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Title: Vices of Convents and Monasteries, Priests and Nuns
Author: Thos. E. Watson
Release Date: November 23, 2017 [EBook #56041]
Language: English
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THE INEVITABLE CRIMES OF CELIBACY:
THE
VICES OF CONVENTS
AND MONASTERIES,
PRIESTS AND NUNS
_By_
THOS. E. WATSON
_Author of "The Story of France," "Napoleon," "Life and
Times of Andrew Jackson," "Life and Times of Thomas
Jefferson," "The Roman Catholic Hierarchy," Etc._
THOMSON, GA.:
1916.
Press of
THE JEFFERSONIAN PUB. CO.
Thomson, Ga.
The Inevitable Crimes of Celibacy: The Vices of Convents and
Monasteries, Priests and Nuns.
CHAPTER I.
When any species of wrong-doing can wear the disguise of righteousness,
the blindest among us can see how dangerous that kind of crime may
become--how hard to prove, punish and put down.
There are immense Arabian plains where nomad robbers have practised
their profession, from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to
the contrary; yet those plains and the nomad bands that pitch their
tents beneath the Oriental sun remain very much as they were in the days
of Abraham.
But where robbery has disguised itself _as Law_, and one class has aimed
the law-making machine at the others, saying "_Stand and deliver!_"
whole regions have become deserts, and great peoples have been blotted
out.
In fact, the highwayman, the cattle-lifter and the pickpocket have never
in the least affected the destinies of nations. The pirate and the
buccaneer have never been able to destroy the commerce of the seas,
beggar provinces, and change noble harbors into neglected pools.
It is when the robbers intrench themselves in Parliaments, Reichstags
and Congresses, and the robbery takes the form of "Law," that spoliation
becomes destructive. Bank laws and money-contraction laws beat down more
victims than armies. Protective Tariff "laws," infinitely more ruinous
than all the Lafittes and Captain Kidds, drive the American flag from
the seas, while on land they make a thousand Rockefellers, Carnegies,
Morgans, Guggenheims, McCormicks and Armours, at the same time that they
are casting millions of the despoiled out of house and home.
There are realms where religious mendicancy keeps to the primitive forms
of the beggar's bowl and pouch. It is the free-will offering.
In these countries of voluntary tributes, religious feeling has branched
into the fewest channels, has lost the least of its original force, and
maintains today its most impregnable position. But where the priestly
caste was able to intrench its mendicancy in Law, and arrogantly say to
the laity, "_Pay me one-tenth of all thou hast!_" religion was first to
well-nigh lose its beauty and its strength, and like, the Rhine, almost
disappear into the intricate morasses of subdivisions.
Ten thousand virulent disputes about tithes ushered in the diabolisms of
the French Revolution; and many of my readers will remember how Charles
Dickens, when a Parliamentary reporter, dropped his pencil in tears,
unable to go on, as Daniel O'Connell described one of the tragedies of a
tithe-riot in Ireland.
When Religion went forth as Christ sent it forth, _it demanded nothing
for the priest_. Yet, the same religion, organized into an episcopacy,
afterwards wrote the tax of one-tenth upon the statute-book, and sold
the widow's cow to pay the priest for his prayer. In those days, it must
have been a gruesome spectacle as the burly parson, a picture of
physical fullness, stood in the background, personifying Law and
Religion, while the bailiff raided the cotter's wretched premises,
pounced upon pigs and poultry, or dragged household goods off to public
sale. Yet, during centuries of outrage, pain and starvation, this sort
of robbery disguised itself with _a double domino of Law and Religion_.
Forgive me, if I digress briefly to mention how vividly I was reminded
of all this, by the thrifty, business-like manner in which Bishop P. J.
Donohue, of Wheeling, West Virginia, sold out a laboring man, S. W.
Hawley, _for rent_, in the year of our Crucified Lord, 1913.
To satisfy the debt due to this most worshipful Bishop of God, the
following personal property was seized, and advertised for sale, to-wit:
3 bed springs and 3 beds, 3 mattresses, 1 stove, 2 tables, 10 chairs, 3
pictures, 1 broom, 4 comforts, 2 blankets, 3 quilts, 4 pillows, and some
dishes.
(It was further stated that Hawley's back was broken, while working in
the coal mines.)
George Alfred Townsend, who was so well known to journalism as "Gath,"
wrote a novel which he called "The Entailed Hat." The book would have
lived gloriously, had it not been for the hat: the sternly absurd
conditions which this idea about the Entailed Hat fastened upon the
author, killed his novel.
But there was in it one passage which lingers yet in my recollection,
after the lapse of more than 30 years. There were two brothers, shrewd,
pushing, flinty Jews, who drove hard bargains, hard collections, and
filled a store-room with household plunder sold for debt, and bought in
by the Jews, to be resold at a profit. "Gath" gave tongue to each
article of this pitiful domestic furniture, torn from the homes of the
poor, and auctioned at public outcry.
The old rickety cradle spoke of the babes that had lain in it, and of
the mother-songs that had been sung over it, as the foot which moves the
world softly pedalled the wooden rockers.
The loom and the spindle had their stories to tell: the table and the
dishes spoke of the plain meals and unpretentious hospitalities of the
lowly: the chairs remembered the humble hearth and fireside, and many a
circle of bright faces they had helped to form around the cheerful glow
of the burning logs.
The silent clock, with no life of moving hands on its dust-covered face,
spoke of how the short and simple annals of the poor had been measured
by it, how it had timed the marriage and the funeral, the birth and
death; and how it had missed the toil-hardened hands that used to wind
it up, every night.
And so on--the dirge of the Household Goods!
As my eye ran over the items of the poor man's goods ordered to sale for
the most worshipful Bishop Donohue--the consecrated disciple of Christ
who didn't even have as much of a home as the foxes and the birds--I
_might_ have thought of one or two blistering passages in the glorious
old Code of Moses; I _might_ have recalled some of the bitterest of the
words of Jesus Christ, against those rich, haughty, unmerciful lordlings
who grind the faces of the poor.
But I did not: on the contrary, that passage in "Gath's" novel rose out
of the mist of 30 years, and brought back the plaintive lament of the
household goods, seized, carried away, and sold into strange hands to
pay a trifling debt. "Gath," following literary tradition, most
canonically chose _Jews_ to act as shylocks: it would never have
occurred to him that a consecrated Bishop of Jesus Christ could sell the
poor Christian's blanket off the bed, sell the bed itself, sell the
table at which the family ate, and the chairs that they sat on. Not
only the mattress on which the tired limbs of labor stretched themselves
to rest, and the pillows upon which the aching head had lain, but the
very broom which swept the floor, had to be seized to satisfy the rent
of this godly landlord, _the Bishop of a homeless Christ_!
To make this picture perfect, the family Bible ought to have been levied
on--and this Catholic Bishop ought to have bought it in. Having acquired
the Book in that manner, a natural curiosity might have prompted him to
read it.
One thing, however, the most worshipful Bishop might yet do: he might
take the proceeds of the sale of Hawley's beds, mattresses, pillows,
stove, dishes, comforts, blankets, chairs and broom--and contribute the
whole sum to Foreign Missions.
* * * * * * *
"Thou shalt not commit adultery!"
All Christians take their laws and their religion more or less from the
Jews. Who the Jews took it from, is another question. Skeptical scholars
say that they took it from the older peoples of the East, of the Nile,
the Euphrates: orthodox Christianity maintains that they took it by
revelation direct from Jehovah. Therefore, every sect in Christendom
stands committed to the proposition that God Almighty, clothed in all
His terrors, with the clouds darkening the skies, the thunders for His
heralds and the lightenings for the flaming swords that went before His
face, came down to Sinai, and wrote upon the everlasting tablets,
"_Thou shalt not commit adultery!_"
(Doway Bible: Deut. xx:14. I will hereafter use this Roman Catholic
version as the true one, thus avoiding any dispute with papists as to
the accuracy of my quotations.)
In this Doway, or Douay, a version of the Book, we are somewhat patly
told that the first thing which Adam did, after having been dispossessed
of Eden, was to know "Eve his wife, who conceived and brought forth
Cain, saying, I have gotten a man through God."
Then she brought forth Abel; and before six other verses are ended, we
learn that the brothers are at enmity because of religion, and that one
has killed the other.
How Adam and Eve were to have propagated the human race, had Eve not
listened to the snake; or whether they were to have propagated it at
all, is a mystery which our finite minds were evidently not expected to
fathom. Nevertheless, Saint Augustine made a heroic effort to answer
the riddle; and his classic theological work, "The City of God,"
contains his theory, still discreetly veiled in the original Latin,
which, being interpreted, is considerably nastier than any other English
that I ever perused in a classical theological work.
