By Darryl Eberhart, Editor of ETI & TTT Newsletters
Website: www.toughissues.org // February 22, 2009
A 1-Page Handout // All emphasis is mine unless otherwise stated.
Many Americans would be surprised to learn that one of the greatest haters of civil and religious liberty is the Roman Catholic Church. This ignorance of Roman Catholic hatred of liberty is largely the result of a century-long assault on American history textbooks and encyclopedias, whose pages have been stripped of almost all things “negative to Papal Rome”! Priests and/or their representatives got themselves on textbook selection committees, and told the companies producing history textbooks to remove negative things about the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican, or no sale! (Companies selling encyclopedias in the USA were no doubt told the same thing.) The result was that history textbooks in public schools and colleges were, for the most part, purged of nearly all things negative about Papal Rome’s bloody history and her great hatred of liberty. (Students in Roman Catholic parochial schools in the USA, of course, found little – if anything – in their history textbooks about Papal Rome’s hatred of liberty!) Immediately below are statements made by two popes, an American Roman Catholic archbishop, and two official Roman Catholic publications that reveal Papal Rome’s great hatred of civil and religious liberty:
“The unrestrained freedom of thinking and of openly making known one’s thoughts is NOT inherent in the rights of citizens and is by no means worthy of favor and support.” – Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846; pope: 1831-1846)
“The absurd and erroneous doctrines or ravings in defense of liberty of conscience, are a most pestilential error – a pest, of all others, most to be dreaded in a State.” – Pope Pius IX (1792-1878; pope: 1846-1878; Encyclical Letter; August 15, 1854)
“These false and perverse opinions [of democracy and individual freedom] are so much the more detestable, by as much as they…hinder and banish that salutary influence which the [Ed.: Roman] Catholic Church, by the institution and command of her Divine Author, ought freely to exercise, even to the consummation of the world, not only over individual men, but [over] nations, [over] peoples, and [over] sovereigns.” – Pope Pius IX (1792-1878; pope: 1846-1878; Quanta Cura; Dec. 8, 1864)
“The State has NOT the right to leave every man free to embrace whatever religion he should deem true. …The [Ed.: Roman Catholic] Church has the right to require that the [Ed.: Roman] Catholic religion shall be the religion of the State, to the exclusion of all others. …Cursed be those who assert liberty of conscience and of worship and such that maintain that the [Ed.: Roman Catholic] Church may not employ force.” – Pope Pius IX (1792-1878; pope: 1846-1878; Syllabus Errorum of December 1864)
“NO man has a right to choose his religion. [Ed.: Roman] Catholicism is the most intolerant of creeds. It is intolerance itself. We might as rationally maintain that two and two does not make four as the theory of Religious Liberty. Its impiety is only equaled by its absurdity.” – John Hughes (Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York; 1864)
“…We do NOT accept it [Ed.: i.e., the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America], or hold it to be any government at all… If the American Republic is to be sustained and preserved at all, it must be by the rejection of the principle [Ed.: i.e., religious liberty] of the [Ed.: Protestant] Reformation, and the acceptance of the Catholic principle [Ed.: i.e., religious tyranny; Roman Catholicism as the State religion]…” – Catholic World (August 1871; page 735)
“Fascism is the regime that corresponds most closely to the concepts of the Church of Rome [Ed.: i.e., the Roman Catholic Church].” – Civilta Cattolica (House organ of the Jesuit Order)
