To all sincere Roman Catholic priests, who in the emotional self-immolation of their lives into the priesthood, have become as truly needless human sacrifices as the victims of Baal, Moloch, or Tetzeatlipoca-that God may give them the light to find the truth, and that truth itself may set them free.  

                   CRIME AND IMMORALITY

                                        IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Introduction

 All organized religions, both ancient and modern, as they spread their wares before mankind, have like giant modem industries boasted of their most important product.  It is morality among men.

They may have other products with which they sometimes become unduly concerned.  Churchmen boast of their vast educational systems, guiding both the sophisticated and the aborigines.  They train doctors and nurses to hold up the healing hands of the Savior.  They build civilizations for their people, like the Mormons.  They move, an too timidly, to try to lower irreligious racial barriers.  They proudly recall teaching the Indians to plant grain, orchards and vineyards and to breed vast herds of cattle, as did the Franciscans of California.  They visit the poor in the slums, and comfort the dying and bury the dead.

But the most important product of any church or religion is morality.  It is to work ever to achieve an almost impossible goal-that man be made but a little lower than the angels.  It is to remind man continually of the Ten Commandments.  It is to distill the crassness of human and animal nature into the observance of the greatest commandment-the love of God and the love of one's neighbor as oneself.

Religion means peace among nations, justice among individuals, and charity toward those down on their luck.  It means the good, living example of a dedicated clergy.  It means no killing, no assault, no stealing, and no lying; in short, the observance of the first laws of society.

The Roman Catholic Church claims to be better than all others-Protestant, Jewish or Oriental.  It teaches its members that it alone is the divine religion, that Christ alone was the Messiah, the incarnation of the deity; that He established only the organized Church and that through the unbroken succession of its supreme pontiffs it has its roots in the Godhead itself and draws from that source the infallible truth and unfailing grace that alone can sanctify the human race.

The Roman Church holds out the Mass as the renewal and application of the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ to all its members.  It channels His grace to them through its seven sacraments.  It teaches its children that God's true Church is "one, Catholic, apostolic and holy."

The Baltimore catechism explains it this way: "The Catholic Church is holy because it was founded by Jesus Christ who is all-holy and because it teaches, according to the will of Christ, holy doctrine, and provided the means of leading a holy life, thereby giving holy members to every age."

Every day the Church reminds men of its most successful members-the saints.  It has canonized them and guarantees that they have fully absorbed and used its most important products-morality and sanctity-and are now enjoying the beatific vision in heaven.  The saints are the models for living Catholics to follow.

The Roman Church has never pointed to a Protestant as a "canonized" example of morality and sanctity for Catholics.

Children in Catholic schools and students in seminaries are given glowing accounts of the beneficial and moralizing effect of Catholic teaching and clerical example upon the Roman Empire , culminatincy in the success of Christian life in the medieval "age of faith." The Reformation, they are taught, was the triumph of evil.  Degeneration continued for centuries, with the sinful growth of Protestant countries, the rise of agnostic "intellectualism," the persecution of God's chosen under the French Revolution, and the dismemberment of the Papal States .  The one true Church lay prostrate.  In many parts of the world its schools were closed, its churches confiscated and its clergy driven underground like the martyrs of the early centuries.  No longer could it adequately display to men and offer for sale its most precious commodities-morality and holiness.

This is what Catholic students are taught.

The Church glosses over the fact that the hamstringing of its priestly salesmen during and after the Protestant Reformation did not at all touch the bulk of its prospects, the many millions in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and the rest of Latin America, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, eastern Europe and French Canada.  In all those lands the Catholic hierarchy and clergy remained free through the centuries not only to teach its rituals but, more important, to give the example of its "divine" way of life and, unhindered by Protestant opposition or irritation, to teach its people the better life and the path to heaven.  Any stray Protestants were considered heretics and effectively punished and silenced.

In these countries, for hundreds and in some instances more than a thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church alone was the moral teacher of the millions, and the Roman Catholic Church alone must bear the full responsibility before God, both in the past and in this, our time, for the good or bad morals of the people.

It is certainly true that in the Protestant countries of the world, Roman Catholicism dipped to low esteem in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries.  But in our century, except in the Communist nations, it has enjoyed a rebirth of freedom, prestige and power.

This is particularly true in the United States .

