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Introduction
The Catholic Church has never denied the role she played in replacing the Sabbath with the day of the Sun. Going through many of their own writings, it is overwhelmingly clear that
the Catholic Church played a major role in the change of the Sabbath observant to Sunday keeping. This is also true for many of the writings of the Protestant church denominations that came out of the Catholic Church. They knew that the Sabbath was the day
commanded by God Almighty to be used for public, family and personal devotion to Him, yet choose to observe the day of the sun (Sunday) which they now call the Lord’s day. The purpose of this study is to reveal the Sabbath admissions of the Catholic Church and Protestant Church denominations in their own writings."
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Content
(A) Catholic admissions
(B) Protestant admissions
a) Anglican
b) Baptist
c) Congregationalist
d) Disciples of Christ
e) Episcopalian
f) Lutheran
g) Methodist
h) Presbyterian
i) Southern Baptist
(A) Catholic admissions
1. Convert’s Catechism of Catholic Doctrine (1957): p50
“Q. Which is the Sabbath day?
A. Saturday is the Sabbath day.
Q. Why do we observe Sunday instead of Saturday?
A. We observe Sunday instead of Saturday because the Catholic Church, in the Council of Laodicea, (AD 336) transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday.”
2. Cardinal James Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers (Ayers Publishing, 1978): 108:
“But you may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will not find a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday. The Scriptures enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never sanctify”
3. Stephen Keenan, Catholic—Doctrinal Catechism 3rd Edition: (1851) p174:
“Question: Have you any other way of proving the Church has the power to institute festivals of precept?
Answer: Had she not such power, she could not have done that in which all modern religionists agree with her, she could not have substituted the observance of Sunday the 1st day of the week, for the observance of Saturday the 7th day,
a change for which there is no Scriptural authority.”
4. The Catholic Christian Instructed in the Sacraments, Sacrifices, Ceremonies, and Observances of the Church by Way of Question and Answer, RT Rev. Dr. Challoner, p. 204.
Q. Has the [Catholic] Church power to make any alterations in the commandments of God?
A….Instead of the seventh day, and other festivals appointed by the old law, the Church has prescribed the Sundays and holy days to be set apart for God’s worship; and these we are now obliged to keep in consequence of God’s commandment, instead of the ancient Sabbath.
5. An Abridgment of the Christian Doctrine, Rev. Henry Tuberville, D.D. (R.C.), (1833), page 58.
Q. How prove you that the Church hath power to command feasts and holy days?
A.
By the very act of changing the Sabbath into Sunday, which Protestants allow of; and therefore, they fondly contradict themselves, by keeping Sunday strictly, and breaking most other feasts commanded by the same Church.
Q. How prove you that?
A. Because by keeping Sunday, they acknowledge the Church’s power to ordain feasts, and to command them under sin; and by not keeping the rest [of the feasts] by her commanded, they again deny, in fact, the same power.
6. Catechism of the Council of Trent, p 402, second revised edition (English), 1937. (First published in 1566)
The Church of God has thought it well to transfer the celebration and observance of the Sabbath to Sunday!
7. Chancellor Albert Smith for Cardinal of Baltimore Archdiocese, letter dated February 10, 1920:
If Protestants would follow the Bible, they should worship God on the Sabbath day by God is Saturday. In keeping the Sunday, they are following a law of the Catholic Church.
8. Our Sunday Visitor (February 5, 1950):
Practically everything Protestants regard as essential or important they have received from the Catholic Church… The Protestant mind does not seem to realize that in accepting the Bible and observing the Sunday, in keeping Christmas and Easter, they are accepting the authority of the spokesman for the Church, the Pope.
9. Louis Gaston Segur, Plain Talk about the Protestantism of To-Day (London: Thomas Richardson and Son, 1874): 213:
Thus, the observance of Sunday by the Protestants is a homage they pay, in spite of themselves, to the authority of the (Catholic) Church. 
