religious thought, was that of the Paraclete in the 12th century under
Heloise. Its teachings that belief was dependent upon knowledge,
attacked the primal church tenet, that belief depends upon faith alone.
The convent of Port Royal des Champs during the 17th century exerted
much influence. Its abbess, the celebrated Mother Angelique Arnault,
was inducted into this office in her eleventh year upon death of her
abbess-aunt whose co-adjutrix she had been. This convent, both in
person of the nuns as well as the monks connected with it, became a
protest against the jesuitical doctrine of the seventeenth century, and
like the Paraclete is intimately connected with reform questions in the
Catholic Church. Notwithstanding such evidences of woman’s organizing
mind and governing qualities under the most favorable conditions, as
well as of piety so unquestioned as to have produced a long calendar of
female saints, the real policy of the church remained unchanged; nor
could it be otherwise from its basis of woman’s created inferiority and
original sin. The denial to women of the right of private judgment and
the control of her own actions, the constant teaching of her greater
sinfulness and natural impurity, had a very depressing effect upon the
majority of women whose lowly station in life was such as to deprive
them of that independence of thought and action possible to women of
rank and wealth. Then, as now, the church catered to the possessors
of money and power; then, as now, seeking to unite their great forces
with its own purpose of aggrandizement, and thus the church has
ever obstructed the progress of humanity, delaying civilization and
condemning the world to a moral barbarism from which there is no escape
except through repudiation of its teaching. To the theory of “God the
Father,” shorn of the divine attribute of motherhood, is the world
beholden for its most degrading beliefs, its most infamous practices.
Dependent upon the identified with lost motherhood is the “Lost Name”
of ancient writers and occultists. When the femininity of the divine
is once again acknowledged, the “Lost Name” will be discovered and the
holiness (wholeness) of divinity be manifested.[36]
As the theory of woman’s wickedness gathered force, her representative
place in the church lessened. From century to century restrictive
canons multiplied, and the clergy constantly grew more corrupt,
although bearing bad reputation at an early date.[37] Tertullian, whose
heavy diatribes are to be found in large libraries, was bitter in
his opposition to marriage.[38] While it took many hundreds of years
for the total exclusion of woman from the christian priesthood, the
celibacy of the clergy during this period was the constant effort of
the Church. Even during the ages that priestly marriage was permitted,
celibates obtained a higher reputation for sanctity and virtue than
married priests, who infinitely more than celibates were believed
subject to infestation by demons.[39]
The restriction upon clerical marriages proceeded gradually. First
the superior holiness of the unmarried was taught together with their
greater freedom from infestation by demons. A single marriage only
was next allowed, and that with a woman who had never before entered
the relation.[40] The Council of A.D. 347, consisting of twenty-one
bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice
married or whose wife had been a widow.[41] A council of A.D. 395 ruled
that a bishop who had children after ordination should be excluded from
the major orders. The Council of A.D. 444, deposed Chelidonius, bishop
of Besancon, for having married a widow. The Council of Orleans, A.D.
511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that monks who married
should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order. The Church was termed
the spouse of the priest. It was declared that Peter possessed a wife
before his conversion, but that he forsook her and all worldly things
after he became Christ’s, who established chastity; priests were
termed holy in proportion as they opposed marriage.[42] The unmarried
among the laity who had never entered that relation, and the married
who forsook it, were regarded as saintly. So great was the opposition
to marriage that a layman who married a second time was refused
benediction and penance imposed.[43] A wife was termed “An Unhallowed
Thing.”
So far from celibacy producing chastity or purity of life, church
restrictions upon marriage led to the most debasing crimes, the most
revolting vices, the grossest immorality. As early as the fourth
century (370) the state attempted purification through a statute
enacted by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian, prohibiting
ecclesiastics and monks from entering the houses of widows, single
women living alone, or girls who had lost their parents.[44] The
nearest ties of relationship proved ineffectual in protecting woman
from priestly assault, and incest became so common it was found
necessary to prohibit the residence of a priest’s mother or sister
in his house.[45] This restriction was renewed at various times
through the ages. The condemnation of the Council of Rome, Easter,
1051, under the pontificate of Pope Leo IX, was not directed against
married priests, but against those who held incestuous relations. Yet
although the Church thus externally set her seal of disapprobation
upon this vice, her general teaching sustained it. Gregory, bishop of
Venelli, convicted of this crime by the Council of Rome, was punished
by excommunication, but in a short time was restored to his former
important position. The highest legates were equally guilty with the
inferior priests. Cardinal John of Cremona, the pope’s legate to the
Council of Westminister 1125, sent by Pope Honorius for the express
purpose of enforcing celibacy, became publicly notorious and disgraced,
and was obliged to hastily leave England in consequence of his teaching
and his practice being diametrically opposed.[46]
Through this clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions of celibacy
and virginity were regarded as of the highest virtue. Jerome respected
marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins to the church,
while Augustine in acknowledging that marriage perpetuated the species,
also contended that it also perpetuated original sin.
