Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

“My God! my God! what a dreadful calamity upon me!” rejoined the old man; and raising his hands and his eyes to heaven, he cried out again, “My God! my God! Why have you not taken away my life before such a misfortune could fall upon me!” He could not speak any longer; his voice was choked by his sobs.

At first, I did not know what to say; a thousand thoughts some very grave, some exceedingly ludicrous, crossed my mind more rapidly than I can say them. I stood there, as nailed to the floor, by the old priest, who was weeping as a child, till he asked me, with a voice broken by his sobs, “What must I do now?” I answered him: “The Church has foreseen occurrences of that kind, and provided for them the remedy. The only thing you have to do is to get a new wafer, consecrate it, and continue your mass as if nothing strange had occurred. I will go and get you, just now, new bread.” I went, without losing a moment, to the vestry, got and brought a new wafer, which he consecrated and turned into a new god, and finished his mass, as I had told him. After it was over, I took the disconsolate old priest by the hand to my parsonage for breakfast. But all along the way he rent the air with his cries of distress. He would hardly taste anything, for his soul was drowned in a sea of trouble. I vainly tried to calm his feelings, by telling him that it was no fault of his; that this strange and sad occurrence was not the first of that kind; that it had been calmly foreseen by the Church, which had told us what to do in these circumstances; that there was no neglect, no fault, no offence against God or man on his part.

But as he would not pay the least attention to what I said, I felt the only thing I had to do was to remain silent and respect his grief, by letting him unburden his heart by his lamentations and tears.

I had hoped that his good common sense would help him to overcome his feelings, but I was mistaken; his lamentations were as long as those of Jeremiah, and the expressions of his grief as bitter.

At last, I lost patience and said: “My dear Father Daule, allow me to tell you respectfully that it is quite time to stop these lamentations and tears. Our great and just God cannot like such an excess of sorrow and regret about a thing which was only, and entirely, under the control of His power and eternal wisdom.”

“What do you say there?” replied the old priest, with a vivacity which resembled anger.

“I say that, as it was not in your power to foresee or to avoid that occurrence, you have not the least reason to act and speak as you do. Let us keep our regrets and our tears for our sins; we cannot shed too many tears on them. But there is no sin here, and there must be some reasonable limit to our sorrow. If anybody had to weep and regret without measure what has happened, it would be Christ. For He alone could foresee that event, and he alone could prevent it. Had it been His will to oppose this sad and mysterious act, it was in His, not in our power to prevent it. He alone has suffered from it, because it was His will to suffer it.”

“Mr. Chiniquy,” he replied, “you are quite a young man, and I see you have the want of attention and experience which are often seen among young priests. You do not pay a sufficient attention to the awful calamity which has just occurred in your church. If you had more faith and piety you would weep with me instead of laughing at my grief. How can you speak so lightly of a thing which makes the angels of God weep? Our dear Saviour dragged and eaten by rats! Oh! great God! does not this surpass the humiliation and horrors of Calvary?”

“My dear Father Daule,” I replied, “allow me respectfully to tell you that I understand, as well as you do, the nature of the deplorable event of this morning. I would have given my blood to prevent it. But let us look at that fact in its proper light. It is not a moral action for us; it did not depend on our will more than the spots of the sun. The only one who is accountable for that fact is our God! For, again, I say, that He was the only one who could foresee and prevent it. And, to give you plainly my own mind, I tell you here that if I were God Almighty, and a miserable rat would come to eat me, I would strike him dead before he could touch me.”

There is no need of confessing it here; every one who reads these pages, and pays attention to this conversation, will understand that my former so robust faith in my priestly power of changing the wafer into my God had melted away and evaporated from my mind, if not entirely, at least to a great extent.