The first occupation of Adam outside of Paradise ought to have some
weight with us, as a time-honored precedent. That wicked mankind, and
Noe came out of the Ark, together with all those animals, birds,
reptiles, &c., the very first command given him was, that he and his
family should increase and multiply. Apparently, their obedience to this
command was so prompt and effective that the Lord never reproached him
or his descendants for any neglect of duty in that particular.
"And God blessed Noe and his sons: and said unto them, Increase and
multiply, and fill the earth."
It is true that Noe got drunk, soon after this; but the diligent
casuists, who follow every perilous passage in the Douay Bible with
their indefatigable notes, tell us that Noe did not commit a sin by
getting drunk, "because he knew not the strength of it," the wine.
(Thus does ignorance excuse the sinner, when the casuists need the
defense.)
And through the Mosaic Code, breathes the same spirit and purpose: it
can fairly be summed up in the phrase, _Thou shalt marry_!
Every encouragement is given to wedlock and to large families: polygamy
itself, had its _reason_, in those hot climates where puberty is reached
at so early an age, and where the child-bearing woman is so quickly aged
into unfitness for mating with the robust husband. It was partly because
the Mosaic law gave so little excuse for immorality, that adultery was
so cruelly punished. And the vigor of the Jewish type, for so many
centuries, amid so many barbarous persecutions, and in spite of such
wide geographical dispersions, is the most splendid monument to the
eternal wisdom of the command--
_Marry! Increase and multiply! Fill the earth with lawfully begotten
children! Honor the Home! Preserve your Race! Do not breed
promiscuously! DO NOT MONGRELIZE!_
In short,
"_Do not commit adultery._"
As Moses minutely regulated the patriarchal household, making the nomad
Jew's wife the queen of his tent, so Paul the Apostle carefully
instructed the model priest, admonishing him to be content with one
wife, and to be watchful over the conduct of his family, "having his
children in subjection with all chastity."
(I may add that St. Paul lays down the law in a manner that condemns the
Christian bishops who sell out their humble fellows who are unable to
pay rent and tithes.)
The priests of Assyria and of Egypt were married men. The priests of the
Jews were married men: the priests of the Romans were married men. The
Bishops, or Popes, of Rome were married men, during the first four
hundred years after Christ.
(See Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport's "Love Affairs of the Vatican," 3rd
Edition, 1912, p. 9.)
Let no one misunderstand me: I freely admit that there are exceptional
men and women who voluntarily choose the unmarried life. There have
always been such exceptions to the rule, and there probably always will
be: the reasons need not be discussed.
Those reasons do not necessarily imply a lack of virility: some men
simply prefer not to take a wife; some women just naturally fear the
loss of independence, or they never meet the King who will take no
denial, or they nobly burden their lives with duties which demand
self-sacrifice.
The six Vestals of old Rome were _voluntary_ celibates: such men as
Paul, Ben Zoma, Montaigne, Spinoza, were _voluntary_ bachelors. It might
have been far happier for John Wesley, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin,
had they persisted in the single state.
But _enforced_ spinsterhood and bachelorhood, is a frightfully different
thing. To say to men and women who have taken certain "vows," that they
shall never seek happiness in marriage, never escape mental and physical
longing and anguish, because of such "vows," _is to put the selfish will
of an earthly priesthood above the will of God_.
It is impossible to conceive of a crucifixion of humanity more
unnatural, more indefensible, and more necessarily horrible in its
consequences.
_Enforced_ celibacy in normal priests, simply means adultery, hidden
behind walls and disguised _as religion_. Therefore, when adultery has
to be tolerated, as an incident to a certain form of Christianity, the
crime eludes the law, the illicit intercourse of the sexes identifies
itself with a religious system, and it becomes as impossible to control
as does the robber who gains control of the machinery of government.
When the robber is _the Law_, who is to punish the criminal? When
adultery is elevated into a system which is recognized as a religion,
who is to punish the adulterer?
Robbery enthroned in the law, and advancing its demands too far, has to
be dealt with by revolutions. Thus it was in England, when the Great
Charter was won. Thus it was in the Revolution of 1688. Thus it was in
Switzerland, in France, in the American Colonies, in Italy, in Germany,
and even in Spain and Portugal--not to mention South America, and
Mexico.
Adultery, _interwoven in a religious system_, was one of the
main-springs of the Revolution in Germany, in England, in Holland and in
the States of the libertine Popes, themselves.
The enormous popular support given to Calvin, Luther, and Knox, to Henry
VIII., to Garibaldi, to Bolivar, and to Juarez, was largely fanned and
fed by the intense wrath of the people against the pope-protected
immorality of the priests--_the adultery which could not be punished
because it was interwoven into the system of popery_.
The Popes could not punish the priests, because the Popes were equally
criminal. The system required celibacy: the system was against the law
of God: _the system gave the priest absolute power over women, and
secret access to them_. The system needed the unmarried priest, and the
system had to pay the price. _The adultery of the priest_ had to be
cloaked and tolerated, for the simple reason that it _was incidental and
inseparable_.
But who made the system? Not God, nor the Bible, nor the Apostles, nor
the early Fathers of the Primitive Church: the system was peculiarly the
work of Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII.
It was this Pope who formulated the dogma of universal dominion.
It was Gregory who said that, "The world derives its light from two
sources, the sun and the moon, the former symbolizing the Papacy, the
latter the Civil State."
In Gregory's mind, the entire Christian world was his Empire. The
temporal Princes were his vassals, every Kingdom of Europe was his
fief, every crown, his to give and to take away. The keys of Heaven and
of Hell were in his hands; he was the Infallible representative of
Jehovah; and when he spoke, nations must shout, "_The voice of the Pope,
is the voice of God!_"
To defend such a power and advance its banners, a disciplined and
devoted soldiery was necessary: hence, the priests who could not take
wives and have children. A family would _divide their allegiance_.
Hence, also, the convent and the confessional, to furnish an outlet to
the ungovernable natural desires of full-sexed men.
During the three frozen winter days of 1077, when a barefooted Emperor
of Germany stood outside the castle-gate at Canossa, in the snow, this
Gregory VII. spent the time inside with his Mistress, the Countess
Matilda of Tuscany. When the Pope finally professed himself satisfied
with the Emperor's penitence and submission, he figuratively placed his
foot upon the Emperor's neck. The Church had conquered the Civil State.
The priest was above the King. To Cæsar nothing was left, save what the
Pope might graciously concede. The things that had been Cæsar's, _in
Christ's time_, were now the Pope's. Thus, the Fisherman not only wore
one crown, but three, the tiara. He was lord of Earth, lord of Heaven,
lord of Hell.
Under the Gregorian theory, God had become a silent partner in the
government of Creation, oppressed by the logical necessity of endorsing
every decree of the Infallible Italian priest. Jehovah was become a sort
of _Roy Faineant_: the Italian Pope was Mayor of the Palace. To vary the
illustration, the Almighty was become a King of England, and the Pope,
Prime Minister. What the Premier tells the King to say, the King says;
and then the Premier assures the world that what he has told the King to
say is, "the King's speech."
* * * * * * *
In the palace of the Popes themselves, what was the result of celibacy?
Dr. Angelo Rappoport, of Rome, Italy, says in his book, published in
1912:
"For centuries the history of the Roman Pontiffs reminds one of the most
depraved times of Athens and pagan Rome, rather than of Bethlehem and
Jerusalem.
Courtesans, famous for their talent and their beauty, their intrigues,
and their gallant love affairs, ruled the Church and disposed of the
tiara. They raised and deposed the Pontiffs, imprisoned and assassinated
them. * * * Their beds became the pedestals from which their lovers
ascended the Pontifical throne.
All these Popes were imitating the mode of life of the Saracens, to whom
they were paying tribute, and like true heroes of a seraglio, these
chiefs of Christendom died by poison or strangulation. They committed
follies worthy of Oriental despots, and vied in their debaucheries with
the Emperors of pagan Rome. Pope John XXII. ordained priests in a
stable, and swore by Bacchus and Venus." (John the 22nd Papa of that
name, began his Vicarship of God in the year 1316.)
Cardinal Baronius exclaims,
"Those infamous prostitutes ruled Rome, and their creatures and lovers
sat on the throne of St. Peter."
Bernard de Morlaix, monk of Cluny, writes in the 12th century,
"Rome is the impure city of the hunter Nimrod: piety and religion have
fled its walls.
Alas! the Pontiff, or rather the King of this odious city of Babylon,
treads under foot the sanctity of the Gospel and the morality of
Christ."