These diverse views in regard to marriage created the most opposite
teaching from the church. By one class the demand to increase and
multiply was constantly brought up, and women were taught that the
rearing of children was their highest duty. The strangest sermons were
sometimes preached toward the enforcement of this command. Others
taught an entirely different duty for both men and women, and a large
celibate class was created under especial authority of the church.
Women, especially those of wealth, were constantly urged to take upon
themselves the vow of virginity, their property passing into possession
of the church, thus helping to build up priestly power. Another class
held the touch of a woman to be a contamination, and to avoid it holy
men secluded themselves in caves and forests.[47] Through numerous
decretals confirmation was given to the theory that woman was defiled
through the physical peculiarities of her being. Even her beauty was
counted as an especial snare and temptation of the devil for which in
shame she ought to do continual penance.[48] St. Chrysostom, whose
prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning service of the Episcopal
church, described women as a “necessary evil, a natural temptation,
a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a
painted ill.” But to escape her influence was impossible and celibacy
led to the most direful results. Monks and hermits acknowledged
themselves tormented in their solitary lives by visions of beautiful
women. Monasteries were visited by an illness to which celibacy
imparted a name,[49] and impurity of body and soul spread throughout
Christendom. The general tone of the church in regard to marriage; its
creation of a double code of morality; its teaching of woman’s greater
sinfulness, together with that of her absolute subordination to man,
subverted the moral character of the Christian world within whose
borders the vilest systems of immorality arose which the world has ever
known; its extent being a subject of historical record.[50]
According to the teaching of men who for many hundreds of years were
molders of human thought, priests, philosophers and physicians alike,
nature never designed to procreate woman, her intention being always
to produce men. These authorities asserted that nature never formed
the feminine except when she lost her true function and so produced
the female sex by chance or accident. Aristotle[51] whose philosophy
was accepted by the church and all teaching of a contrary character
declared heretical, maintained that nature did not form woman except
when by reason of imperfection of matter she could not obtain the
sex which is perfect.[52] Cajetan enunciated the same doctrine many
hundred years later.[53] Aristotle also denied creative power to the
mother.[54] While throughout its history the course of the Christian
Church against marriage is constantly seen, no less noticeable are the
grossly immoral practices resulting from celibacy. Scarcely a crime
or a vice to which it did not give birth. Celibacy was fostered in
the interests of power, and in order to its more strict enforcement
barons were permitted to enslave the wives and children of married
priests.[55] Those of Rome were bestowed upon the Cathedral church of
the Lateran, and bishops throughout Christendom were ordered to enforce
this law in their own dioceses and to seize the wives of priests for
the benefit of their churches. At no point of history do we more
clearly note the influence of the Church upon the State than in the
union of the temporal power with the ecclesiastical for purposes of
constraining priestly celibacy.
Under reign of Philip I of France, a council was held at Troyes which
condemned the marriage of priests.[56] In 1108, the following year,
King Henry I of England[57] summoned a council to assemble in London
for purpose of upholding priestly celibacy, urging its enforcement
upon the bishops, and pledging his kingly honor in aid. A new series
of canons was promulgated, strengthened by severe penalties and
the co-operation of the king. Finding it impossible either through
spiritual or temporal power to compel absolute celibacy[58] the king
for the benefit of his exchequer established a license for concubinage
upon the payment of a tax known as cullagium.[59]
Notwithstanding all the powerful enginery of the church, priestly
celibacy, so contrary to nature, was not rendered absolutely imperative
until the thirteenth century. The Fourth Lateran Council (Twelfth
Ecumenical), 1215, under pope Innocent III, is especially famous
because of its final settlement of the policy of the church in regard
to priestly marriage. This was a large council, 1300 prelates taking
part in the adjudication of this question. While with St. Augustine
acknowledging that marriage was requisite for the preservation of the
race, it strictly confined this relation to the laity.
The subject of celibacy as we see had agitated the church from its
foundation. A more renowned council even than the Twelfth Ecumenical,
namely, the First Nicene or Second Ecumenical, having seriously
discussed it, although after prolonged debate pronouncing against
celibacy and in favor of priestly marriage. St. Paphinutius, the martyr
bishop of Thebes, although himself a celibate advocated marriage which
he declared to be true chastity, the council adopting his opinion.
