Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

And if you want to know what other use is made of those millions and millions of corpses, I will tell it to you. There is no manure so rich as dead carcasses. Those millions of corpses serve to manure the gardens of the priests, the bishops and the popes, and make their cabbages grow. And what fine cabbages grow in the Pope’s garden!

Is it not a lucky thing for the world in general, and for the Roman Catholics in particular, that though they are taught to become like corpses, to have no will, no understanding, no judgment of their own in the presence of their superiors, there are many who can never attain to that perfection of intellectual degradation and death! Yes, in spite of the efforts, in spite of the teachings of their Church, a few Roman Catholics retain some life, some will, some intelligence, some judgment of their own which prevents them from becoming complete brutes. Many now and then refuse to descend to the damp, dark and putrid abode of the corpses. They want to breathe the fresh and pure air of liberty which God has given to man. They raise their humiliated forehead from the ignominious tomb which their church has dug for them, and they give some signs of life. But at every such signs of life given by an individual or by a people in the Church of Rome, be sure that you will see the flashing light and hear the roaring thunder of the Vatican directed against the rebel who dares to refuse to become a corpse before his superiors. It is for having shown such signs of life and independence of mind that Galileo was sent to gaol and threatened to be cruelly tortured on the racks of the Inquisition in Italy, three hundred years ago. It is for having shown those symptoms of life that not long ago the honest Kenna, one of the most respected Roman Catholics of the day, was excommunicated the day before his death, and had to be buried as a dog in his own field, for having refused to take away his children from an excellent grammar school to obey the priest. It is for having dared to think for himself that a few days before his death the amiable and learned Montalembert was considered as an outcast by the Pope, who refused him the honor of public prayers in Rome after his death.

But that you may better understand the degrading tendencies of the principles which are as the fundamental stone of the moral and intellectual education of Rome, let me put before your eyes another extract of the Jesuit teachings, which I take again from the “Spiritual Exercises,” as laid down by their founder, Ignatius Loyola: “That we may in all things attain the truth, that we may not err in anything, we ought ever to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities of the Church define it to be so.”

You all know that it is the avowed desire of Rome to have public education in the hands of the Jesuits. She says everywhere that they are the best, the model teachers. Why so? Because they more boldly and more successfully than any other of her teachers aim at the destruction of the intelligence and conscience of their pupils. Rome proclaims everywhere that the Jesuits are the most devoted, the most reliable of her teachers; and she is right, for when a man has been trained a sufficient time by them, he most perfectly becomes a moral corpse. His superiors can do what they please with him. When he knows that a thing is white as snow, he is ready to swear that it is black as ink, if his superior tells him so. But some may be tempted to think that these degrading principles are exclusively taught by the Jesuits; that they are not the teachings of the Church, and that I do an injustice to the Roman Catholics when I give, as a general iniquity, what is the guilt of the Jesuits only. Listen to the words of that infallible Pope Gregory XVI., in his celebrated Encyclical of the 15th of August, 1832. “If the holy Church so requires, let us sacrifice our own opinions, our knowledge, our intelligence, the splendid dreams of our imagination, and the most sublime attainments of the human understanding.”

It is when considering those anti-social principles of Rome that our learned and profound thinker, Gladstone, wrote, not long ago: “No more cunning plot was ever devised against the freedom, the happiness and the virtues of mankind than Romanism.” (“Letter to Earl Aberdeen.”) Now, Protestants, do you begin to see the difference of the object of education between a Protestant and a Roman Catholic school? Do you begin to understand that there is as great a distance between the word “Education” among you, and the meaning of the same word in the Church of Rome, than between the southern and the northern poles! By education you mean to raise man to the highest sphere of manhood. Rome means to lower him below the most stupid brutes. By education you mean to teach man that he is a free agent; that liberty, within the limits of the laws of God and of his country, is a gift secured to every one; you want to impress man with the noble thought that it is better to die a free man than to live a slave. Rome wants to teach that there is only one man who is free, the Pope, and that all the rest are born to be his abject slaves in thought, will and action.

Now, that you may still more understand to what a bottomless abyss of human degradation and moral depravity these anti-Christian and anti-social principles of Rome lead her poor blind slaves, read what Liguori says in his book, “The Nun Sanctified”: “The principal and most efficacious means of practicing obedience due to superiors, and of rendering it meritorious before God, is to consider that in obeying them we obey God himself, and that by despising their commands, we despise the authority of our Divine Master. When, thus, a religious receives a precept from her prelate, superior or confessor, she should immediately execute it, not only to please them but principally to please God, whose will is made known to her by their command. In obeying their command, in obeying their directions, she is more certainly obeying the will of God than if an angel came down from heaven to manifest his will to her. Bear this always in your mind, that the obedience which you practice to your superior is paid to God. If, then, you receive a command from one who holds the place of God, you should observe it with the same diligence as if it came from God himself. Blessed Egidus used to say that it is more meritorious to obey man for the love of God than God himself. It may be added that there is more certainty of doing the will of God by obedience to your superior than by obedience to Jesus Christ, should He appear in person and give His commands. St. Philip de Neri used to say that religious shall be most certain of not having to render an account of the actions performed through obedience; for these the superiors only who commanded them shall be held accountable.” The Lord said once to St. Catherine of Sienne, “Religious will not be obliged to render an account to me of what they do through obedience; for that I will demand an account from the superior. This doctrine is conformable to Sacred Scripture: Behold, says the Lord, as clay is in the potter’s hands, so are you in my hand, O Israel! (Jeremiah xviii: 6.) A religious man must be in the hands of the superiors to be molded as they will. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What art thou making? The potter ought to answer, ‘Be silent; it is not your business to inquire what I do, but to obey and to receive whatever form I please to give you.’”