Matthew Paris, the historian of the 13th century, says:
"The holy city has become a place of infamy, whose lewdness surpass even
that of Sodom and Gomorrha."
So universal was the scandal caused by the bestial vices of the Popes
and the Italian cardinals that the Catholic Parliament of England
refused to allow Pope Innocent IV. to come to the British Court. Why?
Because, as the House of Commons roundly declared, "the Papal Court
spreads such an abominable odor that it should not be permitted in
England."
(This was the Catholic Parliament of the Catholic King, Henry III., 13th
century.)
Let me quote the brutally frank _words of a Pope_--
"Whoever," writes Pius II., "has not felt the fire of love is either a
stone or a beast.
Who is it, at the age of thirty, that has not committed a crime for the
sake of love?
Many women have I courted and loved: and as soon as I had possessed
them, I was filled with loathing for them."
(The Infallible Pius II. lived in the 15th century.)
Inasmuch as the courtesans raised one boy of eighteen, and another of
twelve, to the "throne of Saint Peter," you can imagine what sort of
lives they led in that gilded brothel, the Pope's palace.
(Pope John XII. was 18 years of age. Pope Benedict IX. was a lad of 12
years. Both were monsters of lust.)
This being the general picture of the Popes, _after_ they quit taking
wives, we are not surprised to learn that their mistresses and their
bastards were as well known, and as socially respectable, as those of
the kings and emperors, who married because it was a duty, and
Lotharioed because they found pleasure in it. The illegitimate children
of the Vicars of Christ were as undenied and undeniable as were those of
Henry of Navarre, Augustus of Saxony, Louis XIV. of France, and Charles
II., of England. Don John of Austria, was not more proudly the "woods
colt" of Charles V. of Germany, than was Cæsar Borgia the son of His
Holiness, Alexander VI. The Duke of Berwick was not better known as the
bastard of James II. and Arabella Churchill, than were two of the
reigning belles of Rome, not many years ago, recognized as the winsome
daughters in the flesh of His Holiness, Pope Pius IX.
To complete the picture, history tells us that Pope John XII., who was
made God-on-earth at the age of eighteen, met his death by the hand of
an outraged husband, at the age of twenty-five. The furious husband
broke into the Pope's bed-room, in the Lateran palace, and slew the
adulterer in the arms of the faithless wife.
Even Platina mentions this horrible fact, in his Lives of the Popes,
written at the request of Pope Sixtus IV., and published in the year
1479.
Platina was a devout Catholic and was Superintendent of the Vatican
Library, Rome, Italy.
In the biography of Petrarch by Jerome Equarciafico, we learn that this
poetic dawn-bird of the Renaissance had a beautiful sister, named
Selvaggia. Upon this lovely girl, Pope Benedict XII. looked with the
eyes of desire. He made infamous proposals to Petrarch, while the poet
scornfully rejected. Then His Holiness caused it to be whispered to
Petrarch that the Inquisition felt inclined to question him concerning
the orthodoxy of his faith. "The Question," meant torture, and Petrarch
fled from Avignon for his life. But a younger brother of Selvaggia was
more of "a man of the world," as the world went in those days of
all-powerful popery; and this brother gave ear to the Pope's temptings.
By his connivance, the girl was seized one night, as she slept, and
carried into the bedroom of the Vicar of Christ.
When this girl of sixteen realized what was intended, she fell on her
knees, and piteously begged the Pope, the Holy Father, to take pity on
her.
The raging lusts of the Pope were only maddened the more by the sight
and the touch of her charms, and he threatened her with eternal
damnation if she persisted in her obstinacy. The weeping, despairing
child _did_ persist, and "_he had recourse to force_"
("Love Affairs of the Vatican." Page 154.)
* * * * * * *
Petrarch, as I have said, may be fairly regarded as the dawn-bird of the
Renaissance, that marvellous Easter of Literature, when European
_Intellect_, which popery had buried and set the soldiers of the
Inquisition to guard, heard the golden trumpet of Resurrection sounded
by the Byzantine scholars--fleeing from Moslem invasion--and threw off
the shroud of a degrading superstition, defied the terrors of the stupid
fanatic, and said to all the world--
"_I will be free again, even though I die for it._"
Petrarch was the purest of ten thousand pure, a lover who lived in the
glory of the sentiment, without even the temptation to plunge the sacred
torch into the stream of sensuality--a poet who sang as the bird sings,
because Nature put music in his brain and heart and throat.
Petrarch was a devout Christian; and to be a Christian at that time,
meant to be a Catholic. You may be sure that it was no heretic whom the
Romans publicly honored in Rome, in the year 1342, and crowned with the
laurels that Virgil had not worn more worthily.
Surely, Petrarch's description of the Pope's morals and the Papal Court
will not be spurned as the libel of an abominable heretic.
"You find there the terrible Nimrod, Semiramis, armed * * * the
scandalous monument of the most infamous amours.
Confusion, darkness and horror, vice and crime dwell within these
precincts. I am only describing to you what I have seen with my own
eyes.
The hope of future life is looked upon as a vain illusion--what is
being told of hell as a mere fable. * * * Love of truth is considered
eccentricity; chastity, prudishness. Licentiousness is considered
broadness of soul, whilst prostitution here leads to fame and prestige.
The more vice one accumulates, the greater the glory. Virtue is
considered ridiculous. * * *
I shall not speak of violation, rape, adultery and incest. _They are
trifles at the Pontifical Court._
I shall not relate that the husbands whose wives have been abducted,
_are forced to silence and exile_. * * * I shall not dwell upon the
cruel insult by which the outraged husbands are being compelled to
receive in their houses _their wives who had been prostituted,
especially when they carry in their wombs the fruit of the criminal
love_."
Great God! What a picture of the Papal Court!
Petrarch adds, "The people are quite aware of everything I know myself."
The people knew; the people murmured: the people were helpless.
_Adultery had interwoven itself into the very fabric of religion_; and
the people saw no way to attack the adulterers without being accused of
heresy and delivered to the terrible Inquisition.
Luther had not yet come. When he _did_ come, the adulterers said that he
was not only a heretic, but a drunkard and a libertine!
William Hogan was born in Ireland, and was educated for the priesthood
at Maynooth College. Coming to America to follow his calling, he was so
shocked by what he learned, in the Confessional and otherwise, that he
abandoned popery in utter disgust.
When he landed on our shores, he brought with him letters of
introduction to DeWitt Clinton of New York. So favorably was he received
that he was elected Chaplain of the New York legislature, unanimously.
Therefore, he was not a man with a grievance. Every selfish instinct
warned him to remain in the service of popery. It was his native honesty
and his horror of imposture that caused him to rebel. Afterwards, he
published books which reached an immense circulation prior to the Civil
War, but which were forgotten in that shock of armies. They are now
seldom seen even in the catalogues of Old Book stores.
To that splendid gentleman, Dr. John N. Taylor, of Crawfordville,
Indiana, I was indebted for a copy of the edition of 1856. The volume
contains Hogan's book on "Popery," and also his "Auricular Confession
and Popish Nunneries."
On page 247, Ex-Priest William Hogan says, in reference to the popish
school-teachers, so numerous now in our Protestant schools--
"These ladies, when properly disciplined by the Jesuits and priests,
become the best teachers. But before they are allowed to teach, there is
no art, no craft, no species of cunning, no refinement in private
personal indulgences, or no modes or means of seduction, in which they
are not thoroughly initiated.
I may say with safety, and from my own personal knowledge through the
Confessional, that _there is scarcely one of them who has not been
herself DEBAUCHED BY HER OWN CONFESSOR_.
The reader will understand that every nun has a confessor; and here I
will add, for the truth must be told at once, that _every confessor has
a concubine, and there are very few of them who have not several_."
Remember that this fearful charge against celibacy was made in 1856, in
the edition of Hogan's work which was the 76th thousand. Therefore, the
ex-priest who had brought the best letters of introduction from Europe,
and who had been unanimously elected Chaplain of the New York
legislature, had hurled this hideous indictment at popery and its priest
76,000 times.
What answer was made to him? _None!_
They furiously abused him, but did not dare to either prosecute or
reply. He had been a priest, and he knew too much.
_Popery has never dared to prosecute an ex-priest, or an ex-nun, where
there was any chance to lift the veil that conceals the rottenness of
life inside the convents, and the monasteries._
After quoting Michelet and Courier and Llorente on the inevitable
lasciviousness and depravity necessarily resulting from denying the
priests the right to marry, William Hogan proceeds--
"Shall the cowl shelter the adulterous monk in this land of freedom? Are
the sons of freemen to countenance, nay, asked to build impassible walls
around a licentious, lecherous, profligate horde of foreign priests and
monks, who choose to come among us, and erect a little _fortification_,
which they call nunneries for their protection?
