Insight on the News

Rome​—A Missionary Field?

● Among world shortages is one affecting the churches​—a shortage of ministers and priests. A recently published Vatican report shows that in 1973 only 3,009 new priests were ordained world wide, while in that same year 4,025 priests died.

Rome itself is particularly hard hit. The Italian newspaper “Il Mondo” recently reported that, in that city of three million people, only six new priests were ordained in 1971. The newspaper warns that, if the trend continues, Rome could be a “missionary field” in another quarter century.

There are, of course, many thousands of priests in Rome, but most are occupied with office work or activity in the Vatican. So, “Il Mondo” says the Church has had to bring in foreign priests to care for regular parish activity. Three fifths of Rome’s churches are now assigned to such ‘emergency priests’ drawn from Spain, England, Germany, India and various African lands. Fifteen churches in Rome now have parish priests or assistant parish priests who are Chinese.

Strange situations, indeed, appear on the world stage today. Bible prophecy, however, gives discernment as to how they fit into an overall pattern. The problems now troubling the world’s religions are but forerunners of a coming devastation, prophetically pictured as the destruction of “Babylon the Great,” the world empire of all false religion.​—Rev. 17:1, 16.

Disease or Personality Problem?

● In Russia alcoholism is a serious problem. The official publication “Literaturnaya Rossiya” recently urged that it be confronted directly as a “disease,” not just a ‘hangover from Czarist times.’

Labeling alcoholism as a “disease” is popular elsewhere, approved even by Alcoholics Anonymous and the American Medical Association. Such designation supposedly frees the alcoholic from considerable shame and causes others to show greater sympathy. In the United States, it lets organizations treating alcoholics obtain federal funds​—allocated for disease, not personality problems. Not all doctors, however, go along with labeling alcoholism a “disease.”

In his newspaper column, Dr. Theodore R. Van Dellen agrees that anyone drinking in excess and damaging his liver, brain or heart is indeed “sick.” “However,” he says, “somewhere along the line, habit, personality, character, and responsibility enter.”

Similarly, Dr. David M. Gimlett, writing in the “American Medical News,” warns that, in calling alcoholism a disease, “one runs the real risk of implying to patients and the treating personnel that the individual has no responsibility for his condition and that therefore assuming individual responsibility is not a necessary part of the ‘treatment.’”

In the first century, a doctor named Luke quoted Christ Jesus as saying: “Pay attention to yourselves that your hearts never become weighed down with overeating and heavy drinking and anxieties of life, and suddenly that day [of Jehovah’s judgment] be instantly upon you as a snare.” (Luke 21:34, 35) Yes, the heart is the key to the problem, and where there is a true heart determination alcoholism can be overcome.

Courage for Principle

● In one East African country, a principal newspaper ran a front-page article relating that many of Jehovah’s witnesses were leaving tobacco farm employment, on account of their religious beliefs. A government official was quoted as saying that this was “apparently a deliberate attempt to cause dislocation in the [national] economy.”

A few days later, under the heading “Courage to stand by their principles,” the newspaper carried a letter from a person not associated with Jehovah’s witnesses in any respect. This reader pointed out that, after revelations linking tobacco with cancer, one internationally known digest magazine cut all tobacco advertisements. Yet no one questioned this as being a matter of honest principle. In conclusion, the reader said of Jehovah’s witnesses: “There are so few people who would be ready to stand by an inconvenient principle (and pulling up stakes and looking for a new home with new employment must be a fraction inconvenient) that those who have the courage to do so deserve some credit even though it may be so inconvenient to ourselves.”