Who Really Instigated It?

Was all of this really instigated by the clergy? John Lord O’Brian denied it. But the facts were well-known by those who lived at that time. On March 22, 1919, Appeal to Reason, a newspaper published at Girard, Kansas, protested: “Followers of Pastor Russell, Pursued by Malice of ‘Orthodox’ Clergy, Were Convicted and Jailed Without Bail, Though They Made Every Effort That Was Possible to Comply with the Provisions of Espionage Law. . . . We declare that, regardless of whether or not the Espionage Act was technically constitutional or ethically justifiable, these followers of Pastor Russell were wrongfully convicted under its provisions. An open-minded study of the evidence will speedily convince any one that these men not only had no intention of violating the law, but that they did not violate it.”

Years later, in the book Preachers Present Arms, Dr. Ray Abrams observed: “It is significant that so many clergymen took an aggressive part in trying to get rid of the Russellites [as the Bible Students were derogatorily labeled]. Long-lived religious quarrels and hatreds, which did not receive any consideration in the courts in time of peace, now found their way into the courtroom under the spell of war-time hysteria.” He also stated: “An analysis of the whole case leads to the conclusion that the churches and the clergy were originally behind the movement to stamp out the Russellites.”—Pp. 183-5.

However, the end of the war did not bring an end to persecution of the Bible Students. It simply opened a new era of it.

Priests Put Pressure on the Police

With the war past, other issues were stirred up by the clergy in order to stop, if at all possible, the activity of the Bible Students. In Catholic Bavaria and other parts of Germany, numerous arrests were instigated in the 1920’s under peddling laws. But when the cases came into the appeal courts, the judges usually sided with the Bible Students. Finally, after the courts had been deluged with thousands of such cases, the Ministry of the Interior issued a circular in 1930 to all police officials telling them to stop initiating legal action against the Bible Students under the peddling laws. Thus, for a short time, pressure from this source subsided, and Jehovah’s Witnesses carried on their activity on an extraordinary scale in the German field.

The clergy also exercised powerful influence in Romania during those years. They succeeded in getting decrees published banning the literature and activity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But the priests were afraid that the people still might read the literature that they already had and as a result would learn about the unscriptural teachings and fraudulent claims of the church. To prevent this, priests actually went with the gendarmes from house to house looking for any literature that had been distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses. They would even ask unsuspecting little children whether their parents had accepted such literature. If any was found, the people were threatened with beating and prison if they ever accepted more. In some villages the priest was also the mayor and the justice of the peace, and there was very little justice for anyone who would not do what the priest said.

The record that some American officials made in doing the will of the clergy during this era is no better. Following the visit of Catholic Bishop O’Hara to La Grange, Georgia, for example, the mayor and the city attorney had scores of Jehovah’s Witnesses arrested in 1936. During their incarceration, they were made to sleep alongside a manure pile on mattresses spattered by cow urine, were fed wormy food, and were forced to labor on road gangs.

In Poland too, the Catholic clergy used every means they could devise to hinder the work of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They incited the people to violence, burned the literature of Jehovah’s Witnesses publicly, denounced them as Communists, and haled them into court on the charge that their literature was “sacrilegious.” Not all officials, however, were willing to do their bidding. The state attorney of the court of appeal of Posen (Poznan), for one, refused to prosecute one of Jehovah’s Witnesses whom the clergy had denounced on the charge that he had referred to the Catholic clergy as “Satan’s organization.” The state attorney himself pointed out that the immoral spirit that spread throughout Christendom from the papal court of Alexander VI (1492-1503 C.E.) was, indeed, the spirit of a satanic organization. And when the clergy charged one of Jehovah’s Witnesses with blasphemy against God by reason of distributing Watch Tower literature, the state attorney of the court of appeal in Thorn (Toruń) demanded acquittal, saying: ‘The Witnesses of Jehovah take exactly the same stand as did the first Christians. Misrepresented and persecuted, they stand for the highest ideals in a corrupt and falling world organization.’

Canadian government archives reveal that it was in compliance with a letter from the palace of Catholic Cardinal Villeneuve, of Quebec, to the minister of justice, Ernest Lapointe, that Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned in Canada in 1940. Other government officials thereafter called for a full explanation of the reasons for that action, but Lapointe’s replies were not at all satisfying to many members of the Canadian Parliament.

On the other side of the globe, there was similar scheming by the clergy. The Australian government archives contain a letter from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney to Attorney General W. M. Hughes urging that Jehovah’s Witnesses be declared illegal. That letter was written on August 20, 1940, just five months before a ban was imposed. After reviewing the alleged basis for the ban, Mr. Justice Williams of the Australian High Court later said that it had “the effect of making the advocacy of the principles and doctrines of the Christian religion unlawful and every church service held by believers in the birth of Christ an unlawful assembly.” On June 14, 1943, the Court ruled that the ban was not consistent with Australian law.

In Switzerland a Catholic newspaper demanded that the authorities seize literature of the Witnesses that the church viewed as offensive. They threatened that if this was not done, they would take the law into their own hands. And in many parts of the world, that is exactly what they did!

[Box on page 655]

The Clergy Show Their Feelings

Reactions of religious periodicals to the sentencing of J. F. Rutherford and his associates in 1918 are noteworthy:

◆ “The Christian Register”: “What the Government here strikes at with deadly directness is the assumption that religious ideas, however crazy and pernicious, may be propagated with impunity. It is an old fallacy, and hitherto we have been entirely too careless about it. . . . It looks like the end of Russellism.”

◆ “The Western Recorder,” a Baptist publication, said: “It is a matter of small surprise that the head of this cantankerous cult should be incarcerated in one of the retreats for recalcitrants. . . . The really perplexing problem in this connection is whether the defendants should have been sent to an insane asylum or a penitentiary.”

◆ “The Fortnightly Review” drew attention to the comment in the New York “Evening Post,” which said: “We trust that teachers of religion everywhere will take notice of this judge’s opinion that teaching any religion save that which is absolutely in accord with statute laws is a grave crime which is intensified if, being a minister of the gospel, you should still happen to be sincere.”

◆ “The Continent” disparagingly styled the defendants as “followers of the late ‘Pastor’ Russell” and distorted their beliefs by saying that they contended “that all but sinners should be exempted from fighting the German kaiser.” It claimed that according to the attorney general in Washington, “the Italian government sometime ago complained to the United States that Rutherford and his associates . . . had circulated in the Italian armies a quantity of antiwar propaganda.”

◆ A week later “The Christian Century” published most of the above item verbatim, showing that they were in full agreement.

◆ The Catholic magazine “Truth” briefly reported the sentence imposed and then expressed the feelings of its editors, saying: “The literature of this association fairly reeks with virulent attacks on the Catholic Church and her priesthood.” Endeavoring to pin the “sedition” label on any who might publicly disagree with the Catholic Church, it added: “It is becoming more and more evident that the spirit of intolerance is closely allied to that of sedition.”

◆ Dr. Ray Abrams, in his book “Preachers Present Arms,” observed: “When the news of the twenty-year sentences reached the editors of the religious press, practically every one of these publications, great and small, rejoiced over the event. I have been unable to discover any words of sympathy in any of the orthodox religious journals.”