The Project Gutenberg eBook of Woman, Church and State, by Matilda Joslyn Gage.

[75] The Romish religion teaches that if you omit to name anything in confession, however repugnant or revolting to purity which you even doubt having committed, your subsequent confessions are thus rendered null and sacrilegious. Chiniquy.—The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, p. 202. Study the pages of the past history of England, France, Italy, Spain, etc., and you will see that the gravest and most reliable historians have everywhere found instances of iniquity in the confessional box which their order refused to trace. Ibid, p. 175. It is a public fact which no learned Roman Catholic has ever denied that auricular confession became a dogma and obligatory practice of the church only at the Lateran Council, in the year 1215, under Pope Innocent III. Not a single trace of auricular confession as a dogma can be found before that year. Ibid, p. 239. Auricular confession originated with the early heretics, especially with Marcius. Bellarmin speaks of it as something to be practiced. But let us hear what the contemporary writers have to say on this question: “Certain women were in the habit of going to the heretic Marcius to confess their sins to him. But as he was smitten with their beauty, and they loved him also, they abandoned themselves to sin with him.”—Ibid, p. 234.

[76] Disraeli, who is most excellent authority, declared the early English edition of the Bible contained 6,000 errors, which were constantly introduced and passages interpolated for sectarian purposes or to sustain new creeds; sometimes, indeed, they were added for the purpose of destroying all scriptural authority by the use of texts.

The revisors of the New Testament found 150,000 errors, interpolations, additions and false translations in the King James or common version.

[77] Cardinal Wolsey complained to the Pope that both the secular and regular priests were in the habit of committing actions for which if not in orders, they would have been promptly executed.

The claim of direct inspiration from God exists equally among Protestants as among Catholics, and even among the Unitarians, who deny Christ’s divinity. A notable instance of this kind, both because of the high scientific and moral character of the clergyman, took place in the pulpit of the May Memorial Church, Syracuse, N.Y., December 4th, 1887, as reported in the Morning Standard of the 5th.

Luther declared that priests believed themselves to be as superior to the laity in general as males were held superior to females.

[78] The legal wife of a priest was termed “An Unhallowed Thing,” while mistresses and concubines were known as “The Hallowed Ones,” “The Honored Ones.” In parts of France, especially in Paris, the latter epithet was common as applied to a priest’s mistress.—Michelet.

[79] Heloise sacrificed herself on account of the impediments the church threw in the way of the married clergy’s career of advancement. As his wife he would lose the ascending ladder of ecclesiastical honors, priory, abbacy, bishopric, metropolitane, cardinalate, and even that which was above and beyond all. Milman.—Latin Christianity.

[80] In 1558 one Walter Mill was indicted, one article of his accusation being his assertion of the lawfulness of sacerdotal marriage. He was condemned to the stake and burned. Taine.—English Literature.

[81] An old doctrine which often turns up again in the middle ages. In the seventeenth century it prevailed among the convents of France and Spain. Michelet.—La Sorcerie, p. 258.

[82] They made the vilest use of the doctrine that Christ was born of a Virgin, using this as an example for woman to be followed.—Ibid, p. 259.

[83] They must kill sin by being more humble and lost to all sense of pride through sin. This was the Quietist doctrine introduced by a Spanish priest, Molinos, who claimed it as the result of an inner light or illumination. He declared that “Only by dint of sinning can sin be quelled.”

[84] “Let not this surprise you,” replied the abbot, “My sanctity is not the less on this account because that abides in the soul, and what I now ask of you is only a sin of the body. Do not refuse the grace heaven sends you.” Boccaccio.—Decameron.

[85] Taine—Eng. Lit. I, 363.

[86] The unmarried state of the clergy was in itself one of the chief causes of sexual excess. The enormously numerous clergy became a perilous plague for female morality in town and village. The peasants endeavored to preserve their wives and daughters from clerical seduction by accepting no pastor who did not bind himself to take a concubine. In all towns there were brothels belonging to the municipality, to the sovereign, to the church, the proceeds of which flowed into the treasury of proprietors.

[87] Draper.—Intellectual Development of Europe, 498.

[88] Men in orders are sometimes deceived by the devil that they marry unrighteously and foredo themselves by the adulteries in which they continue. Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical, 437.

There is ground for the assumption that the Canon which bound all the active members of the church to perpetual celibacy, and thus created an impenetrable barrier between them and the outer world, was one of the efficient methods in creating and sustaining both the temporal and spiritual power on the Romish Church. Taine.—English Literature.

