Clericalism & Vilification

U.S. Protestantism is seething. Recently, charges of too much politicking, too much publicity, too much pressuring of press and radio have been openly leveled at the Church of Rome, not only in the Pope-hating Southern Bible Belt but by top-drawer Protestant clerics and laymen as well.

Last week the president of Princeton's conservative Theological Seminary, Dr. John A. Mackay (rhymes with decry) raised his Presbyterian voice:

"Two things fill me with concern regarding present trends in this country within our great sister communion, the Roman Catholic Church. The first is its increasing commitment to a Roman, as distinguished from the traditionally independent, policy of American Catholicism. Such a trend has inevitably produced in history the phenomenon called clericalism, which has been the bane of Latin lands and from which we in the United States have been providentially spared. Clericalism is the pursuit of power, especially political power, by a religious hierarchy, carried on by secular methods and for purposes of social domination.

"My second concern goes deeper. It is the practice, lately initiated in the official Catholic press in this country, of vilifying, in a most unworthy way, the Protestant Reformation and its great leaders, particularly Martin Luther and John Calvin. I plead with the distinguished scholars of the Roman Catholic Church in America that they frown upon every journalistic attempt to distort historical truth for ecclesiastical ends."

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