# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1924_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24 Proceedings of the twenty-ninth convention

no one, not even the Pope, that by his method all have been united into an inner and outward union. The Pope himself admits that not everyone who outwardly places himself under the sovereignty of the Pope is thereby also inwardly united with the Catholic Church. He admits that there are also in the Catholic Church "rotten and dead members." (Complete Catechism of the Catholic Church by J. O. E. De Harbe, S. J., p. 147.) The Roman Catholic Church admits that teachers in its midst have erred and led into false doctrine. (P. 141.) According to their own admissions, therefore, the Papists have not succeeded and will not succeed in bringing all those who profess their doctrine into living fellowship with Christ, indeed not even into complete agreement in doctrine. And we know how true that is. But can they not at least bring Christians together outwardly? No; that too they have not accomplished, to unite all confessors of Christ outwardly. There has never been a time in which all who confessed Christ acknowledged the sovereignty and authority of the Pope and submitted to it. In the first Christian Church there was no Pope, and as soon as the Roman bishops claimed authority over the whole Church, there have always been people who refused to acknowledge such a claim. The Greek Church, the Waldensians, the Hussites and the Protestants, together with many thousands in the Roman Catholic Church itself, have never accepted the Pope as supreme and final judge on earth, and when the Pope in difficult cases sought to enforce his authority, how many times has he had to learn that people who live outwardly in his church are not subject to him from the heart! To unite the Christian Church even only outwardly, that he has never accomplished in 1500 years.

The Pope's plan has been tried without success for centuries. And how many thousands has he slaughtered, burned, thrown into prison, driven out of their homeland and persecuted in order to keep them all in the papacy! But all his efforts were in vain. Sensible people should learn from this that the Pope, who has tried so long and so zealously and yet has not accomplished it, should learn his lesson and no longer make himself ridiculous with his offer to unite the Church. The Roman Catholic Church claims to be the mother of Christians, but it strongly reminds us of "the old woman that lived in a shoe; she had so many children she did not know what to do." [Printed in English.]

How impossible it is for the Pope to unite the Church, Luther clearly shows in the Smalcald Articles when he writes: "And I assume that the Pope were willing to give up the claim that he is not supreme *jure divino* or by God's command, but that, in order that the unity of Christians against the factions and heresy might be the better preserved, one must have a head to whom all the others would hold; such a head would then be elected by men, and [it] would be in human choice and power to change and depose the same head, as the Council at Constance more or less did with the popes, deposing three and electing the fourth; I assume now, I say, that the Pope and the See of Rome were willing to give up this and accept it (which is nevertheless impossible; for he would have to have his whole government and estate overturned and destroyed, with all his rights and books; in sum, he cannot do it): even then Christendom would be helped nothing thereby, and many more factions would arise