[89] All steps are necessary to make up the ladder. The vices of men become steps in the ladder one by one as they are remounted. The virtues of man are steps indeed, necessary not by any means to be dispensed with, yet though they create a fair atmosphere and a happy future, they are useless if they stand alone. The whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desires to enter the way. Seek it by plunging into the mysterious and glorious depth of your inmost being. Seek it by testing all experience, by utilizing the senses in order to understand the growth of meaning of individuality and the beauty and obscurity of those other divine fragments which are struggling side by side with you and from the race to which you belong.—Light on the Path, Rule XX.

[90] “What in the world makes you look so sullen?” asked the young man as he took his arm and they walked towards the palace. “I am tormented with wicked thoughts,” answered Eugene gloomily. “What kind? They can easily be cured.” “How?” “By yielding to them.” Dialogue in Balzac’s Pere Goriot.

[91] 1st Corinthians VII, 36.

[92] Limbrock.—History of the Inquisition.

[93] Carema reported that the parish priest of Naples was not convicted though several women deposed that he had seduced them. He was, however, tortured, and suspended for a year, when he again entered his duties.

[94] Lea.—Sacerdotal Celibacy, p. 422.

The secrecy with which the Inquisition worked may be conjectured from the fact that during the whole time its officers were busy gathering evidence upon which to condemn Galileo, his friends in Rome, none of whom occupied high position in the church, not only did not suspect his danger, but constantly wrote him in the most encouraging terms.

[95] The acts of the Metropolital Visitation of the Archbishops of Wareham states that in the Diocese of Bangor and St. Davids, in time of Henry VIII., more than eighty priests were actually presented for incontinence.

[96] Against this separation the bitter animosity of Pope Leo XIII. was seen in his refusal of the gifts tendered him by the royal family of Italy at the time of his jubilee.

[97] And the summary was not brief. Dwight.—Roman Republic in 1849, p. 115. Pope John XIII., having appeared before the council to give an account of his conduct, he was proved by thirty-seven witnesses, the greater part of whom were bishops and priests, of having been guilty of fornication, adultery, incest, sodomy, theft and murder. It was also proved by a legion of witnesses that he had seduced and violated 300 nuns.—The Priest, Woman and Confessional, p. 268.

Henry III., bishop of Liege, was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children. Lecky.—Hist. European Morals, p. 350. This same bishop boasted at a public banquet that in twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. Ibid, Vol. 2, p. 349. It was openly asserted that 100,000 women in England were made dissolute by the clergy. Draper.—Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 498.

[98] Familiar Discourses and other works. In Rome are born such a multitude of bastards that they are constrained to build particular monasteries, where they are brought up and the pope is named their father. When any great processions are held in Rome, then the said bastards go all before the pope.—Familiar Discourses, 383.

After Pope Gregory confirmed celibacy he found 6,000 heads of infants in a fish pond, which caused him to again favor the marriage of priests.—Ibid. Bishop Metz, to my knowledge, hath lost the annual revenue of 500 crowns, which he was wont to receive from the county for pardoning of whoring and adultery.—Ibid, 260.

[99] In 1874, an old Catholic priest of Switzerland, about to follow Pere Hyacinthe’s example in abandoning celibacy, announced his betrothal in the following manner: “I marry because I wish to remain an honorable man. In the seventeenth century it was a proverbial expression, ‘As corrupt as a priest,’ and this might be said today. I marry, therefore, because I wish to get out of the Ultramontane slough.”—Galignani’s Messenger, September 19, 1874.

[100] See Biographical Sketch. (Died January 16, 1899.)

[101] pp. 86 to 140.

[102] To be found in The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional.

[103] Ibid, p. 77-8.

[104] Ibid, p. 287.

[105] A Shenandoah correspondent of the Pittsburgh Commercial Advertiser, June 5, 1885, wrote:

SHENANDOAH, PA., June 5.—Father Wolonski, of this place, the only priest of the Uniate Greek Church in this country, has been recalled to Europe.

The Uniate Greek Church, it will be remembered, comprehends those Christians who, while they follow the Greek rite, observe the general discipline of the Greek Church and make use of the Greek liturgy, are yet united with the Church of Rome, admitting the double procession of the Spirit and the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff, and accepting all the doctrinal decisions subsequent to the Greek schism which have force as articles of faith in the Roman Church. The usage of the Church as to the law of celibacy is, with the consent of the Roman Pontiff, the same as among the other Greeks, and Father Wolonski brought a wife with him to Shenandoah when he came here last December. This fact has made both the priest and his religion, subjects of great importance here, and the attention they have received has resulted in his recall to Limberg, Austria, the see of the diocese from which he was transferred here.

