Covenanter Witness Vol. 53 - Rparchives.org

places."Church ind State ConventionAn Address given in Constitution Hall, Washington, D. C.January 21, 1954by Emmett McLoughlin"We wrestle not against flesh and blood, butagainst principalities, against powers, against therulers of the darkness in this world, against spiritualwickedness in high Eph. 6:10, 12.It is not unusual for people to change their religious affiliations. It is not unusual for ministersof Protestant denominations to give up the ministryand become farmers, orbricklayers, or salesmen.But it is considered very unusual for Roman Catholic priests to leave the priesthood. One-third of theclass with which I was ordained have deserted thehierarchy. I know ten priests who have quit from St.Mary's Church in Phoenix where I lived for fourteenyears. I personally know approximately one hundredex-Roman Catholic priests. The number of priestsquitting the priesthood is kept as secret as possible.According to the best estimates I have been ableto find, at least 30 per cent of all Roman priestsleave Rome. There are 45,000 priests in the UnitedStates. If my experience holds true, more than 10,000of them will leave the Catholic priesthood.Most ex-priests, because of fear of persecution,fear of their own families and fear of starvation, slipinto large cities and deliberately become lost andanonymous in an attempt to start their lives anew.You hear only vague rumors of them or if theyappear in a Protestant pulpit they are denouncedby local Catholic clergy and laity as being either fakepriests or liars.No one can accuse me of being a fake Romanpriest. I was a priest in Phoenix, Arizona, from1934 to 1948. 1 heard the confessions of thousands ofPhoenix Catholics. I baptized hundreds of them andI buried a great many of them. I cannot be accusedof being a liar because the experiences that led to mybreak with Rome took place openly in Phoenix. Thestory was in the newspapers and on the radio andthe correspondence and documents involved are in asafety deposit box in the Valley National Bank.I do not wish to rantingly denounce RomanCatholicism. I wish only very briefly to tell how Iwas indoctrinated in a Catholic seminary, how Ibroke with the Catholic church and its priesthood;what I found when I got out of it ; what the Catholicchurch did to me in the process and what warningthat might give you as a danger to your freedomand that of the America we all love.IIFree Americans such as you are, have no conception of the indoctrination, the walling in, themental inbreeding that takes place in the training ofa Catholic priest.150The courses last twelve years. I began in St. An-thony Seminary in Santa Barbara, California, in1922, and finished when I was sent to Phoenix in1934.Upon a boy's entrance to a seminary there begins twelve years of the most thorough and effectiveintellectual indoctrination that the world has everknown.It begins gently, with a blending of the legitimate pleasures of boyhood, the stimulus of competition in studies and the pageantry of the forms ofan ancient religion unseen in an ordinary parishchurch. It ends twelve years later with a rigidity ofmental barriers, of intellectual processes,of medieval superstitions and religious concepts as archaic asthose of the Buddhist monks upon the isolated, frozen mountains of Tibet.Subtly we were indoctrinated in Catholicism tothe exclusion of all other thinking. Attendance atmass was daily and compulsory. So were communityeven inmorning and evening prayers. All textbooks,high school courses, were written by Catholic authors. No daily papers were permitted nor were non-Catholic magazines.Radios for the use of Junior Seminarians wereforbidden. The priests, and all the teachers were permitted a radio in their supervised recreation hall. Wewere not permitted to enter that hall. We were allowed to hear Notre Dame play U.S.C. byspeaker placed in the window and beamed to us outmeans of aside. Of course, on the morning of such games weall prayed at mass that God would vindicate theFaith through the victory of Notre Dame.During these years of the seclusion from American life the indoctrination in the "spirit" of theCatholic church becomes so intense that I felt that Ialone was a normal Christian, privileged to commune with God, that the American way of life wasa pagan, sinful thing, a rebirth of the Roman Empireand destined to the same disgraceful doom in theashes of future history. I came to believe that theAmerican government is to be tolerated thoughwrong; tolerated because it gives unlimited freedomto the Catholic church ; wrong because it gives freedom to other churches. I came to believe that theideal form of government is the one in which Iwas living in my seclusion of spirit, the day whenthe Papacy made kings and the power to governcame from God to the king through His "representative"the Pope. My boyhood concept of civics, of therights of man to the processes of law and of government through the consent of the governed fadedaway under the constant repetition of the teachingsof Thomas Aquinas and the moral theologians. TheConstitution of America and the laws of its statesdimmed into the trivialities in comparison with theall powerful Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catho-COVENANTER WITNESS