# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1861_S344
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

344 The Romanizing Tendency of the Volksblatt für Stadt und Land.

connection to the Catholic Church. (!) — — We are now struggling ... once
more for living outward forms of constitution, of life, of worship, of
which one piece after another has been lost; but we shall win them back
whole and rightly (this is our firm conviction) only when we are again
permitted to be absorbed into the historic (Catholic) Church.'" —
So further says Herr Prof. Leo, in the same place, concerning the
(supposed) true relation of the two confessions: "The true state of
affairs is this: that Luther was not born, baptized, and raised in an
untrue, false church, but in a right one which, however, like so many
another state (sic!), had the misfortune of not being carried and guided
properly by its human bearers and leaders." — And further below: "Every
connection to the old (Roman) Church, every tie to the mother church, has
still built us up, because it necessarily reminds us of our heritage and
leads us back to it; rivalry with her in the right sense, the sense that
is in the spirit of Christ, has still always brought us honor — yes! we
need her so necessarily that we could not exist at all without her — that
if she were wiped from the face of the earth tomorrow with a sponge, we
would not, for a quarter century, be preserved from the fate of either
sinking into the mire of Antichristendom or being blown away like dust by
the winds of philosophy, except insofar as the state police used us as
topsoil and manured us with their dung — and against a being on whose
continuance we depend as much as on our daily bread, as the ripening
fruit depends on the stem by which it hangs on the branch, a Protestant
clergyman dares (indeed?) to cry out against her as against
Antichristendom!" — Further: "However definitely we know ourselves
separated from Rome as it now is, we also know that she is the other half
of the true Church of Christ, the other leg without which we could not
stand." — — "The head of a mother is always sacrosanctum; under all
circumstances a remnant of maternal dignity remains to her — even in the
madhouse or the penitentiary a mother remains a mother to her son — and
who will deny that the Roman Church is our mother, in whose womb we were
carried, at whose breasts we were nourished?" — To an opponent Leo
replies, in the same place, thus: "He plainly speaks of quite another
Roman Catholic Church than the one I know.... He speaks of a Roman
Catholic Church in which the authority of the Pope counts for more than
the authority of Christ, whereas I know only one in which the sole office
of the Pope's authority is to serve the light of Christ. That she orders
this service differently than we do is, of course, understood — that is
why we are Protestants — but she has, after all, no other intention, and
one heeds the Pope only for Christ's sake. He speaks of a Roman Catholic
Church in which people prostrate themselves before images instead of
before the one Physician; whereas I know only one in which, in all the
saints, only the cross of Christ is venerated — what they bore in courage
and patience for the salvation of Christians and the glorification of the
Church of Christ. He speaks