The Crumbling of Religious Orthodoxy

*A retelling based on **The Promised Day Is Come** by Shoghi Effendi. The words in quotation marks are his.*

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In *The Promised Day Is Come*, the long letter Shoghi Effendi addressed on 28 March 1941 to the Bahá'ís of the West, a section titled "The Crumbling of Religious Orthodoxy" follows his survey of the fall of kings. "The decline in the fortunes of the crowned wielders of temporal power," he writes, "has been paralleled by a no less startling deterioration in the influence exercised by the world's spiritual leaders."

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He sums up the parallel in a single line: "The glory of the former has been eclipsed, the power of the latter irretrievably lost."

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The ecclesiastical leaders, like the sovereigns, had been "appealed to, warned, and reproved by Bahá'u'lláh." And they, "more particularly the heads of Muslim ecclesiastical orders," had joined with despots in assailing the Faith. The Guardian lays the heaviest responsibility on the divines of Persia, "the first who hoisted the standard of revolt," who instigated the banishments, executions and massacres that fill its early history. It was these divines, he writes, who by these very acts "sowed the seeds of the disintegration of their own institutions."

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He then traces the process through its principal cases. In Persia, the Shí'ih hierarchy that had once "held in thrall" the Faith of God found itself the prey of a superior civil authority; its mujtahids were reduced to "a deplorably insignificant number," and its clerics were forced to exchange their turbans and robes for European dress. In Turkey, the Caliphate that had been joined to the Ottoman Sultanate for more than four hundred years was extinguished, and the ex-caliph was driven into exile.

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In Christendom, he recalls Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to Pope Pius IX and the loss, in 1870, of Rome and the Papal States, after which Pius IX became "the first prisoner of the Vatican." The Lateran Treaty had restored only a temporal sovereignty "practically confined to the miniscule City of the Vatican." He enumerates further blows: the separation of Church and state in France; the assault in Soviet Russia on the Greek Orthodox Church, which "pulled down, closed, or converted into museums, theatres and warehouses, thousands upon thousands of churches, monasteries, synagogues and mosques"; the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; the divorce of the Spanish state from the Church; the persecution of the Church in Mexico; and the heavy blows dealt to "Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian Missions in Persia, Turkey, and the Far East."

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This process, he writes, "is still operating with undiminished force." He saw the war then raging, with "Anglicans pitted against Lutherans, Catholics against Greek Orthodox," as "a sorry spectacle of impotence and disruption" to those already perceiving "the bankruptcy of the institutions that claim to speak in the name, and to be the custodians, of the Faith of Jesus Christ."

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*A retelling based on **The Promised Day Is Come**. For the fuller account, see the original.*

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