"Shall they own, by law and charter, places where _to bury_, hidden from
the public eye, _the victim of their lust, AND THE MURDERED OFFSPRING OF
THEIR CONCUPISCENCE_?"
Speaking of Albany, New York, Rev. Hogan, on page 268, of "Nunneries,"
says--
"As soon as I got settled in Albany, I had of course to attend to the
duty of Auricular Confession; and in less than two months found that
those three priests, during the time they were there, were the fathers
of between 60 and 100 children, besides having debauched many who had
left the place previous to their confinement.
Many of these children were by married women, whose husbands and
brothers, and relatives were ready, if necessary, to wade knee-deep in
blood for the _holy immaculate infallible church of Rome_."
And why were these American Catholics willing to wade in blood for
popery? Because they did not know the truth about it.
The same reason holds good today; and that's the reason the priests are
frantically trying to violate our Constitutional right of free speech
and free press.
_Above all things_, the priests dread the day when American fathers,
husbands, sons and brothers find out _what it is_, that these devilish
priests claim they have a right _to say, and to do_, in their secret
intercourse with Catholic wives, sisters and daughters.
_The priests will murder any man, if they can, to prevent HIM from
uncovering THEM._
On page 283, Hogan continues--
"Priests, nuns, and confessors are the same now that they were
then--15th century--all over the world.
Many of you have visited Paris, and do you not see there a lying-in
hospital attached to every nunnery in the city? The same is to be seen
in Madrid, and the principal cities of Spain.
I have seen them myself in Mexico, and in the city of Dublin, Ireland.
What is the object of these hospitals? _It is chiefly to provide for the
illicit offspring of priests and nuns, and such other unmarried females
as the priests can seduce through the confessional._
But, it will be said, there are no lying-in hospitals attached to the
nunneries in this country. True, there are not; but I know from my own
experience, _through the confessional_, that it would be well, if there
were.
_There would be fewer abortions; there would be fewer infants strangled
and murdered._
It is not generally known to Americans that the crime of procuring
abortion, is a common, everyday crime in popish nunneries.
It is not known to Americans, that strangling and putting to death
infants, is common in nunneries throughout this country.
_It is done systematically and methodically, ACCORDING TO POPISH
INSTRUCTIONS._"
The modus operandi is this--and then the ex-priest describes how the
priest, the father of the child, baptises it, and thus insures its
passage to Heaven, as per popish belief; and how the abbess, or Mother
Superior, then shuts off the breath of the babe, at the nose: after
which the poor little body is thrown into the lime-pit to be consumed.
Father Hogan also describes how the priests and monks give desired
children to wives whose husbands are not productive. The woman is easily
led to believe that God's will is enlisted in her behalf, and that He
has commissioned the priest to accomplish what the husband failed at:
_result_, happy wife, bouncing babe, rapturous husband, chuckling
priest.
Father Hogan _tells it all_; and the rancorous papists never dared to
hale him into court!
APPENDIX.
Constable's Public Sale.
On Monday, the 22d day of September, 1913, between the hours of 9
o'clock a. m. and 4 p. m. of said day, at the residence of S. W.
Hawley in ---- Town, district of Raleigh County, West Virginia, I
will sell at Public Auction to the highest bidder, for cash, the
following described personal property, to wit: Three bed springs
and 3 beds, 3 mattresses, 1 dresser, 1 wash stand, 1 stand table, 1
range stove, and outfit for said stove, 2 tables, 10 chairs, 3
pictures, 1 broom, 4 comforts, 2 blankets, 3 quilts, and 3
comforts, 1 safe and dishes and 1 set of irons, 4 pillows, levied
upon as the property of S. W. Hawley ---- a distress warrant for
rent ---- to satisfy ---- in my hands for collection in favor of P.
J. Donahue.
Terms of sale: Cash in hand on day of sale.
Given under my hand this 10th day of September, 1913.
J. L. WILLIAMS,
Constable of Raleigh County.
STATE OF MISSOURI,
County of Lawrence--ss.
Before me personally appeared Marvin Brown, and after being duly
sworn on his oath says that the above and foregoing is a true and
correct copy of the notice of the constable's sale as the same
appears from the original now in the possession of the affiant, and
compared by him with the original at the time of making this
affidavit.
(Signed)
MARVIN BROWN, Affiant.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this 30th day of December, 1913.
(Signed)
EUGENE J. McNATT,
Notary Public, Lawrence County.
Commission expires Feb. 19th, 1916.
(Appeared in _The Menace_, Jan. 10, 1914.)
What Happens to Full Sexed Women When They Foolishly Take Vows Which
Insult Nature and God?
CHAPTER II.
Why is it that a human document ten thousand years old has the same
effect upon us, as a newspaper story of yesterday? Why is it that we
love or hate the men and women who live in the songs of Homer? Why do we
grieve, or rejoice with those who live in the pages of Plutarch; and
feel deeply moved when David and Jonathan are forced apart; when Joseph
is sold by his brethren; when the song of Solomon voices the deathless
devotion of the country girl for her mountain lover; and when the
fanatical Jeptha is about to slay his innocent, beautiful daughter?
It is because human nature has never changed; what our fathers were, we
are: what Absolom and David felt, we feel.
When the brilliant, wayward Jewish boy goes astray and meets his
untimely fate, we mourn with his broken father as he wails--"O Absolom
my son, O my son Absolom!"
That which women have already been, women continue to be. Helen of Troy
was not essentially different from Madame de Pompadour; Cleopatra was a
more refined Catherine of Russia; Aspasia was the forerunner of Madame
Maintenon: Sappho was another "George Sand;" Lilly Langtry was a modern
Phryne; and Pauline Bonaparte had all the charm and voluptousness of
Nell Gwynne.
One reason why the Old Testament continues to be a modern book is, that
it is so full of human nature. Our first instinct, when we became
violently enraged is, _to kill_. In the Old Testament, they do it.
Considered as a mere human document, there is more raw slaughter in the
Old Testament than any book you ever read, and the details are given
with frightfully fascinating realism.
No cloak is thrown around Jacob and Abraham and Lot. Those citizens are
painted with all the warts on. In some of them, indeed, the warts fill
most of the canvass. That affair of David and the other man's wife: how
modern it is! If you will glance over the daily newspaper, you will find
that somewhere or other in this world of today, another David has seen
the loveliness of Uriah's wife; and the first thing you know this modern
David (in a Derby hat and tailor-made clothes) is running away with
Bathsheba in an automobile. As to Solomon and his harem--including the
Ethiopian woman--the subject is too delicate for polite treatment in a
high class publication. I must leave such matters to Mr. William
Randolph Hearst, whose Sunday editions and monthly outputs deal in "sex"
novels, Gaby Deslys, Lina Cavalieri, Evelyn Thaw, Mrs. Keppel, and
scarlet people generally.
The point I desired to make is that _God made men and women to mate with
one another_, and thus reproduce and perpetuate the human species.
There are no bachelor eagles, no spinster swans, no monks among the
lions, no nuns among the deer. When we want to make a bachelor out of a
horse, we resort to surgery. Most of us know what Mooley, the cow, does
in the Spring time, if she is shut up in the pasture with no other
company than other Mooley cows.
Without pursuing this line of illustration farther, it is sufficient to
say that _all animal nature is under the same law_. Of course, there are
exceptions to all rules. Some men repel women: some women abhor men.
Some men actually marry, believing that they are fit for it and then
discover that they are not. A tragic instance of this was Thomas
Carlyle: another was Frederick the Great. Our President James Buchanan
was wise enough _not_ to marry; and Charles Sumner was so fatuous as to
do so.
But the great law of Nature is, _Mate and reproduce_! It applies to the
flowers, to the plants, to the insects, to the fishes of the sea, and to
the fowls of the air. I have often wondered why we become so accustomed
to the outrageously informal conduct of hens and roosters, pigeons,
ducks, turkeys, &c., that we see it and don't see it: we know it, and
don't know it: it happens right under our eyes, and yet we never learn
anything from it, or think anything about it.
* * * * * * *
Once again, let me say, men and women in their animal natures are just
like other animals. They hunger, they thirst, they are hot, they are
cold, they are sick, they are well, they love, they hate, they fight,
they yearn for mates, and having found mates, _they mate_. Allowed
liberty, this natural tendency leads to wedlock, and legitimate
children. The husband and wife make the Home: the Home is the Gibraltar
of organized civilization; and the children are Posterity, in its
beginning. Thus marriage, the home, and the children are the
conservators of Society.
