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Show HE THANKED GOD DAILY FOR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH "Among the cabin passengers we have nine physicians phy-sicians and surgeons, six Protestant ministers and two nriests and one representative of the bench." writes Rev. C. E. Byrne, aboard an ocean 'liner bound for Gibraltar, to Church Progress of St. Louis. "The Protestant ministers are a more liberal lib-eral type than one usually meets. A couple of days atro I had a conversation with one of them, a Methodist minister from Brooklyn, about the Holy Father's encylical on modernism. He was of the opinion that the Pope's pronouncement was timelv and much needed by the whole Christian body. He told me. too a strange utterance and though from a Protestant ministers lips that he thanked God daily for the Catholic church. "When I asked his reasons for such unwonted gratitude, he told me it was because he realized fullv that without the Catholic church life in America would be impossible and. erovernment of a free people impossible; the Catholic church was doing a work no single Protestant church, nor all combined, could do for morality and order and Christian truth and life. And this power to control con-trol and direct, he-said, was not in the pulpit, but had its stronghold in the confessional. He migHit have added, if he knew more, that it dwelt, too. UDon our altar, whither power of the confessional leads." |