# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

10 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

We are not saying anything here that would be new to a Lutheran. We have long known that this is how it stands, but it is good and salutary for us too that precisely at our jubilee we recall it vividly.

If we are to learn to recognize and judge the papacy and the Roman Church rightly in their true nature, we must not consult the admirers of this institution among the Protestants or its defenders, nor the occasional utterances of this or that Catholic theologian, even if they should hold ever so high a position in the Roman Church and be bishops, archbishops or cardinals; rather we must go to the sources, to the public confessions of this Church, to which it still adheres today, and to the pronouncements of its teachers, who, as it claims, are infallible, the Popes themselves. There we come to know the papacy and the Roman Church, hear what it teaches, how it stands toward the Gospel, toward God's Word, what prerogatives it demands, etc. — The chief confession of the Roman Church is still today the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent. By this Council in particular, by its decrees, the Roman Church established itself as a sect, solemnly rejected the pure Gospel, the pure Word of God, which had been so mightily testified to it through Luther and his co-workers, and laid under the curse all who preach and confess it. The decrees of the Council of Trent are, so to speak, the final answer which the Roman Church has given to its God and Savior, who had called it too in grace to himself through the Gospel, its decisive and valid No against the divine testimony of the Gospel. Precisely through this Council the Roman Church hardened and obdurated itself in its wickedness against Christ and his Gospel. And this confession still has full validity in that Church today; it still stands in force. Not one letter, not one tittle of it has the Roman Church ever revoked or taken back; it holds fast to all the doctrinal determinations, to all the anathemas. And this confession is not treated in the Roman Church as a relic from olden times, as a venerable historical entity which one lets stand out of piety but about which nobody cares; rather, according to this confession the Church teaches the children in its schools, according to it preaching is done from all pulpits, according to it ministry is performed in all congregations, to it its priests and teachers are finally pledged, and on these decrees and canons rests the *Catechismus Romanus*, the standard textbook of the Roman Church. "On these decrees," as Pastor Tschackert rightly says in the "Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche" [Real Encyclopedia for Protestant Theology and Church] (Vol. 20, p. 106), "the whole of modern Catholicism rests; they are in fact valid in the whole Roman Catholic world, even where they have not been formally promulgated." What, then, do the decrees of the Council of Trent determine? First of all they destroy the