If a so-called "religion" _forces_ 71,000 American marriageable men and
women into hiding places, where they have physical contact with one
another but cannot marry, _what happens_?
You _know_ what happens. Your common sense tells you what happens. Your
own natural passions tell you what happens.
Those marriageable men and women--many of them young, handsome,
buxom,--are shut off from all the world, by thick walls, barred windows,
locked doors. The young buxom men can get to the young buxom women.
Either in the day-time or in the night, this physical access can be had,
_in secret_.
The men have been taught that they are gifted with supernatural powers;
and that they can forgive each other's sins. The women have been taught
that these men cannot sin, and that in serving these men they will be
serving God. Besides, if they _do_ sin with the priests, the priests can
forgive the sins. This being so, what happens, when the lustful young
priest slips into the cloistered convent, goes to the nun's bed-room and
solicits her to yield to _him_, as Mary yielded to the angel?
(See "Why Priests Should Wed." Page 103.)
The cloistered convent is built like a huge dungeon. The encircling
walls about it, are thick and high. No one enters in unto the unmarried
women excepting the bachelor priests.
_The Law does not enter!_
The Italian Pope draws his line around the dungeons of darkness and
mystery, and the civil authorities dare not go in.
Everybody knows that young women are caged in those hell-holes.
Everybody knows that burly, beefy, red-faced, thick-lipped young priests
glide in and out.
Everybody knows what _he_ would do, if _he_ had the pick of a score of
buxom girls, in a secret place, he being a bachelor and they being
without access to any man but _himself_.
If you were young and had no wife, you know what would happen, if you
were alone in a pretty girl's bed-room, and she were educated to yield
to you in _everything_.
Yet, these impudent rascals, the beefy Irish, Italian and German
priests, ask you to believe that they never even think of touching
those 56,000 American girls that are caged inside those walls:
Nevertheless, you _know_ it is against Nature for these young men not to
want to mate with those women. You _know_ that the cloistered convents
would not be built like Bastilles, and the world shut out, if there were
not something going on in there which they are afraid for the world to
see.
You _know_ that where cloistered convents are _built and managed like
jails, THEY ARE JAILS_!
Yet, those impudent rascals, gliding into the women, and coming out from
the women, tell you that although the women are taught to obey the
priest in all things, the priest never does say or do what every
full-sexed man would do and say, under the same circumstances.
The Turks had their harems, and they knew women--likewise, they knew
men. The Turks had walls, and bars, and locked gates, and sentinels
outside to watch. But the Turks knew how vain are walls, and barred
windows, locked gates and vigilant sentinels. Therefore, the Turks
always kept eunuchs in the harem itself, eunuchs whose watchful eyes
were ever upon those ladies of the harem. And the eunuchs were powerful
men, strong and fierce, _but unsexed_. They had the strength to guard
the women, _without the desire to enjoy_.
But the Roman Pope builds harems in all Christian lands--_harems for his
priests to whom he denies marriage_.
There are no eunuchs to guard these women. The men who go in unto them
are men of like passions as ourselves; and there is no eye to watch, no
tongue that will tell, _after_ the priest has gone inside.
* * * * * * *
Our common sense condemns this enforced celibacy which pagan popes
invented for their own selfish, ambitious purposes. Or rather, the Popes
borrowed it from the Turkish Sultans who would not allow their chosen
body-guard, the Janissaries, to marry. In course of time, the
Janissaries became more powerful than the Sultan, and they had to be
exterminated. The Pope's Janissaries are now more powerful than the
Pope; and the wretchedness of his position is that he can neither
massacre them, nor rob them of their women. Of all the exalted slaves
the world ever saw, the Pope is perhaps the most conspicuous example.
The Jesuits rule the priesthood; the Jesuits rule the cardinals; the
Jesuits rule the Pope--and the Jesuits have the pick of the most
beautiful women throughout the Christian world.
* * * * * * *
On such a system as this--a system which has denied so many millions of
men and women _the God-given right to live according to Nature_, history
ought to have much to say. What is the evidence and the verdict of
impartial History?
Let us try the case: let us call the witnesses and hear their evidence.
If the other side wants to be heard, the court is open. I will give them
as much space for the defense as I take for the prosecution. It shall be
a perfectly fair investigation. Remember, however, that the unmarried
men and the unmarried women have been hiding within the walls of
monasteries and convents, ever since Pope Gregory abolished God's
ordinance of marriage, and declared, virtually, that the Pope's will,
and not that of God Almighty, should govern priests and nuns. Remember
that there has been every effort made at concealment: that the dungeons
could not tell their awful secrets; that the light of day was jealously
shut out. Remember that the nun who willingly submitted to the priest
did not wish to expose their mutual guilt. Remember that the nun who was
_forced_, could seldom escape and give the alarm. Remember that the
babes born in the cloistered convents were seldom seen of men, and that
they could easily be thrown into the hidden vault, where the quick-lime
was ready to eat their bones. Remember that it was to the interest of
popery to screen the priests, and that the rulers of States were in
deadly fear of the wrath of Popes--wrath which sent death to Henry III.
of France, William of Orange, and Henry of Navarre. Remember further,
that when Popes kept acknowledged paramours and bastards in the Vatican,
the priests had nothing to fear on account of their turning the
nunneries into brothels. Those nuns whose vows were not broken, were the
ugly ones, the old and the ailing. The monks had such complete power
over wives through the Confessional, that many women inside the cloister
owed their immunity to the women outside.
There was a time, under popery, when no Italian husband was certain that
his wife's children were _his_: hence, for a time paternal affection in
Italy almost became extinct. There was a time, under popery, when every
Italian wife had an acknowledged lover--her _cicisbeo_--the priests
having paved the way. The husband kept a mistress; the wife, a lover;
and the priest enjoyed both wife and mistress, without bearing the
expense of either.
(See Sismondi's Hist. des Repub. d'Ital.)
There was a time, under popery, when it was assumed that every Spanish
woman had yielded to a priest. And of course a woman who takes one lover
will take another; and thus Spain went to moral perdition, with the
priests and the nuns in the lead.
The same thing was true of Portugal, and of all Southern Europe. Of
Mexico, Central and South America and Cuba, it would be a waste of words
to speak.
* * * * * * *
Pope Gregory VII. introduced the unnatural requirement of celibacy--the
forbidding of men and women to do what God had equipped them to do, and
prompted them, by sexual passions to do--the most powerful passions
known to humanity--passions which if not naturally gratified lead to
crimes of revolting enormity, to loss of health, to loss of mental
balance, to loss of shame, of normal desires, and of reason itself.
(Consult such books as Dr. Sanger's "History of Prostitution;"
Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, &c.)
Soon after enforced celibacy was introduced, an honest priest, Honorius
of Antrim wrote--
"Look at the convents of the nuns, places of debauchery! These
abominable women have not chosen the Virgin, but Phryne and Messalina as
their models. They prostrate themselves before the idol of Priapus!"
(Priapus was the male organ of generation, and was formerly to be seen
throughout Europe, especially at public fountains.)
King Edgar of England wrote--
"What shall I say of the clergy? We find nothing among them but
debauchery, excesses, orgies, and unchastity. Their abodes are
propitious for solitude, and yet they dwell there not for pious
meditation, but in order to lead lives of debauchery."
Pope Benedict VIII. at the Council of Pavia deplored the awful vices of
the unmarried clergy.
Nicholas Clemangis says--
"The monasteries are no longer sanctuaries devoted to the divinity, but
places of abomination and debauchery--rendezvous of young libertines.
Indeed, _to make a girl take the veil is equivalent to forcing her into
prostitution_."
The monks of the Middle Ages led a life full of orgies, equalling the
dissipations of Tiberius at Capri. "The concubines and prostitutes were
mistresses of the wealth of the monasteries and convents."
The good Catholic, Anselm of Bisate, wrote--
"The nuns are not more virtuous than the monks. Widows took the veil in
order to be free, and not bound to one man."
Instead of being the wife of one man, the nun could be the mistress of
several.
(Dr. Angelo Rappaport, p. 36.)
Why was it that Irenæus and Epiphanius poured out such unprintable
descriptions of the immorality of those "heretics" who refused to marry
and who professed to be virgins? Did these Fathers of the Christian
Church grossly slander those celibate heretics? Were the men and the
women who indulged in those sexual excesses, while pretending to be
chaste, any better or any worse than the human creatures of today?