FATHER WOLONSKI AND THE ARCHBISHOP.

When Father Wolonski arrived in Philadelphia he visited the Cathedral and sought an interview with Archbishop Ryan, but when that gentlemen then came to Shenandoah, as directed by Bishop Sembratowicz, of Limberg, who sent him on his mission, Father O’Reilly, of the Irish Catholic Church, warned his congregation, under pain of excommunication, to shun the church and priest, at the same time tacitly denying that the Roman Church recognized the right of any priest to marry. The matter led to great controversy, during which Father Wolonski established his congregation, and arrangements have been made for the erection of a church. To avoid further trouble, however, the Bishop of Limberg has selected and sent an unmarried priest to succeed him, and Father Wolonski will return to Austria. Father Wolonski is an intelligent and highly-educated gentleman, and has made a large number of friends during the few months he has been here. He speaks several languages, and during his stay here acquired a remarkable knowledge of English. He has worked incessantly since his arrival here for the temporal as well as the spiritual comfort of his people, and has made a large circle of acquaintances, who will regret his departure from the town.

[106] And yet the world “does move,” and the experience of the church is much that of the big elephant Jumbo, who in opposing his vast form to a train of cars met his death at the engine.

[107] The Chili mantas and skirts of white flannel are worn by penitentes, or women who have committed some heinous sin and thus advertise their penitence; or those who have taken some holy vow to get a measure nearer heaven, and go about the street with downcast eyes, looking at nothing and recognizing no one. They hover about the churches, and sit for hours crouched before some saint or crucifix, saying prayers and atoning for their sin. In the great Cathedral at Santiago, and in the smaller churches everywhere, these penitentes, in their snow-white garments, are always to be seen, on their knees, or posing in other uncomfortable postures, and looking for all the world like statues carved in marble. In the Santiago Cathedral they cluster in large groups around the confessionals, waiting to receive absolution from some fat and burly father, that they may rid their bodies of the mark of penitence they carry and their souls of sin. Some of them make vows, or are sentenced by their confessors to wear their white shrouds for a certain time, while others assume them voluntarily until they have assurance from their priest that their sin is atoned for. Ladies of the highest social position and great wealth are commonly found among the penitentes, as well as young girls of beauty and winning grace. Even the wives of merchants and bankers wander about the streets with all but their eyes covered with this white mantle, which gives notice to the world that they have sinned. The women of Chili are as pious as the men are proud, and this method of securing absolution is quite fashionable. Those souls that cannot be purged by this penitential dress retire to a convent in the outskirts of the city called the Convent of the Penitents, where they scourge themselves with whips, mortify the flesh with sackcloth, sleep in ashes and upon stone floors, and feed themselves on mouldy crusts. Some stay longer and some a less time in these houses of correction, until the priests by whose advice they go there, give them absolution; but it is seldom that the inmates are men. They are usually women who have been unfaithful to their marriage vows, or girls who have yielded to temptation. After the society season, after the carnival, at the end of the summer when people return from the fashionable resorts, and at the beginning of lent these places are full, and throngs of carriages surround them, waiting to bear back to their homes the belles who are sent here and can find no room to remain. For those whose sins have been too great to be washed out by this process, for those whose shame has been published to the world and are unfitted under social laws to associate with the pure, other convents are open, established purposely as a refuge or House of Detention. Young mothers without husbands are here cared for, and their babes are taken to an orphan asylum in the neighborhood to be reared by the nuns for the priesthood and other religious orders. It is the practice for parents to send wayward daughters to these homes, while society is given to understand that they are elsewhere visiting friends or finishing their education. After a time they return to their families and no questions are asked.

[108] Too long have the people out of respect for the church, maintained silence in the presence of gross abuses, while their families have been ruined. I am a husband and a father, and I do not wish the honor of my name and my family to be at the mercy of a wolf who may introduce himself with the viaticum in his hands. I am a father, and I do not wish that the sacred candor of my child should be exposed to the lecherous attempts of a wretch in a soutane. The religious authorities are on the eve of witnessing honest men follow their wives, their daughters, and even their little boys to the confessional, to assure themselves if the hand that holds there the balance of divine justice is the hand of a respectable man or the hand of a blackguard who should receive the lash in public with his neck in the pillory.—Letter from a gentleman. A recent article in the Canada “Review” asks if after giving to the clergy riches, respect and the highest positions, it is too much to ask that they should leave to the people their wives? Our wives and daughters whom they steal from us by the aid of religion, and more especially of the confessional. An immediate, firm and vigorous reform is needed. Our wives and daughters must be left alone. Let the clergy keep away from the women, and religion and the Catholics will be better off. This must be done and at once.—Montreal Correspondence of the Toronto Mail, September 15, 1892.