In the rich soil of freedom of thought and worship prepared and preserved by Protestantism and Freemasonry (not through the Catholic inspiration of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, as parochial school children are taught), the poor discredited Church of Rome grew luxuriantly.

The founding fathers' precautionary measures for effective separation of church and state protected the Catholic Church from governmental interference.  No ruler picked its bishops or controlled its priests, as in many of the countries of the Old World .  No laws governed its schools.  No inspectors censored its sermons.

From a handful of despised, ignorant immigrants it has grown within a few generations to the wealthiest, the most numerous, the most powerful church in America .

The Roman Catholic Church has become respectable.

The President of the United States is one of its members.  So, too, are the majority leaders of both houses of the Congress of the United States .  So, too, is the largest single bloc of the members of the Congress.

The head of all law enforcement in the nation, the Attorney General, is a Catholic, as are a large number of members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The State Department is like one of its own subservient Vatican "congregations." Its priests are the chiefs of chaplains of the great Army, Navy and Air Force of the United States .

 Its members honeycomb governmental offices from Washington to state capitols, county courthouses, and city halls.  Its Communion Breakfasts deliberately advertise its control of very many police and fire departments, like Hitler used to parade his military strength to scare the people.  

Rome claims the greatest church membership in the world-or in history-over 500,000,000.  In the United States it frightens thoughtful Protestants with its boast of 40,000,000 and is generally conceded to have at least 20,000,000, unless one subtracts small children and those who have left it.  In America , it has 53,000 priests and nearly 200,000 nuns.  The gifts of American Catholics, plutocrats, gangsters and paupers, have built the largest private training school system on earth, indoctrinating between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 American children, born heirs to an unrealized freedom of worship, in the peculiar Catholic code of behavior and morals.  

As if this great machine were not sufficient to mold its members and secure its future, it is gradually and almost imperceptibly taking over America 's public school system.  Its Newman Clubs preserve the faith and even convert Protestants on non-Catholic campuses.  Catholic teachers infiltrate elementary and secondary schools alike.  Catholic board members, like a creeping blight, take over more and more public school systems and further the cause by adopting favorable textbooks or by eliminating those that are hostile.

A third of the country’s nurses are indoctrinated in Catholic hospitals, built largely with tax funds fraudulently exacted from all of us, and they later go into other hospitals, universities and health departments to teach the Catholic prohibitions of birth control, abortion and sterilization.

Its hierarchical council of cardinals and bishops freely and authoritatively condemn the nation's laws, schools and morals while arrogantly demanding special privileges for themselves and their Church.

Through inheritances, collections and tax exemptions it waxes wealthy beyond belief.  Its property holdings run into the billions of dollars.

Out of deference to its laws, or fear of reprisals, practically every restaurant and school cafeteria serves fish on Friday.

The Roman Church in America has the most favorable press in the world.  Newspapers devote far more than proportionate space to publicize its charitable and religious events and ventures.  The great national magazines usually portray it as the leader of culture and humanity.  Behind this benign, philanthropic facade is poised the stinging whip of Catholic censorship over all American means of communication-the press, books, motion Pictures, radio and television.  It reinforces this bastion of favorable presentation of itself with its own press, both diocesan and national, carrying its side of all questions into millions of homes.

Years ago it was said that the two greatest world organizations were the Standard Oil Company and the Catholic Church, Standard Oil is no longer in the race.  Catholicism, especially in America , now has the most unique opportunity in all history to achieve its goal and fulfill the purpose for which it claims to have been founded.

 Its most important product-its reason for existence is morality the molding of lives that are not only good but better than others, with a greater assurance than that of other religions that its members will be far less sinful, much better emotionally adjusted throughout life and thus more certain of eternal happiness in heaven.

The purpose of this book is to show that the Roman Catholic Church in its most important work is a failure.

Among its members crime and immorality are greater than among the unchurched or the members of other churches.  Whatever else the Roman Catholic Church may be able to do "in Heaven, on earth and under the earth," it cannot, it has not, and it does not make the majority of its members better and holier.

In the face of the proven facts, an unbiased seeker after truth might be forced to conclude that the Roman Catholic Church was not divinely established.  He might reason that morality and the better life are not its most important product after all.  He might become rather cynical and wonder if Roman Catholicism be really a religion at all, or whether it is perhaps some less noble enterprise cleverly disguised under the masquerade of religion.

After all, "By their fruits you will know them."

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