10. Catholic Priest T. Enright, CSSR, Kansas City, MO:
It was the holy Catholic Church that changed the day of rest from Saturday to Sunday, the 1st day of the week. And it not only compelled all to keep Sunday but at the Council of Laodicea, AD 364, anathematized those who kept the Sabbath and urged all persons to labor on the 7th day under penalty of anathema.
11. Catholic Priest T. Enright, CSSR, lecture at Hartford, KS, Feb 18, 1884:
“I have repeatedly offered $1000 to anyone who can furnish any proof from the Bible that Sunday is the day we are bound to keep…The Bible says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” but the Catholic Church says, “No, keep the first day of the week,” and the whole world bows in obedience.”
12. Catholic Record (September 1, 1923):
“The [Catholic] Church is above the Bible, and this transference of the Sabbath observance is proof of that fact.”
13. Letter from C.F. Thomas, Chancellor of Cardinal Gibbons on October 28, 1895:
“Of course, the Catholic Church claims that the change was her act… And the act is a MARK of her ecclesiastical power and authority in religious matters.”
14. Arthur Weigall, The Paganism in Our Christianity (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1928): 145:
“The Church made a sacred day of Sunday… largely because it was the weekly festival of the sun; for it was a definite Christian policy to take over the pagan festivals endeared to the people by tradition, and to give them a Christian significance.”
15. John A. O’Brien, The Faith of Millions: the Credentials of the Catholic Religion, Revised Edition (Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 1974): 400-401:
“But since Saturday, not Sunday, is specified in the Bible, isn’t it curious that non-Catholics, who claim to take their religion directly from the Bible and not from the Church, observe Sunday instead of Saturday? Yes, of course, it is inconsistent; but this change was made about fifteen centuries before Protestantism was born, and by that time the custom was universally observed. They have continued the custom even though it rests upon the authority of the Catholic Church and not upon an explicit text in the Bible. That observance remains as a reminder of the Mother Church from which the non-Catholic sects broke away—like a boy running away from home but still carrying in his pocket a picture of his mother or a lock of her hair.”
16. Cardinal John Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Basil Montague Pickering, 1878): 373:
“The use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints, and ornamented on occasions with branches of trees; incense, lamps, and candles; votive offerings on recovery from illness; holy water; asylums; holydays and seasons…
are all of pagan origin and sanctified by their adoption into the Church.”
17. Pope Leo XIII, Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae (The Reunion of Christendom), June 20, 1894:
“We hold upon this earth the place of God Almighty.”
(B) Protestant admissions
a) Anglican
1. Isaac Williams, Plain Sermons on the Catechism, Volume 1: 334, 336:
“And where are we told in the scriptures that we are to keep the first day at all? We are commanded to keep the seventh, but we are nowhere commanded to keep the first day…The reasons why we keep the first day of the week holy instead of the seventh is for the same reason that we observe many other things, not because the Bible, but because the [Catholic) Church has enjoined [ordered) it.”
2. Rev. Lionel Beere, Church, and People (September 1, 1947):
“Many people think that Sunday is the Sabbath, but neither in the New Testament nor in the early Church, is there anything to suggest that we have any right to transfer the observance of the seventh day of the week to the first. The Sabbath was and is Saturday and not Sunday.”
b) Baptist
1. Dr. Edward T. Hiscox, sermon at Baptist Ministers’ Convention (Saratoga, NY. August 20, 1893), as quoted in Charlene R. Fortsch, Daniel: Understanding the Dreams and Visions (British Columbia: Prophecy Song, 2006): 363:
“There was and is a commandment to keep holy the Sabbath day, but the Sabbath day was not Sunday. It will, however, be readily said, and with some show of triumph, that the Sabbath was transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week, with all its duties, privileges and sanctions…Where can the record of such a transaction be found? Not in the New Testament—absolutely not. There is no Scriptural evidence of the change of the Sabbath institution from the seventh to the first day of the week…What a pity that it [Sunday] comes branded with the mark of paganism and christened with the name of the sun-god, then adopted and sanctified by the papal apostasy and bequeathed as a sacred legacy to Protestantism.”
c) Congregationalist
1. Robert William Dale, The Ten Commandments (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884): 100-101:
“It is quite clear that however rigidly or devoutly we spend Sunday, we are not keeping the Sabbath… The Sabbath was founded on a specific Divine command. We can plead no such command for the obligation to observe Sunday…There is not a single sentence in the New Testament to suggest that we incur any penalty by violating the supposed sanctity of Sunday.”
