my ignorance; “God is Love, but love in the abstract which
receives its incarnation in the mutual affection of two
hearts which idolize each other. You must then not only love
God in the abstract existence, but must also love him in his
incarnation, that is, in the exclusive love of a man who
adores you. _Quod Deus est amor nec colitus nisi amando._”
“Then,” I replied, “a woman who adores her own lover would
adore Divinity itself?” “Assuredly,” reiterated the priest
over and over again, taking courage from my remark and
chuckling with what seemed to him the effect of his catechism.
“In that case,” said I hastily, “I should select for my lover
rather a man of the world than a priest.”
“God preserve you, my daughter! God preserve you from that
sin. To love a man of the world, a sinner, a wretch, an
unbeliever, an infidel! Why, you would go immediately to hell.
The love of a priest is a sacred love, while that of a profane
man is infamy. The priest purifies his affections daily in
communion with the Holy Spirit.... If you cannot love me
because I am your confessor, I will find means to assist you
to get rid of your scruples. We will place the name of Jesus
Christ before all our affectionate demonstrations and thus our
love will be a grateful offering to the Lord and will ascend
fragrant with perfume to Heaven like the smoke of the incense
of the Sanctuary. Say to me for example ‘I love you in Jesus
Christ, last night I dreamed of you in Jesus Christ,’ and you
will have tranquil conscience, because in doing this God will
sanctify every transport of your love.”
Rev. Mr. Chiniquy who in his fifty years of Romish priesthood possessed
every opportunity for knowing the truth, does not hesitate to affirm
that the popes are today of the same general immoral character they
were in the earlier centuries of the Church. He says:
Let not my readers be deceived by the idea that the popes of
Rome in our days are much better than those of the ninth,
tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are absolutely the
same—the only difference is that today they take a little more
care to conceal their secret orgies. Go to Italy and there the
Roman Catholics themselves will show you the two beautiful
daughters whom the late Pope Pius IX had from two of his
mistresses. Inquire from those who have personally known Pope
Gregory XVI the predecessor of Pius IX; after they will have
given you the history of his mistresses, one of whom was the
wife of his barber, they will tell you that he was one of the
greatest drunkards in Italy.[104]
The views of the Catholic Church in regard to marriage of the
priesthood was recently demonstrated in the United States, 1885, by
the persecution of a priest of the Uniate Greek Church sent as a
missionary from Austria to Pennsylvania. The Greek Church, it must be
remembered, permits a single marriage to a priest. The Uniate while in
this respect following the discipline of the Greek Church, yet admits
the supremacy of the Pope which the regular Greek Church does not. The
Uniate Greek Church accepts, as binding, all the decisions of Rome
subsequent to the division between the eastern and the western parts of
christendom. Endowed with authority from both branches, Father Wolonski
came to this country accompanied by his wife, in full expectation of
fellowship with his catholic brethren. His first contrary experience
occurred in Philadelphia when Archbishop Ryan of the Cathedral refused
all intercourse with him because of his marriage. Reaching Shenandoah
where commissioned by his own Austrian Bishop, he discovered himself
still under ban; the resident priest of the catholic church having
warned his congregation under pain of excommunication to shun both
himself and his church, upon the ground that the Roman Church under no
circumstances tolerated a married priest. Eventually the subject grew
to such proportions that Father Wolonski was recalled, and an unmarried
priest sent in his stead.[105]
From the experience of Father Wolonski less than a decade since, with
the bitter hostility shown by the church towards Father Hyacinthe,
we find that a belief in the special holiness of celibacy is as
dominant in the Catholic church today as at any period of its history;
concurrent testimony teaching us that its greatest evils remain the
same as of old. It is less than twenty years since the whole christian
world was interested in a suit brought against the heirs of the
deceased Cardinal Antonelli in order to secure recognition of his
daughter’s claim to inheritance. This girl was everywhere spoken of by
the Catholic Church as “a sacrilegious child,” that is, a being who had
violated sacred things by coming into existence. The destruction of her
mother’s life, her own illegitimacy, the wrong done to her mother’s
family and to society were held as of no moment beside the fact that
her claims, if allowed, would take property from the church. The love
of the Great Cardinal for this girl’s mother was fully proven, but
the church having established celibacy in order that it might control
the property of its priests, was not inclined to permit any portion
to be diverted from that source. Honesty, justice, and the ties of
natural affection, now as of yore are not part of the Church system. In
consequence, this suit of the illegitimate child of the Great Cardinal
Secretary, filled not alone Italy, but the whole Catholic world with
disgrace.