Although the tendency of the church for so many hundred years had been
towards celibacy yet when adopted as a dogma, a belief in its propriety
or its scriptural authority was by no means universal even among the
most eminent members, but in no instance has the control of the church
over the consciences and will of its adherents been more forcibly
illustrated. Many illustrious and learned theologians as Gratian the
Canonist, St. Thomas Aquinas and Giraldus Cambrensis, Arch-Deacon of
St. Davids, while thereafter sustaining celibacy _as a law of the
church_ declared it had neither scriptural nor apostolic warrant;
St. Thomas affirming it to be merely a law of human ecclesiastical
origin.[60]
Absolute celibacy of the priesthood proved very difficult of
enforcement. At the great council of London, 1237, twenty-three years
afterwards, Cardinal Otto deplored the fact that married men still
received holy orders and held office in the church, and in 1268 only
fifty-three years after the great council confirming celibacy as a
doctrine of the church, another great council was convened in London,
when Cardinal Legate Ottoborn, the direct representative of the Pope,
demanded the establishment of concubinage for priests. The institutions
of Otto and Ottoborn long remained the law of the English church. Yet
to their honor be it remembered that despite council and cardinal, pope
and church, there were priests who still persistently refused either
to part from their wives or to relinquish their priestly functions,
and who when excommunicated for contumacy, laughed at the sentence and
continued their priestly offices.[61] Others sufficiently conformed
to the edicts to lock up their churches and suspend their priestly
administrations, yet refusing to part with their wives. The relatives
of wives also exerted their influence against the action of the church.
The struggle was bitter and long. New canons were promulgated and
celibacy enforced under severe penalties, or rather marriage was
prohibited under severe penalties. The holy robbery which made slaves
of the wives and children of priests confiscating their property to the
church, had more effect in compelling celibacy than all anathemas upon
the iniquity of marriage. Priests who retained their wives preferring
the chastity of this relation to the license allowed celibates, were
prohibited from their offices and their wives denounced as harlots.
If this did not suffice, such priests were finally excommunicated.
But a way of return was left open. In case this measure coerced them
into abandoning wives and children, a short penance soon restored the
priestly rank with all its attendant dignities. Nor was the reinstated
priest compelled to live purely. So little was it expected that the tax
upon concubinage soon became a component part of the celibate system.
So gross and broadspread became the immorality of all classes that even
the Head of the Church pandered to it in the erection by Pope Sixtus V
of a magnificent building devoted to illicit pleasure.[62]
The example of Christ himself was pointed to in favor of celibacy, even
upon the cross saying to his mother, “Woman, what have I to do with
thee?” The saints of the Old Testament as well as the New, were quoted
as having opposed marriage. Abel, Melchisedeck, Joshua, Elias, Jonah,
Daniel, St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul with
his disciples, and all saintly personages were declared to have been
celibates.
A concubinage tax was exacted from all the clergy without exception,
and rendered compulsory even upon those priests who still kept their
wives, or who lived chastely outside of the marital relation. Protests
were of no avail. Those whom disinclination, age or ill-health kept
chaste, were told the privilege of unchastity was open to them; the
bishop must have the money and after payment they were at liberty to
keep concubines or not.[63] Under concubinage the priest was free from
all family responsibility; his mistress possessed neither present nor
future claim upon him; children, who according to church teaching
followed the condition of the mother, were born to him, but for
their education and maintenance neither ecclesiastical nor civil law
compelled him to provide.[64]
For many centuries this immoral tax brought enormous sums into the
treasuries of both Church and State. Although the laws against the
marriage of priests were enacted on pretense of the greater inherent
wickedness of woman, history proves their chief object to have been
the keeping of all priestly possessions under church control. It was
openly asserted that the temporal possessions of the church were
imperilled by sacerdotal marriage, and it has been declared with every
proof of truthfulness that edicts against the marriage of priests were
promulgated to prevent the alienation of property from the church.[65]
The saying of Paul was quoted; “He that is married careth for his
wife, but he that is unmarried for the Lord.” Married bishops were
occasionally confirmed in their sees upon condition that their wives
and children should not inherit their property, which upon their death
should fall to the church.[66]
The struggle against the absolute celibacy of the priesthood was
bitter. A few priests still kept their benefices while retaining their
wives and acknowledging their children as legitimate. The sons of such
contumacious priests were declared forever incapable of taking holy
orders, unless by a special dispensation. The church showed almost
equal determination in the establishment of concubinage as in the
enforcement of priestly celibacy, each of these systems tending to its
enrichment.
Opposition proved of no permanent avail. Holding control over the
conscience of men, asserting the power to unlock the doors of heaven
and hell, a strongly organized body working to one end, it is not a
subject of astonishment that the church, its chief object the crushing
of body and soul, should in the end prove conqueror, and the foulest
crimes against woman receive approval of the entire christian world.
Many notable consequences followed the final establishment of celibacy
as a dogma of the church.
First: The doctrine of woman’s inherent wickedness and close fellowship
with Satan took on new strength.
Second: Canon Law gained full control of civil law.
