In 1944, after completing 25 years of priesthood and literary apostolate at the service of the Catholic Church, Professor Rohden handed over to the head of the ecclesiastical authority in Brazil a document dismissing his functions due to intense and constant slander he suffered - some quite aggressive - on the part of the local and foreign clergy, and especially the prohibition of some of his books to the public which served only to divulge the mystics and ethics of the Gospel of Jesus, and his teachings and not to the Gospel of the clergy, because Rohden “was calling white what was white, and black what was black, a dangerous thing amid a shadowy and tinted religious society.”
The text below shows part of the criticism that Rohden openly made to segments of the Roman clergy, having published his discontentment and ideas in the two volumes of his autobiography in 1962.
“At the time of Jesus' pilgrimage through the lands of Palestine, he encountered only one class of mortal enemies: the ritualists of the synagogue, who did not rest until they saw him suspended on the cross, excommunicating the most religious man known to humanity!... The parable of the Good Samaritan is the most vehement condemnation of this ritual plenitude and spiritual emptiness of the members of Jewish clergy. The Samaritan, a vile heretic and excommunicated by the “saints” of the synagogue and canonized by Jesus as the authentic kind of truly religious man, for he was profoundly ethical and spiritual, though nothing ecclesiastical in the opinion of the priests and Levites of the church of Israel, so much so that Jesus proposes to be this Samaritan a model to be imitated, inciting everyone with his well-known phrase: “Go and do the same!”
External ritualism, such as the execution and exact fulfilment of certain practices, dogmas, reverences, the obedience of rules, observances, postures, etc., when taken in isolation as a religion hardens and numbs the ethical, spiritual consciousness, making man inaccessible to the real spirit of Truth. It is generally easier to convert a crude materialist than a refined follower of ritualism: the first is uncultivated and empty ground. The second is a poorly constructed and contaminated building. It must be demolished before the spiritual structure of the realm of Truth begins.
If the Roman clergy had the humility and the sincerity of comprehending and accepting that the real force of Christianity is not in certain liturgical practices which it has introduced into the church over the centuries, but in the complete assimilation of Christ's spirit as it shines in the Gospel, certainly, the ethically impotent Catholicism of our day would once again be the powerful Catholicity that was in the first centuries. But between the weakness of Roman Catholicism and the force of Christian Catholicity, there is a huge abyss. To build a bridge over this abyss, the Roman hierarchy must, first of all, abandon its political and diplomatic tendencies and engage with the proper ethical and spiritual interests of its followers; and then replacing the theology of its priests with the Gospel of Christ, since the regenerative force for the individual and society is in the word of God and not in the speculations of men.
With the confession of an error begins the truth.
But this humble sincerity does not exist in the ecclesiastical hierarchy as such. However, it exists in certain individuals who, despite the theological framework, are guided by the spirit of the Gospel. Instead of recognizing its error - and thereby weakening its political prestige - the church excommunicates all those who dare to point out how far it has deviated from Catholicity.”
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