"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!