reformers as anything but blasphemous scoundrels, for whom hanging and burning were too good. . . . "Protestants need not expect that the judgments of Catholics upon Reformers and their work are going to undergo any mitigation. Time has only added confirmation and irrefutability to the original estimates. The process of religious peace will be on the lines of truth and loyalty to the church's heroic past. . . . The promoters of heresy are children of perdition. She has always maintained this as a theory; she is prepared to demonstrate its truth in the lives of her detractors. It has taken a long time; but the original Protestant sin has found its authors out. Get ready the ropes; the bloated authors of the Reformation will soon be toppled from their place of pride and cast in the dunghill of the world's scorn." It is well to know how Catholics look upon Protestants and Protestantism, and here we have it from one of their ablest exponents and defenders.