ON many occasions, as our readers know, says the Evangelical Christian, we had to point out some of the errors of Romanism, and to call attention to the desperate efforts of the Church of Rome to make herself supreme in the world and suppress every form of religious belief but her own. The strange thing is that Protestants for the most part seem to be utterly blind to what is going on. One can only hope and pray that they may awake before it is too late. The trouble is that Protestants are deceived by the sham pretensions of Rome and whenever some platitudes are uttered by the Pope or another Papal dignitary some Protestants seem to feel it necessary to applaud their words as heaven-sent revelations. On November 14th, 1942, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church issued a “Statement on Victory and Peace.” It is, as so many of these Romanist utterances are, a high social and moral Document. That is, if one does not look too closely at it, or examine it too critically. It speaks about “human freedom” and “religious liberty,” and commands the high principles expressed by the President of the United States. There is one paper in the United States, however, that was not deceived by these Romanist pretensions and that is The Independent Board Bulletin in which we were glad to read the following:—”Earnestly the statement calls for sacrifice and for prayers to achieve these ends. It denounces secularism, exploitation, and totalitarianism. It purports to defend liberties hardly won, to speak for childhood, for motherhood, for minorities, for racial tolerance, and for a free world. But in this statement these high principles break down. The ‘freedom’ Rome desires is but that in which she has always believed, the freedom to keep all other faiths out of any land where she thinks she has the ascendancy, coupled with a real freedom where she is not yet strong enough to demand the kind of ‘freedom’ in which she really believes. In this widely publicised statement, after professing world-wide principles, these bishops proceed, in the name of understanding and brotherhood, to ask for a complete closing of every door to religious freedom in Latin America, which Rome has already kept idolatrous, pagan, and ignorant, for four hundred years. As to that portion of the world their bishops plead not for liberty but for a perpetual slavery. ‘They say these countries are bound to us by the closest bonds of religion. They are not merely our neighbours. They are our brothers professing the same faith. Every effort made to rob them of their ‘Catholic’ religion, or to ridicule it, or to offer them a substitute for it, is deeply resented by the peoples of these countries and by American ‘Catholics.’ These efforts prove to be a disturbing factor in our international relations. The traditions, the spirit, the background, the culture of these countries are Catholic. We express the hope that the mistakes of the past which were offensive to the dignity of our Southern brothers, their culture, and their religion, will not continue.’ Had the principles which really underlie the bishops’ plea for a Latin America closed to the true gospel, been applied by our American Republic to Roman Catholicism there would not now be enough Romanist bishops in the United States to make their voices heard in a plea of this kind. Their plea is not what it purports to be. It is based upon principles intolerant, grasping, partisan, and even pagan in nature. It subtly asks for freedom for Rome and for suppression for Protestants. That is not a plea against a slave world but for the continued enslavement of lands where Rome now rules. We have had to ask in recent years, ‘Shall the modernist win?’ This statement asking for a Romanist victory and a peace of spiritual death makes it necessary now to ask again ‘Shall the Romanist win?'”
We pass on these words, adds the Evangelical Christian (Toronto) to our American and Canadian readers with our own word of commendation and warning. The freedom Rome wants for herself she will never, never grant to others. Get hold of that fact. Write it on the tables of your heart. Keep it always before your eyes, lest having won this war despite the opposition of Rome we lose the peace to her machinations—Evangelical Christian (Toronto).