ROME'S CHALLENGE

Why Do Protestants Keep Sunday?

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Rome's Challenge: Part 1

Rome's Challenge: Part 2

Rome's Challenge - Printer-Friendly Version

Most Christians assume that Sunday is the biblically approved day of worship. The Roman Catholic Church protests that, indeed, it is not. The Roman Catholic Church itself without any Scriptural authority from God transferred Christian worship from the Biblical Sabbath (Saturday) to Sunday, by the command of the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 AD; and that to try to argue that the change was made in the Bible is both dishonest and a denial of Catholic authority. If Protestantism wants to base its teachings only on the Bible, it should worship on Saturday.

Over one hundred years ago the Catholic Mirror ran a series of articles discussing the right of the Protestant churches to worship on Sunday—exposing their claim that the New Testament taught Sunday keeping to be false. The articles stressed that unless one was willing to accept the authority of the Catholic Church to designate the day of worship, the Christian should observe Satur­day, the true Christian Sabbath, as both the Old and New Testaments teach. Those articles are presented herein their entirety.

(When this series of articles was written in 1893, there were in the United States perhaps no more than 30,000 Church of God Sabbath–keepers and about an equal number of SDAs. Today, there are more than 13 million Christian Sabbath-keepers in the world, about 3 million are SDA. According to the Bible Sabbath Association, there are over 475 Christian Churches of God—large and small—that observe the seventh-day Sabbath, numbering perhaps 300,000 worldwide with the majority in the United States. [CBCG comments added].)

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Photo copyright 1914 by Underwood & Underwood

James Cardinal Gibbons

Archbishop of Baltimore Maryland (1877-1921)

These articles, therefore, although not written by the Cardinal's own hand, appeared under his official sanction, and as the expression of the Papacy to Protestantism, and the demand of the Papacy that Protestants shall render to the Papacy an account of why they keep Sunday and also of how they keep it.

The following matter (excepting the footnotes, the editor's note in brackets beginning on page 25 and ending on page 27, and the two Appendixes) is a verbatim reprint of these editorials, including the title on page 2.

*Notre Dame University has the relevant issues of the Catholic Mirror archived on microfilm.

Web site for the *Archdiocese of Baltimore Maryland, which published the Catholic Mirror.