THE EARLY CHRISTIAN SABBATH - Friends of the Sabbath Australia

The Early Christian Sabbath
Fathers, 2d Series, vol. 12, Page 7.
Their agreement was well illustrated in their mutual suppression of Sabbath
keeping. It remained for a pope of Rome to denounce as anti-Christian those keeping the
Sabbath commandment of God. Gregory 1, named the Great, bishop of Rome from AD
590 to 604, declared Sabbathkeepers to be preachers of antichrist. He wrote:
“Gregory, bishop by the grace of God to his well-beloved sons, the Roman
citizens: It has come to me that certain men of perverse spirit have disseminated among
you things depraved and opposed to the holy faith, so that they forbid anything to be
done on the day of the Sabbath. What shall I call them except preachers of antichrist?” -
Epistles, book 13: 1, in Labbe and Cossart, Sacrosancta Concilia, volume 5, column
1511.
Who was it that suppressed the Sabbath and emphasized Sunday observance? As
we review the evidence, we answer. The Church of Rome. It is not surprising therefore to
find catechism after catechism of the Roman Catholic Church admitting frankly, indeed
claiming, that to the Church of Rome must go the credit for the elimination of the true
Sabbath and the establishment of Sunday observance. This shift became effective during
the fifth and sixth centuries, at the very period when the popes were consolidating their
enormous ecclesiastical power.
As the centuries rolled by, Sunday observance became increasingly a symbol of
the ecclesiastical power of the Roman Church. It was used by Rome as a challenge to the
Protestant leaders of the Reformation. Eck, the noted Catholic debater against Luther,
had in the Leipzig disputation of 1519 forced the Protestant leader to concur in the
“heresies” of the great Bohemian reformer, Huss, who had been burned at the stake in
1415. In 1533, writing further against Luther, Eck used Sunday observance as an
evidence of the authority of the Roman Church in matters of faith and religious practice.
He wrote:
“The Scripture teaches: Remember that you sanctify the Sabbath day; you will
labor six days, and do all your work, but on the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord
your God, etc., etc. Nevertheless the church has changed the Sabbath to the Lord's day by
its own authority, concerning which you have no Scripture.” John Eck, Enchiridion
Locorum Communium adversus Lutheranos (Handbook of Commonplaces Against the
Lutherans), printing of 1533, pages 4a, 5. (Translation by the author.)
But the full force of this Catholic claim is clearly seen in the Council of Trent
itself. On Sunday, January 18, 1562, Which opened the last session of that important
council, the archbishop of Reggia, Caspar del Fossa, delivered a sermon in which he
based the whole structure of the authority of the Catholic Church upon the fact that “the
Sabbath, the most glorious day in the law, has been changed into the Lord's day.” - Labbe
and Cossart, Sacrosancta Concilia, volume 14, columns 1253, 1254.
Commenting upon this, Heinrich julius Holtzmann, German scholar and
outstanding authority on the question of ecclesiastical tradition, says of the significance
of Del Fossa's position:
“At last at the final opening [of the council] on January 18, 1562, they rid
themselves of all hesitation; the archbishop of Reggia made an address in which he
declared openly that tradition was elevated above the Scripture. On this account the
authority of the Church could not at all [the archbishop maintained] be tied to the
authority of Scripture, because the former had, not according to the ordinance of Christ,
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