Roots of Romanism

This article was written by Wayne Jackson and is reprinted here from the December, 1977 edition of The Christian Courier. The paper was published by the East Main Street Church of Christ in Stockton, California and was edited by Jackson.

In his celebrated debate with Bishop John B. Purcell in January of 1837, Alexander Campbell affirmed that, "The Roman Catholic Institution, sometimes the 'Holy, Apostolic, Catholic Church,' is not now nor was she ever catholic, apostolic, or holy; but is a sect in the fair import of that word, older than any other sect now existing, not the 'Mother and Mistress of all Churches,' but an apostasy from the only true, holy apostolic and catholic church of Christ." (Campbell-Purcell Debate, p. vii.) It is certainly true that the Catholic Church ultimately resulted from a "falling away" that occurred within the primitive church (cf. II Thessalonians 2:3; I Timothy 4:1). There is a vivid contrast between the church of Christ as represented in the New Testament and the Roman Church of today. Surely, every sincere and studious Catholic must have wondered at times concerning the many elements characteristic of the Roman system which are totally unknown in the apostolic writings.

Catholicism is a curious mixture of three major backgrounds: first, as already indicated, it is a departure from Christianity. Secondly, it has incorporated into its system some features of Judaism. And thirdly, a very large portion of the movement has roots deeply embedded in the heathen religions of ancient Greece, Rome and the Far East. Oddly enough, the paganistic background of the Roman Catholic church is not even denied by their leading authorities. Cardinal Caesar Baronius, a church historian wrote: "It is allowable for the Church to transfer to pious uses those ceremonies which the pagans employed impiously to superstitious worship, after they had been purified by consecration; for the devil is more mortified to see those things returned to the service of Jesus Christ, which were instituted for his own." (Quoted by John Rowe, The History of Apostasies, pp. 6, 7.)

Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of Catholicism's most influential theologians, declared that the apostles of Christ, "and they alone possessed, venerated and protected a Divine Message as both sacred and sanctifying; and, in the collision and conflict of opinions, in ancient times or modern, it was that Message and not any vague or antagonistic teaching that was to succeed in purifying, assimilating, transmuting and taking into itself the many colored beliefs, forms of worship, codes of duty, schools of thought through which it was ever moving." (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, pp. 356, 357.)

Again Newman shockingly admits: "The use of temples and these dedicated to particular saints and ornamented on occasions with branches of trees; incense, lamps and candles; votive offerings on recovery from illness, holy water, asylums, holy days and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring of marriage, turning to the East, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant and the Kyrie Eleison are all of pagan origin and sanctified by their adoption into the Church." (Ibid, p. 373.)

In the popular volume A Catholic Dictionary, which has the Imprimatur of the Church, Attwater writes: "Nothing but error and sin being foreign to Catholicism, the Church has ever sought to 'baptize' rather than to destroy the customs, institutions and native life of those to whom her missionaries are sent. Thus wrote Pope St. Gregory the Great to Augustine: 'The temples of the idols in that nation [of the English] ought not to be destroyed but let the idols that are in them be cast down; let water be blessed and sprinkled in the said temples and let alters be built and relics placed therein. For if those temples be well built, it is meet that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God. And because they are used to slay many oxen in that worship, some solemnity must be provided in exchange...For without doubt it is impossible to cut off everything at once from their rude natures'." (Donald Attwater, A Catholic Dictionary, p. 363.) Thus, by her own admission, the Roman Catholic Church is baptized paganism; a rude heathenism with a "Christian" veneer. This is stated only in the interest of truth.

The noted historian John Mosheim has summed up the matter very well. "The rites and institutions, by which the Greeks, Romans and other nations had formerly testified their religious veneration for fictitious deities, were now [in the 4th century] adopted, with some slight alterations by Christian bishops, and employed in the service of the true God. We have already mentioned the reasons alleged for this imitation, so proper to disgust all who have a just sense of the native beauty of genuine Christianity. These fervent heralds of the gospel, whose zeal out run their candour and ingenuity, imagined that the nations would receive Christianity with more facility, when they saw the rites and ceremonies to which they were accustomed, adopted in the church and the same worship paid to Christ and His martyrs which they had formerly offered to their idol deities. Hence it happened, that in these times the religion of the Greeks and Romans differed very little in it external appearance from that of the Christians. They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual. Gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, gold and silver vases, and many such circumstances of pageantry were equally to be seen in the heathen temples and the Christian churches." (Ecclesiastical History, I, p. 105.)