The Holy Faith of the Romanists

And if it is Catholic doctrine that it is better that all this ruin, being only material or secular, should take place than that you should tell the wife you were detained at the office when you were giving a little dinner to a stenographer, what ruin is not the Church prepared to sanction, or to cooperate in producing, rather than that tens of millions of folk should commit, or should persist in the mortal sin of apostasy with all its sequels? Every apology for the Pope's action in Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, Abyssinia, Brazil, etc., springs from that root. It is Catholic doctrine from Augustine's City of God onward.