Third: An organized system of debauchery arose under mask of priestly
infallibility.
Fourth: Auricular confession was confirmed as a dogma of the church.
Fifth: Prohibition of the Scriptures to the laity was enforced.
Sixth: Crime was more openly protected, the system of indulgences
gained new strength, becoming the means of great revenue to the church.
Seventh: Heresy was more broadly defined and more severely punished.
Eighth: The Inquisition was established.
When Innocent III completed the final destruction of sacerdotal
marriage, it was not upon disobedient priests the most severe
punishment fell, but innocent women and children.[67] Effort was made
to force wives to desert their husbands. Those who proved contumacious
were denied christian burial in an age when such denial was looked
upon as equivalent to eternal damnation; property left such wives was
confiscated to the church; they were forbidden the eucharist; churching
after childbirth was denied them; they were termed harlots and their
children bastards, while to their sons all office in the church was
forbidden. If still contumacious they were handed over to the secular
power for condign punishment, or sold as slaves for the benefit of
the church. They were regarded as under the direct control of Satan
himself, as beings who iniquitously stood between their husbands and
heaven.
At numerous times in the history of the church women have been brought
to despair by its teachings, and large numbers driven to suicide.
A similar period was inaugurated by the confirmation of priestly
celibacy. The wives of such men, suddenly rendered homeless and with
their children classed among the vilest of earth, powerless and
despairing, hundreds shortened their agonies by death at their own
hands. For all these crimes the church alone is responsible.
Under celibacy, auricular confession, and extended belief in
witchcraft, a new era of wrong toward woman was inaugurated. From
thenceforth her condition was more degraded than even during the early
centuries of Christianity. Accusations of heresy, which included
witchcraft as well as other sins against the church were constantly
made against that being who was believed to have brought sin into the
world. Whosoever dared question the infallibility of the church by use
of their own judgment, even upon the most trivial subjects, immediately
fell into condemnation.
Canon Law gaining full control over civil law, the absolute sinfulness
of divorce, which maintained by the church has yet been allowed by
civil law, was fully established. Woman was entirely at the mercy of
man, the Canon Law maintaining that the confession of a guilty woman
could not be received in evidence against her accomplice, although it
held good against herself[68] and the punishment due to both was made
to fall on the woman alone.[69] The best authorities prove that while
the clergy were acquainted with the civil codes that had governed the
Roman Empire, they made but little use of them.[70] Upon coming to the
throne, Justinian[71] had repealed the law of the Patriarchate which
gave the father sole right and title to, and interest in the children
of legal marriage, but this was soon again subverted by ecclesiasticism
and under Canon Law a mother was prohibited all authority over her
child, its relationship to her even being denied. While under Common
Law children followed the condition of their fathers, who if free
transmitted freedom to their children, yet in the interests of priestly
celibacy, under church legislation, an entire reversal took place and
children were held to follow the condition of their mothers. Thus
serf-mothers bore serf-children to free-born fathers; slave mothers
bore slave children to their masters; while unmarried mothers bore
bastard children to both priestly and lay fathers, thus throwing the
taint of illegitimacy upon the innocent child, and the sole burden
of its maintenance upon the mother. This portion of Canon Law also
became the law of the State in all Christian countries,[72] and is
in existence at the present time, both civil codes and statue laws
enforcing this great wrong of the Church.[73] The relations of men
and women to each other, the sinfulness of marriage and the license
of illicit relations for the priesthood, employed the thought of the
church. The duty of woman to obey, not alone her male relatives, but
all men by virtue of their sex, was sedulously inculcated. She was
trained to hold her own desires and even thoughts in abeyance to those
of man, as to one who was rightfully her master. Every holy principle
of her nature was subverted by this degrading assumption.
When auricular confession became confirmed as a dogma of the church, it
threw immense power over the family into the hands of the priesthood,
a power capable of being converted to many ends, but was specially
notable in its influence upon morals.[74] Although auricular confession
was not established as a dogma until the Council of 1215, it had
been occasionally practiced at early date, carrying with it the same
immorality in lesser form as that which afterwards became so great a
reproach to the church.[75] Through its means the priesthood gained
possession of all family, social and political secrets, thus acquiring
information whose power for evil was unlimited. The spirit of evil
never found a more subtle method of undermining and destroying human
will, its most debasing influences falling upon woman, who through
fear of eternal damnation made known her most secret thoughts to the
confessor, an unmarried and frequently a youthful man. It soon became a
source of very great corruption to both priest and woman.
Another effect of this council was the formal prohibition of the
scriptures to the laity, and thenceforth the Bible was confined to the
priest who explained its teachings in the interests of his own order,
adding to, or taking from, to suit his own interests; the recent new
version showing many such interpolations.[76] Nothing was held sacred
by these men, who sacrificed everything to their own advancement and
that of their order.