HOW A PREJUDICED MINISTER JOINED THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

New Zealand Tablet, 7 August 1919, Page 39

HOW A PREJUDICED MINISTER JOINED THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Catholic Church -is constantly receiving a steady stream of Protestant ministers into .her fold—men who often are married and who have been trained for nothing else but the ministry, yet who must give up the idea of continuing it because our clergy are celibates. Professor Charles W. Meyers, of San Antonio, Texas, XI.S.A., is one of these converts (says the Brooklyn Tablet of April 26), and has written a pamphletdescribing his experiences. It is regarded as one of the most valuable contributions to Catholic missionary literature in recent years. It is entitled A Minister’s Surrender ; or. How Truth Conquered Prejudice , and is published by Our Sunday Vi Pi tor Press, Huntington, Ind. He was born of Lutheran parents near Louisville, Hy. “My very earliest religious impressions were intensely anti-Catholic. My parents taught me that the Catholic Church was an institution of the devil, and that all Catholic priests were the devil’s agents,” he says. . While born of Lutherans, he was reared in tho Methodist Church, as there was no Lutheran Church around. tie was ordained a Methodist preacher* but his belief became too ‘ liberal" for this fold, so he joined the Ccngregationalists. He held Congregational and Presbyterian pulpits a seeming inconsistency made consistent by the cordial relations between these Churches. He admits that his aversion to Catholicity was intensified “by the bitter anti-Catholic literature that charged the Catholic clergy with all sorts of beastly lust, and with murderous hatred towards all Protestants.” $ His first favorable impression of Catholicity came in a Protestant theological seminary, when he realised that Protestants had only fragmentary and unconvincing explanations of why the books that make up the Bible should be there. Asked about these proofs, his professor said, “Yes. these are all the proofs that Protestants have, but the Catholics claim that the canonicity of the New Testament books was settled by the infallible Councils of the Church.” The convert says: “At once I was impressed with the direct force of this Catholic proof, and felt it to be the only satisfactory one. There came also the associated thought that if the Church, by Divine authority, fixed the limits of the Bible, then she must also be superior -to the Bible. The authority which determined what was Scripture, and what was not Scripture, seemed to me to be the Supreme Divine authority.” The minister, ten years later, came across Father Searle’s Plain Facts for Fair Minds in a hotel readingroom. Its effect on him was “enlightening, chastening, and pacifying.” He says: “I discovered one fact after another about which I had always been grossly misinformed. I found excellence and beauty where I had expected to find defect and deformity. When I laid the book aside, my antagonism to Catholicity was subdued, and my hatred was pacified.” What an argument for Catholic literature ! This book, while not convincing the minister, allayed all his prejudice. He ceased to refer to himself as a “Protestant.” He preferred the “more generous name of non-Catholic.” But he got into dangerous religious mires. He read great quantities of Unitarian literature and delved into higher criticism, so that he was on the verge of paganism. About this time, the great anti-Catholic wave of a few years ago started. The minister determined to investigate the anti-Catholic charges thoroughly. He heard “ex-Priest” Crowley lecture and discovered him “to be a profuse dispenser of gross, unproved assertions about Catholicity.” He also heard the editor of the Menace and found that he “was merely catering to religious prejudice by giving utterance, both in speech and print, to the most outlandish and untruthful statements about the Catholic Church.” One day Mr. Meyers found a piece of Our Sunday Visitor lying

• W ~ ' : 1 L-P “~ r * ;r *- ~rv~sTJ L>;.. in. the dirt. He sent for a copy and got others, at times, being put in touch with interesting ! literature* Father Noll, the editor, sent him >aj number .of books, too. Looking up the Congressional " Record to find but about the alleged bloody Knights of Columbus* oath, he found,, as the bigots charged, that the publication did contain the oath, but for an entirely different reason than they had said. It was there “simply to expose it and condemn it as spurious.... The wily anti-Catholic editor - had purposely deceived his readers by simply telling 'them the half truth that this awful oath was recorded in the Congressional Record . . . and this disgraceful trick is only one out of a number of the'same sort.” - ' : The thing that finally led the minister into the Catholic Church was a deep study of the Reformation. He was particularly struck by finding that it was an out-and-out falsehood of Protestantism that Luther “found” the Bible and gave it to the people. Luther himself never at any time claimed to have made any such accidental discovery of the Bible, but on the other hand, distinctly states that he had been accustomed to reading the Bible from his very childhood. 80 says Mr. Meyers, and he gives the quotation from Luther Tisckrden. Melancthon, Luther’s co-worker, also says that in his youth the Bible was much more extensively read by young men than it was after the Reformation. Protestant scholars of high standing are quoted to the same effect. And so the minister goes on in this memorable little pamphlet, proving how, step by step, he found that the Catholic Church was the exact opposite of the vile thing his good, but mistaken parents had believed her to be, and was the very. Church of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man.