Among the countries now striving to free themselves from Church
dominion is Mexico. A letter to the New York Herald, winter of 1892,
regarding the revolution there in progress, said of Diaz:
Instead of his being assisted by the Church it has been his
bitterest and most relentless enemy and opponent. The Church
in Mexico is opposed to all enlightenment of the people. The
clergy, if they can be honored with that name, fight all
improvements. They want no railways or telegraphs and when
he adopted a system of compulsory education the war began in
earnest. Diaz was determined, however, and he retaliated by
closing up the convents and prohibiting the establishment of
monasteries. Being further opposed in his efforts at reform
and defied by the priests he put hundreds of them in Pueblo
in jail and prohibited the ringing of Church bells in certain
localities. He forcibly impressed on them the fact that he was
running Mexico, not they. He gave them to understand that his
idea of Christianity was, that priests should preach Christ
crucified and not revolution and infraction of the laws.
In Mexico, priests can keep mistresses with impunity. From
a church to a gambling-table is but a step, and the priests
gamble with the rest. The rentals of houses of ill-fame, of
gambling-houses, of bull-pens all go to a church which is
supposed to teach religion. Because Diaz, a catholic himself,
will not tolerate such crimes under the guise of religion
he is fought by the church and is the recipient of their
anathemas.
Take the leading church in Monterey outside of the cathedral.
You step from the church-door to a plaza owned by the church
and in which stand fifty tents in which are conducted monte,
roulette and other games of chance. Behind this stand the
bull-pen, and the profits and rentals go to the Church.
With all these lights the most plausible inference or theory
is that the clerical party, as they see all these privileges
being swept away, will cheerfully contribute the sinews of war
with which to carry on a revolution against Diaz. They have
agents in Europe and the money can come through that source
without detection.
The agent of the Clerical Party in Europe is the Church itself. As a
body, it has ever opposed advancement and reform. It anathematized the
printing press as an invention of the devil and has steadily opposed
education of the people. Its work is best done in the darkness of
ignorance and superstition. For this cause it has opposed all new
discoveries in science, all reforms of whatever character.[106] Not
by the Catholic Church alone, but under the “Reformation,” as we have
seen, the same prohibition of the Bible to common people, has existed
the same resistance to education of the masses, the same opposition
to anti-slavery, to temperance, to woman’s demand for equality of
opportunity with man. The general nature of the church does not change
with change of name. Looking backward through history we even find the
same characteristics under the patriarchate; love of power, greed for
money, and intense selfishness combined in a general disregard for the
rights of others.
M. Renan’s drama, “L’Abbesse de Jouarre,” was written because he
wished to prove the worthlessness of those vows imposed on catholic
priests and nuns, as well as show the bondage under which they held the
feminine conscience, while the masculine conscience throws them aside.
It is not alone the nuns whose conscience is bound, but all feminine
members of the catholic church are more closely held in a spiritual
bondage, than the male members of that church. In 1885, a letter from
Chili to the _New York Sun_ graphically pictured certain Chilian
women penitents who are known by a peculiar dress they are required to
wear.[107] Others whose sins are so great that they cannot be purged by
a penitential dress, retire for a season to the “Convent of Penitents,”
where by mortification of the body they hope to gain absolution for
the soul. Still more severe than this retreat are other convents known
as “Houses of Detention,” where wayward daughters are sent, and young
mothers without husbands are cared for. But the whole country of Chili
fails to show a similar dress, or house of penitence, or correction for
men. Shame and penance, equally with sin, have been relegated by the
church to women alone.
The confessional is not frequented by men, and mass is but seldom
attended by them. For this laxity a double reason exists: First,
immorality in men is not looked upon as contrary to its discipline.
Second, through woman having been trained to a more sensitive
conscience than man, the confessional wrests secrets from her lips,
which gives the church knowledge of all it wishes to learn in regard
to the family. No more certain system could have been devised for the
destruction of woman’s self-respect than the one requiring penance from
her for sins the church passes lightly over in man. Nor would penance
of this character be demanded from women were the offices of the church
open to her the same as to man. No greater crime against humanity has
ever been known than the division of morality into two codes, the
strict for woman, the lax for man. Nor has woman been the sole sufferer
from this creation of Two Moral Codes within the Christian Church.
