(Editor's Note: Brother Russell is a capable elder in the Lafayette Heights church in Indianapolis. He often has written for the VOICE OF FREEDOM. We welcome this article from him for TRUTH MAGAZINE.)

In this mid-century era of compromise, dissembling diplomacy, boycott, blackmail and bribery, is the truth becoming obsolescent and outmoded? Is truth being pushed into the background in favor of keeping the peace among our Citizens, brethren and the world--at any price? It has seemed to me that for considerable time our relations with other individuals, groups and nations, have reached such an impasse that there are few facets of our lives about which the truth can be told without attempts being made to silence it. Are we afraid that the truth will disturb our peaceful co-existence with others and with ourselves?

In this wholesale and deliberate evasion of the truth, it appears that we are burying our heads in the sand ostrich-like and assuming a position similar to a person who suspects he has a dreaded cancer and refuses to see his doctor, thinking that by ignoring the truth, somehow the malignancy will go away. By such reasoning he is discarding all of his chances for a cure, because we must recognize and accept the truth before a cure can be affected.

If one will take the time to take a good look at the morality of our nation as a whole, he is forced to the conclusion that from the many signs of decadence, our citizenry has a malignancy which is disintegrating our virtues and gnawing at the very vitals of our society. With our national crime rate increasing by leaps and bounds and polite society embracing corrupt practices which only a few decades ago were unheard of, there can be no doubt of a moral descent. Yet no honest and constructive diagnosis of the cause is possible on a national scale, because of so many sacred cows and taboos. There are so many truths which must be left unsaid because of the craven fear that the truth will be an affront to someone, or some group guilty of a corrupting activity which is contributing to our degradation.

This unwillingness to face reality and concealment of the truth, I am convinced is caused mainly by the fact that many racial, nationa1, religious, labor, socio-religious groups and corporations have been organized, and have become pressure groups with selfish motives for keeping certain facts about their activities and products from the public. Perhaps some may have been formed to promote admirable principles, or to protect rights which they thought were denied them, but upon finding the tremendous power they could wield, too often ethics were abandoned, and pressure was applied to obtain privileges, or to suppress facts about themselves which would lose them money, power and prestige if all the truth were known. Because of special privileges gained and attendant discriminations, still others formed groups as a defensive measure, until our nation has become a multiplicity of segregated groups, all struggling for favoritisms, which bring power and wealth.

Organizations may be necessary in our pluralistic society, but when crime syndicate tactics are used as they are, and they reach the point where truth is smothered under an avalanche of clever semantics, equivocations and deceitful publicity, regardless of the corruption concealed, it is not only destroying our freedom of speech, but our spoon-feeding on diluted reports from which the truth has been screened by various pressure groups, is keeping the people in the dark about the extent of our degeneracy. Hence no plans can be made for a cure.

Of all these special interest groups, because of their longer existence and their international aspects, which have made them more successful in silencing the truth, two organizations have emerged as the principal threats to our freedoms and which are the most implacable enemies of truth.

One, of course is the communist party, which by threatening a nuclear war, which it wants no more than we do, has been able to blackmail our government into ostracising every citizen who dares publish anything which offends the Kremlin Such suppression of communist intentions and methods precludes any preparedness and plans which could cope with the threat of the atheists.

While communism poses a real threat to our nation, it has had an able teacher, from which it has copied many of its tactics, in the Roman Catholic Church, which is able to hide behind her sacerdotal robes of immunity from adverse criticism. The papacy, which has brought shame and disgrace to the name "Christian" indulges in many ignominious I acts which would bring a blush of shame to an atheist. Hence it not only threatens our freedoms by silencing the truth, but by its decadent influence is dragging our entire nation down to its own level. The Roman Catholic (usually Irish or Italian) control of our big city political machines is as notorious as it is corrupt, and this iniquitous blight is creeping outward in ever-widening circles to engulf our nation in an abyss of moral stagnation. How can we expect to maintain a high moral standard when a purportedly divine institution stoops to promoting almost every conceivable crime if enough of the proceed, find their way into the church's coffers? When it competes with professional gamblers, liquor distillers and tavern keepers, condones drunken orgies in church festivals and breeds more immorality by its elastic laws which excuse evil, than "Gambler's and Alcohol Anonymous" can rehabilitate, and gospel preachers can possibly overcome, the only way is down-into spiritual oblivion!

