# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

14 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

the dreadful poison penetrated almost all provinces; people from all classes and callings succumbed to the infection, and the belief soon took firm hold in many hearts that in that realm the cause of religion was endangered to the utmost, and hardly any remedy was left to heal the sickness." Leo XIII also fully maintained this and asserted again and again that the Pope is the head of Christendom. He asserts that by virtue of his office the supreme governing power belongs to the Roman Pope: "Now it is, as explained above, by divine right the business of the Church, and within it of the Pope, to give instructions as to what is incumbent on us in both respects, namely what we are to believe and what we are to do. Therefore the judgment as to what divine revelation contains, what agrees with its content and what contradicts it, must also be subject to the authority of the Pope; he must be entitled to declare what is honorable and what is immoral, what we must do and leave undone in order to be saved." (*Sapientiae christianae*.) Exactly so it stands with Leo's successor, Pope Pius X, whom people have often praised as a man of peace, who it is said meant it sincerely with the Protestants. He too was a bitter enemy of the Gospel, of the work of God, the Reformation. In his well-known Borromeo Encyclical of 19 May 1910 he writes of this work thus: "Under these circumstances proud and refractory men appeared, enemies of the cross of Christ, men of earthly mind, whose god was their belly. These naturally did not set about the improvement of morals, but the denial of dogmas; they increased the disorder and gave free rein for themselves and others to licentiousness, or at least, in contempt of the authoritative leadership of the Church and in the train of the passions of degenerate princes and peoples, undermined with a certain tyranny the doctrine, constitution and discipline of the Church. Then they imitated those godless men against whom the threat is directed: 'Woe to you who call the good evil and the evil good,' and they called the rebellious confusion and the perversity of faith and morals reform, and themselves reformers. In truth, however, they were seducers, and in that by quarrels and wars they exhausted the strength of Europe, they prepared the revolt and the apostasy of modern times, in which the three kinds of struggle, formerly separate, and out of which the Church always came forth victorious, have been united in one: the bloody struggles of the first age, then the inner plague of the heresies, and finally, under the name of evangelical freedom, that corruption of morals and perversity of discipline which perhaps the Middle Ages had not reached." (*Lehre und Wehre* [Doctrine and Defense, a Missouri Synod theological journal] 56, p. 320.) We see, then, that the Roman Pope has become no better, but is still today the same bitter and dangerous opponent