“I will venture to make some specific predictions…The alliance between neo-evangelicals and Romanists in the Culture Wars will…result in the election of our second Romanist president.”
- John W. Robbins, “Bleating Wolves – The Meaning of Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” 1998.
In April 1927, The Atlantic ran a story titled “An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith.” It’s a remarkable letter, the sort of thing one would never see today from any publication of national note. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a supposedly Christian publication running such a piece in 2020.
The letter is remarkable in that it openly questions whether Al Smith, a leading contender for, and eventual winner of, the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination would be able to support and defend the Constitution of the United States in light of his Roman Catholic faith.
The open letter, written by attorney Charles C. Marshall, raised a number of important points, asking how Smith could reconcile the political and economic pronouncements of the Roman Church-State (RCS) with America’s Constitution.
Time does not permit me to go through all of Marshall’s arguments, but the following two paragraphs are representative.
It is indeed true that a loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic could and would discharge his oath of office with absolute fidelity to his moral standards. As to that in general, and as to you in particular, your fellow citizens entertain no doubt. But those moral standards differ essentially from the moral standards of all men not Roman Catholics. They are derived from the basic political doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, asserted against repeated challenges for fifteen hundred years, that God has divided all power over men between the secular State and that Church. Thus Pope Leo XIII, in 1885, in his encyclical letter on The Christian Constitution of States, says: ‘The Almighty has appointed the charge of the human race, between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things.’
The deduction is inevitable that, as all power over human affairs not given to the State by God, is given by God to the Roman Catholic Church, no other churches or religious or ethical societies have in theory any direct power from God and are without direct divine sanction, and therefore without natural right to function on the same basis as the Roman Catholic Church in the religious and moral affairs of the State. The result is that that Church, if true to her basic political doctrine, is hopelessly committed to that intolerance that has disfigured so much of her history. This is frankly admitted by Roman Catholic authorities.
