The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1933, Page 52

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52 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

Later on the child must be confirmed, and this
ceremony also demands payment. When the young
man desires to marry, he must needs pay again;
besides, he must confess to the priest before the cere-
mony is performed. If there happens to.be any
blood relationship between the contracting parties,
he must pay again, and heavily, in order to remove
this impediment. It is only a question of paper
dispensation, or rather a question of money. When
a Catholic comes to die, if the family wishes the
priest to go to the funeral, besides being given a car-
riage in which to ride, he must be paid a good fee.
If the man has confessed his sins and has been
absolved; if he has been properly anointed with oil
and has died even while hearing long prayers; if he
has a holy candle in his dying hand and a crucifix
at his lips, certainly such a good Catholic should

Selling Statues of Saints.

go straight to heaven. But such is not the case.
The soul goes to purgatory, where the only dif-
ference from hell is that the latter is eternal, while
the former is only temporary. There is no way
whereby any Catholic (no matter how saintly he
may have been) may escape this terrible place of
torment. All go there, even the most holy Popes.
And the worst of it is that no one knows when the
poor soul will get out. I remember reading a notice
of a Mass being said for the soul of a man who had
been dead forty years; and last year, in the city of
Rio de Janeiro, Mass was said for the repose of the
soul of Pope PiusIX! [He died 1878, fifty-five
years ago!]

“So complete is the lack of real religious feeling
among the Brazilians that Dr. Julio Maria, the most
celebrated of our priests of the present day, declared
in the cathedral of Rio in an address that the Bra-
zilian people are really atheistic people. Note well

that he did not say the cultured classes nor the
aristocracy, he did not say the middle classes, but
he said the people. In the face of the social results
of a practically atheistic people, Julio Maria said
further: ‘In Brazil everything is great except man.’

“What is the cause of such spiritual and moral
decadence of the Brazilian people? The cause is
found in the Roman clergy, who, besides being cove-
tous and poorly prepared intellectually, are gen-
erally immoral in character, given over to dissolute-
ness and licentiousness, practised even in broad
daylight. They are cclibates by solemn vow, but
live notoriously as if they had never made such
a vow. The scandals of immoral life on the part of
the clergy are very frequently registered and com-
mented upon by the daily press and the illustrated
weeklies and reviews.

“The priestly class has fallen so low
in public estimation that Brazilian young
men very rarely indeed embrace this as
a career. With such a priesthood, how
would it be possible for society to pro-
gress morally and spiritually? In any
land the greatest handicap to religious
progress is the lowering of standards of
the religious leaders. This is especially
true when, in addition to failure in set-
ting a good example, they fail to teach
the sanctifying doctrine of Christ and
do not give the people the Word of God.

“In Brazil the people not only are
practically without religion, but the re-
ligion they claim to possess they do not
understand. Ask any one in Brazil why
he is a Catholic, and his reply will usually be,
“Because I was born in that religion,’ or, ‘Because
it is the religion of my fathers.” The Roman Cath-
olie Church in Brazil, as a rule, has no schools;
the clergy, with rare exceptions, never even teach
the catechism to the children of their parishes. The
least known of all the subjects in Brazil is that of
religion.

“The majority of the people are indifferent
members of the Catholic Church. A cultured
minority is frankly infidel, another minority is
devoutly Catholic, and one and a half per cent. of
the population is Protestant.

“Thank God, through the instrumentality of
evangelical teachers from North America and
Europe, the light begins to shine in darkness! The
Gospel in its purity is being proclaimed, and the
power of the Holy Spirit begins to fulfil these words
of hope: “The people that sat in darkness have seen