South America Still Needy

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 26, 1914

South America Still Needy

REV. E. F. COOK, secretary of the Foreign Department of the General Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, recently made an extensive tour of the Brazilian conferences of that church and reports his experiences through the Nashville Christian Advocate. In this report are given a number of interviews with both native-born and foreign residents of Brazil in reference to religious and moral conditions in that country. From that report we reprint the following excerpt:—

Next I give the questions and answers in an interview with a Brazilian professor in one of the oldest and most successful educational institutions in the republic.

Is the Roman Catholic Church answering the moral and spiritual needs of the people?

The Catholic Church has signally failed to establish moral ideals, hence the people are morally adrift. The church has pitifully failed to supply the spiritual needs of the people. If it failed to establish moral ideals, it could hardly be expected to present spiritual truths and maintain spiritual standards. The people are without spiritual food.

Does the church encourage moral reforms and the progress of the nation?

No, no. The church is reactionary and obstructive.

Are the priests as morally impure as they are reputed to be?

The priests have not been misrepresented in this regard. As a class I fear they are morally corrupt. Now and then you meet a good man among them, but it is the exception.

After speaking of his conversations with scores of men in all walks of life, representing various nationalities, faiths, and no faith, the secretary says:—

The unvarying testimony is that the Roman Catholic Church in South America is unable to meet the moral and spiritual needs of the people; that it impedes rather than promotes the moral and intellectual uplift of the people; that the priests are immoral and unfit to lead in spiritual things; that men of Brazil are indifferent toward religion, and are deserting the Church of Rome with contempt for her priests and scorn for her institutions.

And this is the field that Protestants have been urged so long to leave alone because it has been so completely dominated by a Christian church, and because so large a percentage of the people are known as Christians. The Neglected Continent is still getting but a small portion of the evangelical attention which its condition is really calling for, and no one feels this more than the missionaries who are now in the field and in immediate contact with the conditions.