When this church alleges to be divine, but makes it clear that it has allowed the dollar sign and lust for power to obscure all its divinity, it furnishes the sensual devotee the respectability he is seeking, by putting a religious label on his immoral acts and encourages him to continue them. Furthermore, when it operates its illegal and lucrative enterprises with impunity, it lends an atmosphere of legality and honor to acts, which have been defined illegal because of their degenerating influence. Satan himself could not have prescribed a better promotional scheme for his own cause. How appropriate the axiom: "Hypocrites do the devil's drudgery in the Lord's livery."

This masquerade of the truth has infiltrated our public school textbooks until one would have to conclude that all popes, prelates, priests and nuns of the past were all lily-white angelic creatures filled with an unselfish love for humanity. However Roman Catholic and authentic history prove that such were the exception and not the rule, and that this church has always been made up of every type of degenerate, and has written many of the bloodiest pages of history; that the Inquisition, the Crusades and the various massacres it incited were such scenes of sadistic carnage that they could have been stimulated only by an emissary of Satan. The silence is deafening regarding the multiplied thousands of Protestants who were slaughtered simply because they wanted to worship God in their own way and refused to bow their knees to the popes and their images. Nor is there a whisper about the common practices of priests and prelates living in concubinage, incest, drunkenness and simony, and about the hundreds of would-be popes who fought and murdered each other so that they could ascend to the "Chair of Peter."

Editors and commentators over our nation are so terrified by the legal blackmail (boycott) of this church that, with few exceptions, they refuse to print the facts about the drunken escapes and amorous exploits, as well as defections, so common among the clergy. Nor is there a word about the fact that drunkenness is so widespread among Catholics that there is, near Detroit, a "Guest House" with a long waiting list, and over the nation are other counterparts dedicated to the "cure" of priestly alcoholics only. These editors and commentators are hastening the destruction of our freedom of the press by their cowardice, and at the same time are furnishing a podium from which this church is painting a pietistic backdrop for its profitable traffic in souls. Thus they are helping create the image of an ornate facade, which has all the characteristics of the "whited sepultures, full of dead men's bones" which the Lord so thoroughly condemned.

It seems that this evil influence and craven fear to defend the truth has extended into every corner of our nation and is being witnessed within the Lord's church itself. Are we going to allow error and immorality to win by default?

If an epidemic of a contagious disease threatened the public interest, and the evidence of its origin pointed conclusively to a certain race or nation, we can be certain that the truth about it would be publicized so that our citizens could avoid it. Moral corruption could avoid it. Moral corruption is equally communicable and it is moving in on us at a rapid rate; so when its origin is so obviously along religious lines, should not the people be informed, so that they can escape this pollution?

If the evidences which prove that the ratio of Catholics in our prisons runs as high as five times that which their ration in our population warrants, with about the same ration in our mental institutions, is not sufficient, our officials should take a good look at the world picture of crime and immorality. Columbia, the most thoroughly Catholic nation of the Americas, in 1958, had 11,058 murders--3000 more than the United States, which has 13 times the population. The Philippines, with its 400 years of Catholic training had 6,173 murders in 1959, and Peru, also predominately Catholic, has as high as an 8070 illegitimate birth rate.

The combined population of Protestant Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland far exceeds these countries, yet they had only 283 murders. Can there be any doubt, but that corruption is in direct proportion to Roman Catholic population?

When did all this have its inception? It began in the second century when Scriptural truths began to be withheld from the people, and man's opinions substituted for truth. Once began, it could not have been perpetuated unless the truth about the fruits of false doctrines had been continually silenced, because the people are aware that "by their fruits ye shall know them." It is common knowledge that if the truth were known about the extent of this corruption, the people, Catholic and Protestant alike, would disgorge it as a poison, which nauseates them. Which will it be? The truth -- or crime and immorality? We need to realize that by remaining silent we are all silent partners in the suppression of the truth and in the ascendancy of crime and corruption.

Truth Magazine VII: 3, pp. 4-5, 23
December 1962