Through it man has lost fine discrimination between good and evil, and
the Church itself as the originator of this distinction in sin upon
the trend of sex, has become the creator and sustainer of injustice,
falsehood and the crimes into which its priests have most deeply sunk.
Nor is this condition of the past. As late as the fall of 1892 a number
of articles appeared in Canadian papers openly accusing the catholic
priesthood of that province of the grossest immorality.[108] That
priestly celibacy yet continues in the Romish Church is not a subject
of surprise, when we realize the immense power and wealth it has been
enabled to secure through its means; but it is one of astonishment,
carrying with it a premonition of danger, that we now see a similar
tendency in the ritualistic portion of the Episcopal Church, both in
England and the United States. The evils of monasticism, although less
potent than during the middle ages, are still great, and in finding
entrance into Protestant denominations are a fresh warning of their
dangerous tendency. The experience of the past should not appeal to
us in vain. We have noticed the perils to society arising from those
classes of persons who, under plea of religion, evade the duties of
family and social life. No crime against the world can be greater than
the deliberate divestment of responsibility by one’s self, because
tired of the warfare of life, that struggle which comes to every human
being; the becoming “fascinated with the conceptions of an existence”
outside of ordinary cares; and the entrance into an order in which
one’s own personal responsibility is largely surrendered to others
is not alone a crime against the state, but a sin against one’s own
self and against humanity. An order which thereafter assumes the task
of directing the thoughts and lives of its members into a channel
of “repose and contentment” as certain protestant orders do, is one
of the dangerous religious elements of the present day. No crime
against one’s self or against society can be greater than this. In the
Ritualistic Episcopal Church are to be found monks and sisterhoods
upon the celibate plan, confessors and penance, all of them primal
elements in moral and spiritual degradation. If religion has a lesson
to teach mankind, it is that of personal responsibility; it is that
of the worth and duty of the individual; it is that each human being
is alone accountable for his or her course in life; it is the lesson
of the absolute equality of each human being with every other human
being in relation to these cardinal points. The lesson should have been
learned ere this, that ecclesiastical pretense of divinely appointed
power has ever made the priesthood arrogant, coarse and tyrannical;
the male laity dependent and dissimulating; woman, self-distrustful
and timorous, believing in the duty of humiliation and self-sacrifice;
that her life is not to be lived primarily for herself alone, but that
her very right to existence is dependent upon the benefit thereby to
accrue to some other person. Today, as of old, the underlying idea of
monasticism, of “brotherhoods,” “sisterhoods,” and their ilk even in
Protestant denominations, is the divine authority of some priestly
superior, and that the power of remitting sins inheres in some system
under control of some priest. The Ritualistic party of the Episcopal
Church, equally with the Roman Catholic Church, makes frequent
reference to these words of Christ—St. John XX, XXIII—“Whatever sins
you remit they are remitted unto them, and whatsoever sins you retain
are retained,” thus premising the divine power of the priesthood.
_Chapter Three_
+Canon Law+
The earliest Saxon laws were almost entirely ecclesiastical,[1] their
basis seeming to have been payment of tithes to the Church and support
of the pope through what was known as the “hearth penny” to St. Peter.
Marriage was by no means allowed to escape general ecclesiastical
control, its legitimacy being made to depend upon the sanction and
services of a priest.[2] This we learn from Reeves, whose authority is
indisputable,[3] therefore we discover that even long before marriage
was constituted one of the sacraments, celibacy or the confessional
established, the Church had perceived the great increase in its
authority to be brought about by gaining control of the marriage
ceremony and making its legitimacy depend upon the services of a
priest. This was a material step towards the subjugation of mankind;
one whose dire consequences have not yet received due consideration.
When Rome became a Christian State, and the phallic cross triumphed
over the gods and goddesses of old, the condition of woman under the
civil law became more degraded. The change from ancient civilization
to that renewed barbarism at an early age of the Christian era, which
so many writers note without perceiving its cause, is to be found in
the low conception of womanhood inculcated by the Church. Ignorance,
superstition, falsehood and forgery united in creating new codes of
law, new customs of society, new habits of thought, which, having for
centuries been imposed upon mankind by the united force of the Church
and the State, still continue their impress upon modern life and law.
