Catholic Pressure In Bremerton, Washington
Mr. F. Yater Tant Box 980 Lufkin, Texas
Dear Brother Tant:
Brother O. C. Lambert was with us for a series of lectures on Roman Catholicism and gospel meetings September 20 through October 3. The congregation and a large number of visitors was informed of the gross corruption and dangers of Roman Catholic doctrine. The events that happened immediately preceding the lectures should serve to make us all aware that such lectures are needed even more than we had thought.
We wrote to the school board in January requesting the use of one of the auditoriums for the five nights of the lectures. We told them in our request exactly the nature of the lectures. In August we received a letter from the school board asking if we still wanted the auditorium; and if we did, it was available. We assured them that we did still want it and thanked them for compliance with our request. Then we proceeded to finish our plans for advertising and the week prior to the lectures we mailed out 3,000 invitations with a list of the lectures and ran a good size ad in the paper. Then Catholic pressure began to take its effect. On the evening of September 18 the school board met in special session in which they called us in. Brother Douglas Shaw and myself attended their meeting in which we explained the purpose of the lectures and answered several questions. It was apparent that this meeting had been called because of pressure from the Catholic priest to rescind their approval of our request. After our dismissal from the meeting the Board decided by 3-2 vote to stay by their former approval. At the conclusion of their meeting the Superintendent of Schools returned some of our literature to the priest (the priest had given it to him earlier) and told him of the Board's decision in our favor. Then the priest remarked, "The school board has not heard the last of this." The next morning at mass the priest told all of his group to sound out their protest to the school board. Many of them did make calls of protest to the members of the board. In fact by 2:30 p.m. September 19 they had called another special session of the school board. In this meeting one of the members changed his vote and that made it 3-2 against us. Thus, after we had had our request in eight months early and had received approval on two occasions from the school administration, the Catholics were able to intervene and cause the decision to be reversed in only two or three days.
All five men on the school board are professed Protestants (?). One of the members of the board who stood by us until the end related to us the accounts of pressure and other events relative to it that we have mentioned in this writing.
We held the lectures in our building. Brother Lambert is very well prepared for such a work. He uses nothing but writings of Catholic officials who are all held as representative of the Hierarchy. It is our prayer that this pernicious doctrine may be exposed for what it really is and that many souls may be turned "from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God."
During the week of gospel meetings Brother Lambert preached on some of the issues that have been bothering many brethren for a long time. We believe that he did a good job in helping us to realize the unscripturalness of some of the modern brotherhood projects.
One was baptized during the meeting.
In Christian love, Howard W. Reagan
Note . .
You may use this letter in any way you see fit. It just seems to me that this is a very good example of Catholic pressure being applied and that brethren everywhere should be aroused to the fact that we are probably not as far from the "Dark Ages" as we might think.
Incidentally, the school board does rent the auditorium quite frequently to other religious groups, so it was not a matter of policy against renting it to all religious groups.