Among a thousand other analogous precepts the reverend Kenrick, bishop of Boston, in the United States, gives the following to his confessors:
Uxor quae, in usu matrimonii, se vertit, ut non recipiat semen, vel statim post illud acceptum surgit, ut expellatur, lethaliter peccat; sed opus non est ut diu resuspina jaceat, quum matrix, brevi semen attrahat, et mox, arctissime claudatur.
Puellae patienti licet se vertere et conari ut non recipiat semen, quod injuria et emittitur; sed, acceptum non licet expellere, quia jam possessionem pacificam habet et haud absque injuria naturae ejiceretur.
Conjuges senes plerumque coeunt absque culpa, licet contingat semen extra vas effundi; id enim per accidens fit ex infirmitati naturae.
Quod si vires adeo sint fractae ut nulla sit seminandi intra vas spes, jam nequeunt jure conjugi uti (vol. III, p. 317).
Such is the teaching of Chiniqui, the man whose courage and powerful individuality succeeded in introducing abstinence from alcohol in Canada. His long life was that of a pioneer and an inflexible champion of social and moral reform in that country, based on Christianity. He died at the age of ninety.
I have quoted the erotic precepts of the confessional from him, as I was anxious to quote from an absolutely reliable source. It was not with a light heart that Chiniqui abandoned the Catholic Church, but only after violent and bitter struggles with conscience, struggles of which he relates the tragic episodes, and which lasted for many years.
He commences the chapter from which we have quoted with the following words: "Let legislators, fathers and husbands read this chapter and ask themselves the question whether the respect which they owe to their mothers, their wives and their daughters does not impose upon them the duty of forbidding auricular confession. How is it possible for a young girl to remain pure in mind after such conversations with an unmarried man? Is she not more prepared for the depths of vice than for conjugal life?" The author of these lines is a man who was obliged for many years to be a confessor himself, and who understood to what extent confession corrupted the sexual life of women and priests. It is true that persons, priests or women, of strong character, and especially those with a cold nature from the sexual point of view, may resist such sexual excitation. But has confession been specially instituted for this type of character? Every one who is not a hypocrite will own that it is exactly the contrary.
Religious Prudery.—The results of such a combination of sexual life with religious prescriptions are a mixture of ridiculous prudery and continual eroticism. In certain convents (those of the nuns of Galicia, for example) the nuns forbid their pupils to wash the sexual organs, because it is improper! In Austria the nuns often cover the crucifix in their bedroom with a handkerchief, "so that Christ cannot see their nakedness"! But the convents of nuns, in the Middle Ages, were often transformed into brothels; and it is not uncommon to see hypocrites or the subjects of erotic hysteria (both men and women) perform sexual orgies of the worst kind under the cloak of religious ecstasy.
Hottentots. Eunuchs.—Among the Hottentots, the lips of the vulva (labia minora) in women are artificially elongated, and among the Orientals eunuchs are made. In themselves these two operations have certainly nothing to do with religion and only originated in profane customs. In the course of time they were made religious precepts, which has deeply rooted them in the customs of the people.