Was Cyprian libelling his own brethren and sisters when he described how
depraved, how licentious, how sodom-like was the conduct of the
so-called "virgins" of his time? Cyprian lived in the third century
after Christ, and he was speaking of the same phase of Christianity
which provoked the immortal passage in Gibbon. Carrying their brazen
hypocrisy to unheard of lengths, the monks and the nuns occupied the
same beds, and yet unblushingly vowed that they had passed through this
fiery furnace without the smell of fire on their garments!
If I were to quote the Latin in which Cyprian exposes these shameless
harlots and libertines, the great and good U. S. Government would
perhaps _again_ prosecute me for telling the truth on Roman Catholicism.
_Popery is the one thing that you must not tell the truth about, unless
you are prepared to withstand boycott, abuse, persecution and threats
against your property and life!_
(The curious are cited to "Elliott on Romanism," Vol. II., p. 408, and
to Cyprian to Pompanius, Book II., p. 181.)
So well understood was it that young men and young women needed each
other, sexually, that both in the Latin and in the Greek there was a
distinctive name given to these "holy virgins." The "soul marriage" of
the ancient church was as much like the affinity doings of the present
day, as Solomon's carryings on were like those of the Sultan of Turkey.
To the testimony of Cyprian may be added that of Chrysostom, who
bewailed the utter licentiousness of the "virgins."
Since Bishop Udalric in the year 606 wrote of the skulls of the six
thousand infants found in draining off some fish ponds at the command of
Gregory the Great, the slaughter of the babes has gone steadily on.
"When Pope Gregory ascertained that _the infants thus killed were born
from the concealed fornications of and adulteries of the priests_, he
recalled his decree, extolling the apostolic command. It is better to
marry than to burn." (Elliott II., p. 409.)
Yet, when we are told the same story by Father Chiniquy, Dr. Justin
Fulton, ex-priest William Hogan, ex-priest Fresenborg, ex-priest Manuel
Ferrando, ex-nun Margaret Shepherd, ex-nun Maria Monk, ex-priest Blanco
White, ex-priest Seguin, and by such submissive Catholics as Erasmus,
Rabelais, Campanella and scores of other unimpeachable witnesses, we are
more inclined to listen to the impudent denials of the lecherous priests
than to the evidence of _those who escape AND TELL_!
The denial made by the unmarried priests is at variance with their
looks, is at variance with admitted facts, is at variance with what we
ourselves know of the overwhelming strength of our carnal desires: yet
the impudent denial is _so_ brazen, _so_ persistent, and _so_
threatening, that we either accept it, or enter the plea of _nolle
contendere_.
The accusation against the pretended virgins involves so many apparently
good men and chaste women, that we shrink from remembering the
difference between publicity and privacy; we forget that the treacherous
inclination is not felt in the church and in the crowd, but that it
creeps to the secret couch, under cover of night, when there is silence,
freedom from interruption and security from detection.
We forget how this passion takes advantage of night, of undress, and of
secret contact of the physical man and woman, to heat their normal
blood, _no matter how sanctified they may really be in their daily
visible life_.
"Saint" Bernard of the 10th century exhausts his wrath upon the hideous
vices of the monks and nuns "behind the partition." "What abominable
lust!" cries this stern old anchorite. He exclaims--
"Would that those who cannot rule their sexuality would fear to give
their conduct the name of celibacy. It is better to marry than to
burn.... Take away from the church honorable marriage and the undefiled
bed, and do you not fill it with concubines, incestuous persons,
onanists, male concubines, and with every kind of unclean person?"
(Bernard's Sermons V. 29, cited in Elliott, II., 410.)
Take away honorable marriage from the priests, and what do you get in
place of the bed undefiled? Read again that tremendous sentence of Saint
Bernard, and then ask yourself, _Has human nature changed_?
A typical illustration of priestly seduction is the following:
"A lady of the name of Maria Catharine Barni, of Santa Croe, declared on
her death-bed, that she had been seduced through the confessional, and
that she had during twelve years maintained a continual intercourse with
priest Pachiani. He had assured her _that by means of the supernatural
light which he had received from Jesus and the holy virgin_, he was
perfectly certain that neither of them was guilty of sin, &c." (Secrets
of Female Convents, p. 58, cited by Elliott, Vol. II., p. 448.)
Substantially, that is the way every priest seduces every nun who yields
to him.
Almost the very formula is mentioned in Dr. Justin D. Fulton's book
which was submitted to Anthony Comstock, the modern Cato, before it was
published. And Dr. Fulton asserts that Pope Pius IX. authorized this
concubinage of priests with nuns, _by a formal Vatican decree of 1866_.
Dr. Fulton says--page 97 of "Why Priests Should Wed"--
"In the year 1866, Pope Pius IX. sanctioned the establishment of one of
the most appalling institutions of immorality and wickedness ever
countenanced under the form and garb of religion."
Briefly, this institution authorized priests and nuns who had been in
service long enough to inspire confidence, to live in sexual relations,
like man and wife. Dr. Fulton proceeds at length to describe how the
priest selects his nun, how he makes his wishes known to her, how he
quotes Scripture to overcome her scruples, how the "love room" is
adorned with holy emblems and images, how the priest sprinkles holy
water over the bed, how he then kneels and prays for a blessing on the
union about to take place, and then----!
As I have said a number of times, Dr. Fulton submitted his manuscript to
Anthony Comstock. The chaste Cato of New York, advised the omission of
many passages; but the whole of this hideous chapter describing how
Pope Pius IX. authorized the priests to make use of the nuns, sexually,
appears in the book with sufficient clearness to lay it in parallel
columns with the abominations of Sodom, Gomorrha, the White Slave
Traffic, the Decameron, the Heptameron, and Balzac's Merry Tales of the
Abbeys of Touraine.
Dr. Fulton's book was published in 1888. _He was never prosecuted for
that terrible charge against Pope Pius IX._ He was never sued for
libelling the priests and nuns. His charges were never officially
denied.
Cardinal Gibbons wrote his mendacious book, "The Faith of our Fathers,"
for the purpose of answering all that had been said against Popery. He
mentioned Maria Monk by name, and denounced her true story as false.
Yet, although Gibbons published his book _sixteen years after Dr. Fulton
had hurled his awful charge against Pope Pius IX._, the Baltimore priest
dared not challenge the statement of Dr. Fulton!
Maria Monk--poor, outraged, persecuted woman, was dead: Dr. Justin D.
Fulton, a fearless, powerful man, _was alive_! Gibbons was brave enough
to vilely attack the dead woman: he was too much of a contemptible
coward to attack the living man.
The living man was ready with his evidence, _and he was a fighter_--and
the catlike Gibbons knew it.
Says Dr. Fulton--
"At first the female may be a little timid, &c. She may object, &c. But
the priest, representing God's angel in this office, gently soothes the
mind and quiets the fears of his future spouse by saying to her, He who
will _come upon thee_ is not man, but is the holy one of God, and this
union is pleasing to him;----."
(At this point Anthony Comstock must have blushed and raised an
objection, as the nun was doing, for the remainder of the sentence is
stricken out.)
But the text continues--"It will be holy and blessed; therefore I say
unto thee, as the angel said unto Mary, Fear not."
After this, the woman, being convinced by the language of heaven's
messenger that all is right, gives the priest complete assurance of her
willingness to submit by saying, as Mary said to the angel, "Be it done
unto me according to thy word."
Then Dr. Fulton so frankly indicates what takes place in that private
room, and upon that consecrated bed, that I really am curious to know
what it was that made Comstock blush, a few lines above those which thus
tell of the soliciting priest, the yielding nun, and the ready bed.
Now, if you will compare one case with another, from the time of the
early Fathers down to the present day, you will detect a similarity that
is appalling.
The testimony of Edward Gibbon, the skeptical historian, exactly accords
with that of Saint Cyprian, Chrysostom, Jerome and Bernard.
The memorable investigation which Duke Leopold of Tuscany caused to be
made of the cloistered convents of Italy revealed identically the same
cess-pools of vice that came to light in England when Henry VII.
uncovered the monasteries.
All the literature of the Renaissance, after men's minds and pens freed
themselves from the ignoble fear of popery, bear witness to the same
universal everlasting truth--_Men and women were made for each other,
and no so-called religion can annul the laws of Nature_.
* * * * * * *
When a "religion" sets up the claim that it can pardon sins, educate the
children to believe it, _destroys those who deny it_, and fixes a scale
of money-payments for the pardon of sins, what sort of fruit is that
kind of tree likely to bear?
If penance and payment rids me of sin, my conscience, like an unused
muscle, becomes enfeebled, and my proneness to sin is encouraged.
Pope Leo X. was the Vicar of Christ who ordered lists of sin to be drawn
up, with the price of the pardon opposite each sin.