[1] Maine says the bodies of customary law which were built up over Europe were in all matters of first principles under ecclesiastical influence, but the particular application of a principle once accepted were extremely various.

[2] The Council held at Winchester in time of Archbishop Le Franc contained a constitution that a marriage without the benediction of a priest should not be deemed a legitimate marriage. Ecclesiastical law as allowed in this country (Great Britain), from earliest times the presence of a priest was required to constitute a legal marriage. Reeves.—History of English Law.

[3] Reeves History of English Law is a full and comprehensive history of the English Law, accurate and judicious as well as full. Lord Mansfield is said to have advised its author. In this work the student is presented with all that is necessary that he should know of the earliest law books. Bracton, Glanville and Fleta carefully collected and presented. Reeves History of English Law, says Chancellor Kent, contains the best account that we have of the progress of the law from the time of the Saxons to the reign of Elizabeth. Sherwood.—Professional Ethics.

[4] Hefele’s, Acts of Councils.

[5] Church and priestly property is still untaxed in the United States. At an early day the clergy were not required to sit on juries nor permitted to cast a vote.

[6] Giessler, Ecclesiastical History.

[7] Doctrines in the Canon Law most favorable to the power of the clergy are founded in ignorance, or supported by fraud and forgery, of which a full account is found in Gerard. See Mem. de l’Acad. des Inscript., Tom 18, p. 46. Also Voltaire’s essay upon general history.

[8] “Whenever Canon Law has been the basis of legislation, we find the laws of succession sacrificing the interests of daughters and wives.” “Du Cange, in his Glossary, voc Casia Christianitatis, has collected most of the causes with respect to which the clergy arrogated an exclusive jurisdiction, and Giannone, in the Civil History of Naples, lib. 19, sec. 3, has arranged these under proper heads scrutinizing the pretensions of the church.”

[9] “Canons were made from time to time to supply the defects of the common law of the church; so were statutes added to enforce both Common and Canon Law. The greater part of the statutes made before the Reformation, which concerns the church and clergy, are directly leveled against violence committed against the possession of persons by the minister or the king, and against the encroachments of the Temporal Courts upon the spiritual jurisdiction.”

[10] “Phantastic romanticists and calculating persons have endeavored to represent this period as the age of morality and sincere reverence for woman.... The ‘Service of Love’ preached by French, German, and Italian knights, was supposed to prove the high respect paid to the women of that day. On the contrary, this period succeeded in destroying the little respect for the female sex which existed at its commencement. The knights both in town and country were mostly coarse, licentious men.... The chronicles of the times swarm with tales of rape and violence on the part of nobles in the country, and still more in the towns where they were exclusive rulers up to the XIII. and XIV. centuries, while those subjected to this degraded treatment were powerless to obtain redress. In the towns the nobles sat on the magistrates bench, and in the country criminal jurisdiction was in the hands of the lord of the manor, squire or bishop.”

[11] The first article of the famous Code of Love was “Marriage is not a legitimate excuse against love.”

[12] This was Christine’s first work. Her success was so great that she supported a family of six persons by her pen.

[13] Wright. Womankind in Europe.

[14] “The Fathers seem to have thought dissolution of marriage was not lawful on account of the adultery of the husband, but that it was not absolutely unlawful for a husband whose wife had committed adultery to re-marry.”

[15] The preference of males over females in succession was totally unknown to the laws of Rome. Brothers and sisters were entitled to equal parts of the inheritance. Blackstone.—Commentaries.

[16] No marriage could take place after 12 M., which is even now the rule of the English Established Church. The decrees of the Plenary Council, Baltimore 1884, tend to the establishment of similar regulations in our own country.

[17] The New Testaments of sixty years since, contained a list of relatives commencing with grandfather and grandmother, whom a man and woman might not marry.

[18] The policy of the church was to persuade mankind that the cohabitation of a man and woman was in itself unholy, and that nothing but a religious bond or sacrament could render it inoffensive in the eyes of God. Pike.—History of Crime in England, I, 90.

[19] This law held good in Protestant England until within the last decade.

[20] The church visited its penalties upon the innocent as well as guilty; when any man remained under excommunication two months, his wife and children were interdicted and deprived of all doctrines of the church but baptism and repentance. Lea.—Studies in Church History.

