# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

the worship and perfection and have preferred them to the works which God requires and has ordained of everyone in his calling. Now one must not consider that these are minor errors, for they take his honor from Christ and damn souls; therefore one must not let them go unpunished. To these errors are now added two great, dreadful sins: the one, that the Pope wants to defend and maintain such errors with unjust fury and cruel tyranny by force; the other, that he takes the judgment from the Church and will not let such religious matters be judged in the ordinary way; indeed, he wants to be more than all councils and to have the power to tear up and annul everything that has been decided in councils, as the canons sometimes shamelessly state, and the Popes have done this still more shamelessly, as many examples testify. 9. Quaest., 3, the canon says: No one shall judge the highest see; for neither the emperor nor the priests, neither king nor people, judge the judge. Thus the Pope acts on both sides like a tyrant, in that he defends such errors with force and fury and will tolerate no judges. And this second point does more harm than all the fury. For as soon as the right judgment and discernment is taken from the Church, it cannot be possible to check false doctrine or false worship, and many souls must therefore be lost." This fits point for point the papacy of today and the Roman Church, only with the difference that it still lays under the curse the right doctrine and all who confess it. Even today the Pope is the true Antichrist, who holds men in dreadful tyranny over their consciences, shamefully defrauds them of their salvation and leads them with himself to hell. Even today Luther's judgment on the papacy holds: "Even the whole papacy, where it is at its best, does nothing else but torment and kill consciences like a hangman. But to true righteousness it points and leads no one, but makes only hypocrites, as the law also does." (I, 622.) And again: "It is impossible that there should be on earth a worse government, one that brings more souls to destruction than the Pope's; I will say nothing of the flaying of bodily goods. Therefore all that is left is to cry out and pray God against the arch-rogue of all God's enemies, that he come and deliver us from him; we have the one truly guilty. Let him say Amen who is a Christian!" (XV, 1824.) "There stand all his bulls and books, in which he roars like a lion (as the angel in Rev. 12:1 depicts him), that no Christian can be saved unless he is obedient and subject to him in all things, whatever he wills, whatever he says, whatever he does. Which all is nothing else than to say: Though you believe in Christ and have everything in him that is necessary for salvation, yet it is nothing and all in vain unless you hold me for your god and are subject and obedient to me."

In the treatise "Von der Gewalt und Oberkeit des Papſtes" [On the Power and Primacy of the Pope],