2. Dr. Lymen Abbot, Christian Union June 26, 1890):
“The current notion that Christ and His apostles authoritatively substituted the first day for the seventh is absolutely without any authority in the New Testament.”
d) Disciples of Christ
1. Dr. D. H. Lucas, Christian Oracle (January 23, 1890):
“There’s no direct Scriptural authority for designating the first day “the Lord’s Day.”
e) Episcopalian
1. Bishop Seymour as quoted in Kevin Morgan, Sabbath Rest (TEACH Services, 2002): 13:
“We have made the change from the seventh day to the first day, from Saturday to Sunday, on the authority of the one holy catholic apostolic Church.”
2. Manual of Christian Doctrine: 127:
“Is there any command in the New Testament to change the day of weekly rest from Saturday to Sunday? None.”
f) Lutheran
1. Augustus Neander and Henry John Rose, The History of the Christian Religion and Church (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1848): 186:
“The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a Divine command in this respect, far from them, and from the early apostolic Church, to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday.”
2. The Sunday Problem (1923): 36, as quoted in Kevin Morgan, Sabbath Rest (TEACH Services, 2002): 45:
“We have seen how gradually the impression of the Jewish [not exclusively Jewish but given to all God’s people] Sabbath faded from the mind of the Christian Church, and how completely the newer thought underlying observance of the first day took possession of the Church. We have seen that the Christians of the first 3 centuries never confused one with the other.”
g) Methodist
1. Amos Binney, The Methodist Book Concern (New York, 1902):
“It is true, there is no positive command for infant baptism. Nor is there any for keeping holy the first day of the week. Many believe that Christ changed the Sabbath. But, from His own words, we see that He came for no such purpose.”
2. Harris F. Rall, Christian Advocate (July 2, 1942): 26:
“Take the matter of Sunday…there is no passage telling Christians to keep that day, or to transfer the Jewish Sabbath to that day.”
h) Presbyterian
1. Canon Eyton, The Ten Commandments: 63, 65:
“Into the rest of Sunday, no Divine Law enters… The observance of Ash Wednesday, or Lent, stands exactly on the same footing as the observance of Sunday”
2. Nathan L Rice et al., The Christian Sabbath (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1863): 60.
“A change of the day to be observed, from the last day of the week to the first. There is no record, no express command, authorizing this change.”
i) Southern Baptist
1. Joseph J. Taylor, The Sabbath Question (F.H. Revell Co., 1914): 14-17, 41:
“The sacred name of the seventh day is the Sabbath. This fact is too clear to require argument…Not once did the disciples apply the Sabbath law to the first day or the week—that folly was left for later ages, nor did they pretend that the first day supplanted the seventh.”
Conclusion
The Sun’s day was a popular pagan festival for many centuries, Constantine made the day a public holiday throughout the Roman Empire and was later given a Sabbath characteristic by the Catholic Church at the 29th Canon of the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364. Even though many of the large church denominations acknowledge that the Sabbath day is the day God commanded us to worship Him, they still choose Sun’s day and called it the Lord’s day. Knowing the truth, accepting the truth, and following the truth is the hallmark of a true believer in the Messiah. And obedient to the commandment is the goal of anyone who believes in the Bible. No matter how a tradition is popular, convenient, and long-held, it does not mean it has the approval of the word of God. It is the responsibility of the individual to prove what he/she believes and hold fast to what is true. Your choice today on the day you worship God, either on the Sabbath day or the Sun’s day, has a serious impact on your eternity. The choice is yours."
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