(See History of Auricular Confession, by Count C. P. De Lasteyrie, Vol.
II., p. 132.)
I will quote only a few of these tariff rates established by this
Infallible Pope.
For allowing a ship to sail to convey merchandise to infidels, 100 d.
For the absolution of any one practising usury, 7 d.
For concubinage, 7 d.
For intimacy with a woman _in a church_, 6 d.
For pardon of him who has violated a virgin, 6 d.
For one who has committed incest, 5 d.
(The d. stands for the coin known as the ducat.)
Can you imagine anything more conducive to immorality, than a
"religion," sanctified by the name of Christ, which teaches that its
priests can forgive sins, and which publishes a list of market prices
for such forgiveness? Do you marvel that Roman Catholic countries are
the immoral countries? Do you wonder at the mania for vice and crime
among the lower Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese?
When a man could ravish a virgin for six ducats, what girl had any
safety except in the fear that libertines might have of her father or
her brother, or her sweetheart?
What sort of hell would we have in America if popery gained the upper
hand, _and the negro bucks were taught that they could buy pardons for
violating white women_?
God Almighty! It makes one sick to think that even now they are
admitting young black men to the priesthood.
What will _they do_, inside the cloistered convents?
No scream from within can be heard outside. Those dead walls tell no
tales. The Law dares not scrutinize the interiors where the negro
priests can penetrate; and we have no legal process to wring the dread
Secret out of the nun's cell!
The Pope's Empire has been erected inside our Republic; and those who
represent our State, and our Law, are afraid of the Italian Pope and the
laws of the Italian church!
* * * * * * *
When the Commissioners sent by King Henry VII. visited the monasteries,
the guilt of the inmates was so overwhelmingly evident that hardly any
attempt at denial was made. The Confession of the Prior and Benedictines
of St. Andrew's in Northampton is yet of record, and it is a fair
example. They confessed that they "had lived in idleness, gluttony, and
sensuality, for which the Pit of Hell was ready to swallow them up."
(Burnett, Book III., p. 227.)
Among the false "relics" that were found and which had long been used to
swindle ignorant believers out of their money, were a Wing of the Angel
that had brought to England the Spear which pierced Christ's side; some
of the coals that had roasted the Most Blessed Saint Anthony; numerous
pieces of "the true Cross;" a small bottle filled with Christ's blood; a
Crucifix which would sometimes bow its head, sometimes roll its eyes and
sometimes move its lips.
(All this fraudulent rubbish was seized, taken to London, and publicly
destroyed.)
Bishop Burnett says--
"But for the lewdness of the confessors of the Nunneries, and the great
corruption of that state, _whole houses being found almost all with
child_."
That was in the year 1535, in England! In the year 1910, when the
nunneries were suddenly broken up in Spain, exactly the same state of
affairs was discovered! Some of the nuns came out leading their
children: some were so far advanced in pregnancy that their condition
was evident to all--and as to how many little bones were left in the
underground vaults, God alone knows.
Bishop Burnett continues--
"The dissoluteness of Abbots, and the other monks, and the friars, not
only with whores, but married women, and their unnatural lusts and other
brutal practices, _these are not fit to be spoken of_, much less
enlarged on, in a work of this nature." ...
_The full report was destroyed_ by the fanatical papist Bishop Bonner,
at the beginning of the reign of Bloody Mary. (See "English
Reformation.") But Bishop Burnett saw extracts from it "concerning 144
Houses, that contains abominations in it, equal to any that were in
Sodom!"
Put this original evidence side by side with the confession already
quoted: put with it the testimony gathered by Duke Leopold of Tuscany:
add what Blanco White and Erasmus say; add what S. J. Mahoney and Manuel
Ferrando say: buttress this mass of evidence with what the Fathers of
the Church said, what all the escaped nuns and priests have alleged, and
compare this mountain of proof with what you _know_ about human
nature--and how can you harbor a doubt that nunneries and monasteries
are today what they always have been? They are houses of hidden
iniquity, and nameless crimes--_AND YOU KNOW IT_!
That marvellous man of letters, Erasmus, who _wrote_ for the
Reformation, but who left Luther and others to _fight for it_, says this
in his "Colloquies."--
"I hold up to censure those who entice lads and girls into monasteries
against their parents' wills, abusing their simplicity or superstition,
and persuading them that there is no chance of salvation but in the
cloister. If the world were not full of such anglers; if countless minds
had not been most miserably _buried alive_ in such places, then I have
been wrong in my conclusions. But if ever I am forced to _speak out_
what I feel upon this subject, I will paint the portrait of _these
kidnappers_, and so represent _the magnitude of the evil_, that every
one shall confess I have not been wrong."
(Quoted in Day's "Monastic Institutions," p. 239.)
The infamous Liguori--a Roman Catholic "Saint"--calmly assumes that many
inmates of the convents are captives, just as Erasmus had said they
were, and he lays down the law to these helpless, kidnapped captives
with all the malevolence of a grinning devil.
"Now that you are professed in a convent, and that _it is impossible for
you to leave it_," &c. (Monastic Institutions, p. 294.)
Liguori threatens the captive, telling the poor creature that if she
abandons herself to sadness and regret, _she will be made to suffer a
hell here_, and another hereafter.
In other words, _Smile, prisoner, smile! or we will make the convent a
hell to you_!
So says Saint Liguori, whose instructions to the priests, telling them
what filthy questions they must ask the Catholic women, are so "obscene"
that I was prosecuted by the Catholic Knights of Columbus for having
quoted some of them. If I had quoted all that Liguori wrote in coaching
the priests, _and teaching them virtually how to disrobe women of their
modesty as a prelude to their ruin_, I suppose the Government would have
ordered out the troops and had me shot.
Several times, Erasmus has been mentioned as one of the most terrific
accusers of the papal system, its frauds, impostures, greed, ferocity,
its fake miracles, its pagan adoration of images and relics, and its
rotten immorality. Perhaps it is due to the reader that I cite him to
"The Life and Letters of Erasmus," by the historian James A. Froude,
published in this country by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1895.
From this comparatively recent work, the student can most readily obtain
a general idea of Popery, as described by one who was a devout Catholic,
but not a blind, servile papist. Erasmus was practically an orphan boy,
of somewhat uncertain parentage, whose life mystery and romance inspired
Charles Read to write the greatest of all novels, "The Cloister and the
Hearth."
Mr. Froude tells the painful story of the forcing of Erasmus into
monastic vows; and then follows him as he develops into the most learned
and brilliant scholar of Europe.
Never a robust man, always more or less an invalid, Erasmus remained
inside the Roman pale, but abhorred the inherent vices of _the system_,
denounced those vices with a pen of fire, endured the terrors and
agonies of persecution within his church, was bitterly abused by the
vile priesthood whose putrid lives he uncovered, was menaced by the
dread Inquisition, and really suffered more keenly the penalties than
Luther did, _for telling the truth on popery_.
Luther, a bull-necked, fearless _Man_, broke out, and fought popery from
the outside. Erasmus, like many of his predecessors, tried to reform it
_from within_, and he discovered at last that he might as well have been
trying to reform hell.
The enraged monks and monkesses did not murder Erasmus, as they had
murdered Savonarola, Huss, Jerome, &c.; but it was because the Pope had
his hands full of other matters, and the time was not favorable for
burning the most illustrious scholar of Christendom.
What did Erasmus say and write and publish against the vast parasitical
growth of paganism, fraud and imposture that had overgrown Christianity
under the pope?
Read his "Praise of Folly," which has been translated into English and
can be had through any book-dealer.
When you read it, remember that Erasmus was never answered, save by
_abuse and threats_.
In his letters to the Prothonotary of the Pope, letters written for the
Pope to read, and which the Pope did read, Erasmus arraigns the
unmarried clergy of Rome, her monks and her nuns, her monasteries and
her convents, in the same terms that are used by the Preamble to the Act
of the British Parliament which stated that reasons for the dissolution
of these Romish hell-holes.
The accusations fathered by Erasmus and laid before the Pope, agree in
every essential particular with the revelations of Blanco White, of S.
J. Mahoney, William Hogan, Joseph McCabe, Bishop Manuel Ferrando,
Margaret Shepherd, Maria Monk, and every other witness who has had the
courage to uncover these papal dens of infamy, torture, vice and crime.
I have not the space to quote at any length from the Letters of Erasmus:
get the book and read it for yourself.
But weigh this passage--
"Men are threatened or tempted into vows of celibacy. _They can have
license to go with harlots_, but they must not marry wives.
They may keep concubines and remain priests. If they take wives, they
are thrown to the flames.
