# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Roman Church.                                    21

Only the Gospel can help here. But even this is abused. It is written from Italy that there is presently so strong a demand for the Holy Scripture that even in states where it is forbidden, certain booksellers could be named who carry on a profitable smuggling trade in it and grow rich, selling it at a very high price. Yet one should not build great hopes on the zeal with which the Bible is now being read and studied in Italy. That zeal not infrequently turns to coldness when salvation through the cross of Christ is preached. For the Italians, the Bible is merely a tool of earthly passions, and they search in it only for arguments against Roman Catholicism and weapons against the papacy, without thereby accepting the Gospel. — How thoroughly the whole land, despite the church's dominion, is undermined by the spirit of revolution needs no mention at all. — How very differently things stand in the Tyrol, that land of German plain-heartedness! Only one must not demand more than a closed-off population is capable of rendering in Roman religiosity — a religiosity that maintains its sole rule only by the violent exclusion of the Gospel, in former times as in new. That, on top of this, the Jesuits are now coming to power in Innsbruck and its theological faculty now to be established, and that philology is being taught from Latin church fathers such as Augustine's De Civitate Dei instead of from the Roman classics, we cannot regard as a hopeful sign. — The foremost citadel of the Roman church, however, is Belgium, the land that already again numbers as many monasteries as square miles. But how sharply the parties here stand opposed to one another has been shown by the debates in the chamber — how large a part of the people is hostile to the clergy — and has been shown by the recent widespread riots of the mob, in which the monasteries were stormed and their inmates mistreated. — Strenuous are the efforts of the clergy in France, both against the successful attempts at evangelization and against the irreligiousness of the masses. But what means are used! The fraud of the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Salette, where a Mademoiselle de la Merliere played the part of the Virgin, was not too crude to be used, in order to boast of a new miracle, to gain a new site of pilgrimage, and to give a new boost to the veneration of Mary among the people. Not even the lottery is immoral enough to keep it from being pressed increasingly into the service of religion. Religious lotteries, by which one can win all sorts of spiritual treasures — even souls out of purgatory — are coming more and more into fashion in France. Into fashion indeed! Did not the Jesuit father Lesevrt some time ago address a circular letter to the ladies of the Faubourg St. Germain, in which he commends to their hearts, for the building of a new church, his lottery, the ticket at 100 francs, and, because for setting the prizes otherwise the means