# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

support, protect and defend. On what is this duty based? On the obligation of civil society to profess religion. For since nations come from the Creator, they owe him as nations reverence, love and obedience, just as individuals do. What, then, is the chief duty of the heads of state? Their chief duty is to practice the Catholic religion themselves and, as long as they are in power, to protect and defend it. Has the state the right and the duty to banish (proscribe) separation and heresy? Yes, it has the right and the duty to do so, both for the good of the state and of the individual believers; for religious unity is the foundation of social unity. May the state separate itself from the Church? No, for it may not renounce the supreme rule of Christ. What is the doctrine called that the state has neither the right nor the duty to unite with the Church and protect it? This doctrine is called Liberalism. It is based on the fact that modern human society rests on freedom of conscience, of worship, freedom of speech and of the press. Why must Liberalism be condemned? 1. Because it denies the subordination of the state to the Church; 2. because it confounds liberty and right; 3. because it despises the social sovereignty of Christ and rejects the benefits derived from it.'" (*Der Friedensbote* [The Messenger of Peace], 6 December 1914.) In the light of these pronouncements we must understand and correct all the fine talk about the harmlessness of the Roman Church in political respects, as it is served up to us again and again. Of all Popes, especially also of the recent Popes, there holds, *mutatis mutandis*, what the late Dr. Gräbner wrote of Leo XIII: "Let us now sum up everything we have heard from Leo XIII's public and official pronouncements: how he pilloried the Reformation, as to its doctrine as heresy, as to its consequences as the source of dreadful abominations; reviled our marriage, the foundation of our whole social life, as concubinage; condemned our most precious rights and liberties as contrary to God and reason and their defense as unlawful, whereas he made their combating a sacred duty for his adherents also in our country; and when we consider that he said and did all this so that it should hold and have effect for all times even beyond his death, and that in doing so he understood how to pose as friend and refuge of the peoples of the globe, then we must say this, quite apart from all else that we have to say about the papacy: The old man who died on 20 July 1903 in the Vatican palace at Rome was the bitterest, most dangerous and most harmful enemy that we Protestant Christians and we American Protestants and citizens have had on earth in the last twenty-five years." (*Protestantischer Nachruf*, p. 22.)