Parents who design their children for a celibate priesthood _should
emasculate them in their infancy_, instead of forcing them, reluctant or
ignorant, _into a furnace of licentiousness_."
What was this furnace of licentiousness? The cloistered convent, or the
monastery.
In his notes to the New Testament, a Greek translation of which Erasmus
made, he said, after alluding to St. Paul's injunction about the "one
wife," that the priests could commit homicide, parricide, incest,
piracy, sodomy and sacrilege: "_these_ can be got over, but _marriage is
fatal_."
He adds that of all the enormous herds of priests, "very few of them are
chaste."
In his letter to Lambert Grunnius, (in the year 1514) Erasmus gives an
awful picture of monastic slavery in houses "_which are worse than
brothels_."
But once a young man is entrapped, there is no escape. "They may repent,
but the superiors will not let them go, _lest they should betray the
orgies which they have witnessed_."
Then Erasmus tells of instances where men were buried alive inside the
monasteries to prevent their escape. "Dead men tell no tales!"
Remember, reader! Erasmus was writing to the Pope's own Prothonotary, in
order that the "Holy Fathers" might of a surety _know_ what was going on
inside the monastic houses! And in reply, the Prothonotary, Lambert
Grunnius, writes to Erasmus--
"I read your letter aloud to the Pope, from end to end: several
cardinals and other great persons were present. The Holy Father was
charmed with your style!"
And the Holy Father waxes wroth at some personal grievances of Erasmus,
and granted _him_ relief from monkish diabolism; but what was done to
correct the frightful conditions which Erasmus had brought to the Pope's
personal attention?
Nothing! Absolutely nothing. It was the same way when the exposures were
made in Spain, when they were made in Tuscany, when they were made in
England, when they were made in the Philippines! The answer of Rome is
ever the same: _Nothing can be done_.
The Pope _knows_ what enforced male celibacy does, when screened from
the civil law behind thick walls, _and given unlimited license among
young women, who cannot resist, and who cannot tell_!
And you _know_ that the Pope _does_ know--for he also is a male like me
and you.
Again, Erasmus asks what would Saint Augustine say _now_, if he were to
see these convents and monasteries become "public brothels."
In those standard works, "The History of Prostitution" and "Human
Sexuality," you will learn the fearful fact that the utter lewdness of
nuns and of wives who had been debauched by the priests, became so
universal that _the trade of the professional harlot was almost entirely
taken away from her_. Why should loose men _pay_, when there were so
many places of gratuitous entertainment?
(Lest you heed the deceptive talk which endeavors to convince you that
the old tree is now bearing different fruit, read Hogan's "Popish
Nunneries," McCabe's "Ten Years in a Monastery," McCarthy's up-to-date
"Priests and People in Ireland;" and the astounding, undenied statements
of Bishop Manuel Ferrando, in "The Converted Catholic" magazine of New
York City.)
In Delisser's powerful book, "Pope, or President?" there is a masterly
summing up against "Romanism as revealed by its own writers."
Among other witnesses, he cites the evidence of Mahoney, the priest who
was examined by a Committee of the House of Commons.
"A very nefarious use was made of convents," testified this honest
Irishman. His disclosures corroborated what another honest Irish priest,
Hogan, said several centuries later.
"A woman ... is seduced into a convent to live in sin with the bishop
and other confessors. It is not human to place a priest where he is
allowed to fall, and suppose him innocent. Reader, commit your daughter
to the soldier or hussar who can marry her, rather than to a Romish
priest." ("Pope, or President," p. 59.)
In fact, Delisser's chapter on "Convent Exposed" is one of the most
frightful that I ever read--doubly frightful because the Romanist
writers therein quoted _assume it to be their right_ to mistreat women,
just as they please!
It is only in such a chapter, composed of citations from orthodox Roman
Catholics, that you can obtain anything like a true conception of _the
priest's point of view_.
They have the right to kidnap children: they have a right to restrain
prisoners; they have a right to compel obedience: they have a right to
shut out the State and its law: they have a right to punish the
refractory, to flog the unruly girl, to starve her into submission, to
degrade her with disgusting services, to use her person for their lusts!
_That is the priest's point of view!_
Study the horrible "theology" of Dens and Liguori: read what popes have
said in denial of a layman's right to criticise a priest; read what Rev.
Blanco White said of the systematic depravity of Romanism.
Cardinal Newman had to acknowledge that Blanco White was a man or
irreproachable character, "a man you can trust." "I have the fullest
confidence in his word," &c.
And what does this ex-Catholic, for whom Cardinal Newman vouched, have
to say about convents?
"I cannot," says he, "find tints sufficiently dark to portray the
miseries which I have witnessed in convents. Crime, in spite of the
spiked walls and prison gates is there. The gates of the holy prison are
forever closed upon the inmates: _force and shame_ await them wherever
they might fly."
Then the ex-priest tells the tragic story of his two sisters, virtually
tortured to death in the Spanish convent, he being a witness to their
misery and powerless to relieve it. The system held them all!
He continues--
"Of all the victims of the church of Rome, _the nuns_ deserve the
greatest sympathy."
White's book was published in 1826. Like "Pope, or President," published
in 1859, it is now out of print. Only at long intervals may you see a
copy advertised in the catalogues of Old-book stores. _Some_ agency has
been most active in destroying anti-Catholic books, and keeping them out
of our Public Libraries.
Consider this sentence in Hume's "History of England," Vol. II., p.
592.
"Monstrous disorders are therefore said to have been found in many of
the religious houses, _whole convents of women abandoned to lewdness_;
signs of abortions procured, _OF INFANTS MURDERED_, of unnatural lusts
between persons of the same sex."
Did poor Margaret Shepherd, or Maria Monk make any accusations that were
worse than these which we find in a standard history of England?
In Aubrey's "Rise and Growth of the English People," the indictment
against the convents and the monasteries is equally severe. See Vol. I.,
p. 80 and 81.
In Lecky's "History of European Morals," we have exactly the same
arraignment of this unnatural and polluting system.
In Bower's "History of the Popes," in Hallam's "Constitutional History
of England," and in every trustworthy account of the system of enforced
celibacy we have the same horrible, _but natural_, description of the
lives led by those full-sexed members of both sexes, who cannot mate
legally and decently, but who are given access to each other under cover
of night, behind the curtain of thick walls, and with the assurance
that, _so long as no scandal leaks out_, no notice will be taken of what
is done inside the "holy" brothel.
The very language in which the virgin girl is made to pledge herself as
"the spouse of Christ," is so abominably obscene and suggestive that it
is bound to plant impure curiosity in her mind--and, with a girl,
_impure curiosity_ is the lure to the fall. Not especially wishing to be
again indicted for quoting the Pope's nasty language, I will forbear.
Even in the Latin, it is so vile, lewd, lascivious, filthy, _and nasty_,
that I marvel how any white woman, under any circumstances, can allow a
beast of a man to use that language to her, _and not slap his face_.
The language is quoted in "Pope, or President," pages 86 and 360. The
"Nun Sanctified," of "Saint" Alphonsus Liguori, and the Theology of
Peter Dens will give the reader a fairly correct idea of what sort of a
slave the priests make of a woman, _after_ she has been ensnared into
taking the black veil.
In the famous investigation of the convents of Tuscany, in 1775, one of
the nuns gave testimony which, is singularly piquant and unique.
Besides, it remained uncontradicted. The name of the witness was Sister
Flavia Peraccini. After telling of many escapades she had witnessed
inside the convents, and of many merry times the priests and the nuns
had with one another, Sister Flavia Peraccini deposed--
"A monk said to me that if a nun's veil were placed on one pole, and a
monk's cowl on another, so great is the sympathy between the veil and
the cowl they would come together, _and unite_." ("Unite" is the modest
word: "copulate," is _meant_.)
"I say," continues the Sister, "I say, and repeat it, that whatever the
Superiors know, they do not know _the least portion_ of the great evils
that pass between the monks and the nuns."
The foregoing is a mere trifle compared to the whole amount of the
undisputed testimony taken by Duke Leopold of Tuscany in 1775. Have men
and women changed? Is human nature the same?
It was for all people and all ages that the inspired writer wrote--
"Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let _every man_ have his own wife;
and let _every woman_ have her own husband." (I. Cor. 7:12.)
The most powerful argument and authority against the Roman papacy on
this question _is that of Jesus Christ_.
Virtually, he said that _a man must make himself a eunuch_--if not born
so--_before he could live like a eunuch_!
If the word of Christ is not conclusive and binding, where shall we seek
the truth?
The trouble with papists is, they are educated outside of the Bible and
common sense; and they seldom free their minds from the priestly
domination established in childhood.
(THE END.)
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