Among general canons we find that “No woman may approach the altar.”
“A woman may not baptize without extreme necessity.” “Woman may not
receive the Eucharist under a black veil.” “Woman may not receive the
Eucharist in _morbo suo menstrule_.”
At the Synod or Council of Elvira,[4] 305 or 306, several restrictive
canons were formulated against woman. Under Canon 81, she was forbidden
to write in her own name to lay christians, but only in the name of her
husband. Women were not to receive letters of friendship from any one
addressed only to themselves.
From the commencement of the fifth century, the Christian clergy
acquired a powerful influence in Rome. Bishops and priests were the
municipal magistrates of the Roman Empire, of which little now remained
except its municipal government; thus the Church in reality became
Rome, and Rome the Church. It has been declared difficult to fix with
precision the period at which ecclesiastics first began to claim
exemption from civil jurisdiction. The Synod of Paris, 615, seems to
have secured to the clergy the privilege of being brought before mixed
tribunals in all cases which had theretofore belonged to the civil
judge alone. Bishops acquired greater power from having an oversight
over the whole administration of justice committed to them, while
their spiritual judgments were rendered more effective by the addition
of excommunication to civil punishments. The State, at first holding
repression over the Church, added to its powers by relieving the clergy
from all civil duties,[5] thus tending to make of them a body exterior
to the civil government. This division was farther increased through
the emperors giving confirmation to the decisions pronounced by bishops
in ecclesiastical affairs, and also when they were chosen umpires in
civil suits; the tendency of this action was towards the creation of
an ecclesiastical law with separate powers from the civil law. Another
step towards the separation of civil from ecclesiastical law and the
supremacy of the latter, was made when in cases of discipline the
clergy were allowed to come under the authority and supervision of the
Spiritual Courts.[6]
As soon as Christianity became the religion of the State, this power
was still farther increased by the permission accorded ecclesiastics to
accept gifts, inherit and hold property; the purity of clerical motives
being thereby greatly lessened, as covetous and unscrupulous persons
were forthwith attracted to this profession. The law of tithes was
introduced by Charlemagne, and his edicts largely increased clerical
power. The compilation of a Code of Canon Law was begun as early as
the ninth century,[7] by which period the olden acknowledged rights of
the clergy, those of superintending morals and interference on behalf
of the unfortunate, had largely been lost sight of, or diverted from
their proper course by a system of ecclesiastical tyranny which created
an order of morals, whose sole design was that of building up priestly
power.
The complete inferiority and subordination of the female sex was
maintained both by civil and common law. It was a principle of common
law that sons should be admitted to an inheritance before daughters.[8]
This distinction created by the Church in the interests of the class
which was alone admitted to the priesthood, thus placing the possession
of wealth in the hands of man, did much towards keeping woman in a
subordinate condition. In accordance with natural law, the person not
owning property is less interested in the welfare of the State than
the one possessing it, a denial of the rights of ownership acting
prejudicially upon the individual.
Ecclesiastical or Canon Law[9] made its greatest encroachments at the
period when Chivalry[10] was at its height; the outward show of respect
and honor to woman under chivalry keeping pace in its false pretence
with the destruction of her legal rights. The general conception in
regard to woman was so degraded at this period that a “Community of
Women” was proposed, to whom all men should act in the relation of
husbands.[11] This plan was advocated by Jean de Meung, the “Poet of
Chivalry,” in his famous _Roman de la Rose_. Christine of Pisa, a woman
of learning and remarkable force of character, the first strictly
literary woman of western Europe, wrote a work in defense of her sex
against the general libidinous character of the age.[12] Her opposition
to the debasing theories of the “Romance” marks the later period of
woman’s entrance into literature, and is an era from which dates the
modern intellectual development of Europe.[13] Efforts to utterly
crush the moral rectitude of women through the adoption of those base
ideas of phallic origin, having been the systematic course of the
Church, the State and society through many hundred years, it is a most
notable proof of her innate disbelief in this teaching, that woman’s
first literary work of modern times was written in opposition to such
a powerfully sustained theory as to her innate depravity. Christine
asserted the common humanity of woman, entirely repudiating the sensual
ideas of the times.