[21] In England, until the reign of William and Mary, women were refused the benefit of clergy.

[22] In the hands of such able politicians it (marriage), soon became an engine of great importance to the papal scheme of an universal monarchy over Christendom. The innumerable canonical impediments that were invented and occasionally dispensed with by the Holy See, not only enriched the coffers of the church, but give it a vast ascendant over persons of all denominations, whose marriages were sanctioned or repudiated, their issue legitimated or bastardized ... according to the humor or interest of the reigning pontiff.—Commentaries 3, 92.

[23] The word Liber, free, the solar Phre of Egypt, and Liber, a book, being as has been shown, closely connected, the bookish men of Bac, Boc, Bacchus, were comparatively free from the rule of the warrior class, both in civil and military point of view, and thence arises our benefit of clergy. If the benefit of clergy depends upon a statute, it had probably been obtained by the priests to put their privilege out of doubt. It has been a declaratory statute, although, perhaps, every man who was initiated could not read and write, yet I believe every man who could read and write was initiated, these arts being taught to the initiated only in very early times. It has been said that the privilege of clergy was granted to encourage learning. I believe it was used as a test, as a proof that a man was of, or immediately belonging to, the sacred tribe, and therefore exempt from the jurisdiction of the court in which he had been tried. If he were accused he said nothing; if found guilty he pleaded his orders and his reading. I have little doubt that the knowledge of reading and letters were a masonic secret for many generations, and that it formed part of the mysterious knowledge of Eleusis and other temples.—Anacalypsis, 2, 271-2.

[24] Woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed of the very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual penance on account of the curses she had brought upon the world. She should be ashamed of her dress, for it is the memorial of her fall. She should especially be ashamed of her beauty, for it is the most potent instrument of the demon.... Women were even forbidden by a provincial council, in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the eucharist in their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained. Lecky.—Hist. European Morals.

[25] No woman can witness a will in the State of Louisiana today.

[26] Blackstone says whosoever wishes to form a correct idea of Canon Law can do so by examining it in regard to married women.—Commentaries.

[27]. Blondell, a learned Protestant who died in 1659, fully proved Isidore’s collection of the Decretal Epistles of the popes of the first three centuries, to be all forged and a shameless imposture, says Collier.

[28] The famous law of Constantine, attached to the Theodosian Code, by virtue of which a prodigious and monstrous jurisdiction was formerly attributed to bishops, or to the hieratic order, though in reality that law was never a part of the aforesaid code, at the end of which it is found. Seldon.—Dissertation on Fleta, p. 101.

At time of Valentinian neither bishops nor the Consistories could, without the consent of the contracting lay parties, take cognizance of their causes.... Because, says that emperor, it is evident that bishops and priests have no court to determine the laws in, neither can they according to the imperial constitutions of Arcadius and Honorius, as is manifest from the Theodosian body, judge of any other matters than those relating to religion. Thus the aforesaid Emperor Valentinian. Neither do I think that the above sanction as extravagant, obtained a place at the end of the Theodosian Code, or was under the title of Episcopis, by any other manner posted into my manuscript, than by the frauds and deceits, constantly, under various pretenses, made use of by the hieratical orders, who endeavored to shape right or wrong, according to the custom of those ages, not to mention others, sovereign princes and republics of their authority and legal power, by this means under the cloak of religion, its constant pretext, most strenuously serving their own ends and ambition.—Ibid, 107.

[29] See Reeves.—History of English Law.

[30] Draper.—Conflict of Science and Religion.

[32] Declaration of judges in the famous case of Evans and Ascuith. Vaughn said in a later case of the same kind, “If Canon Law be made part of the law of this land, then it is as much a law of the land and as well, and by the same authority as any other part of the law of the land.”

[33] Gibson was archdeacon of Surrey, Rector of Lambeth, and Chaplain of his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (Primate of all England and Metropolitan) to whom the Jurus was dedicated. The work said: “The foreign is what we commonly call the body of Canon Law, consisting of the Canons of Councils, Decrees of Popes and the like, which obtained in England by virtue of their own authority (in like manner as they did in other parts of the Western Church), till the time of the Reformation, and from that time have continued upon the foot of consent, usage and custom. For which distinction we have no less warrant than an act of Parliament, made at the very time when those foreign laws were declared to be no longer binding by their own authority.... We have a plain declaration that foreign laws became part of the law of England by long use and consent.” Gibson.—Codex Jurus Ecclesiasticum Anglican.