I ask of you, American Protestants, what would become of your fair country if you were blind enough to allow the Church of Rome to teach the children of the United States? What kind of men and women can come out of such schools? What future of shame, degradation and slavery you prepare for your country if Rome does succeed in forcing you to support such schools. What kind of women would come out from the schools of nuns, who would teach them that the highest pitch of perfection in a woman is when she obeys her superior, the priest, in everything he commands her! that your daughter will never be called to give an account to God for the actions she will have done to please and obey her superior, the priest, the bishop or the Pope? That the affairs of her conscience will be arranged between God and that superior, and that she will never be asked why she had done this or that, when it will be to gratify the pleasures of the superior and obey his command that she has done it. Again, what kind of men and citizens will come out from the schools of those Jesuits who believe and teach that a man has attained the perfection of manhood only when he is a perfectly spiritual corpse before his superior; when he obeys the priest with the perfection of a cadaver, that has neither life nor will in itself.

But some will be tempted to think that this perfect blind obedience to the priest, which is the corner-stone of the Roman Catholic education, is required only in spiritual matters. Yes; but you must not forget that in the Church of Rome every action of the public or private life belongs to the spiritual sphere, which the superior only must rule. For instance, a Roman Catholic has not the right to select the teacher of his boy, nor the school where he will send him; he must consult his priest, and if he dares to act in a different way from what his priest has told him in the selection of that teacher or that school, he is excommunicated and damned, as Mr. Kenna has been lately. If he votes according to his own private judgment for Mr. Jones, instead of Mr. Thompson, the selected member of the bishop and the priest, he is damned and considered as a rebel against his holy Church, out of which there is no salvation.

The Church of Rome’s only object in giving what she calls education is to teach her slaves that they must obey their superiors in everything, as God himself. All the rest of her teaching is only a mask to conceal her plans. History is never taught in her schools; what she calls history is a most shameful string of falsehoods. Of course she does not dare to say a word of truth about her past struggles against the great principles of light and liberty, when she covered the whole of Europe with tears, blood and ruins. Writing, reading, arithmetic, geography and grammar are taught to a certain degree in her schools, but all these teachings are nothing else but covered roads through which the priest wants to reach the citadel of the heart and intelligence of his poor victim, and take an absolute possession of them. Those things are taught every day only to have a daily opportunity to persuade the pupil that he must never make any use of his private judgment in anything, and that he must submit his intelligence, his conscience, his will to the intelligence, conscience and will of his superior, if he wants to save himself from the eternal fire of hell. He is constantly told, what I have been told a thousand times myself, when studying in the college of Nicolet, that those who obey their superiors in everything will not be called to give an account of their actions to their Supreme Judge, even if those actions were bad in themselves; for, as Liguori told you a moment ago, “Whosoever obeys his superior for the love of God, obeys God himself, and that there are more merits to obey one’s own superior than God himself.”

The Church of Rome shows her great wisdom in enforcing that dogma of the entire and blind subjection of the will and intelligence of the inferior to the superior. For the very moment that a Roman Catholic thinks that it is his right and sacred duty to follow the dictates of his own conscience and intelligence, he is lost to the church of Rome. It is only when a man has entirely silenced and absolutely killed his intelligence, it is only when he has become a perfect moral corpse, that he can believe that his priest, even his drunken priest, has the power to change a wafer, or any other piece of bread, into the great God, for whom and by whom everything has been created. It is only when the intelligence of man has become a dead carcass that he can believe that a miserable sinner has the supreme power to force the Son of God to come, in His divine and human person, into his vest or pant’s pockets to follow him everywhere he wants to go, even to the bar of the low tavern, that He may become his companion of debauch and drunkenness. Do you see, now, why the Church of Rome cannot let her poor young slaves go to your schools? In your schools, the first thing you inculcate to the pupil is that his intelligence is the great gift of God, by which man is distinguished from the brute; that he must enlighten, form, feed, cultivate his intelligence, which is to him what the helm is to the ship, Christ, with His holy Word, being the pilot. You see, now why the Church of Rome abhors your schools. It is because you want to make men, and she wants to make brutes. You want to raise men to the highest sphere to which his intelligence can allow him to reach; she wants to keep him in the dust, at the feet of the priests; you want to form free citizens, she wants to form abject and obedient slaves of the priests; you teach man to keep his sacred promises and stand by his oath, she teaches him that the Pope has the right to dissolve the most sacred promises and to annul all his oaths, even to the oath of allegiance to his country. You tell your pupils that so long as they will keep themselves within the limits of the laws of their country they are responsible only to God for their consciences. They tell their pupils that it is not to God, but to the priest that he must go to give an account of his conscience. You teach your pupils that the laws of God only bind the conscience of man; they tell him that it is the laws of the Church, which means the ipse dixit of the Pope, which binds their consciences. You teach the student that every man has the right to change his religion according to his conscience; she positively says that no man has the right to change his religion according to his conscience. It is evident that the Church of Rome would be dead to-morrow, if, to-day, she would allow her children to attend schools where they would learn to follow the dictates of their conscience and listen to the voice of their intelligence. But she is too shrewd to avow before the world the real reasons why she wants, at any cost, to prevent her children from attending your schools. And it is here she shows her profound and diabolical cunning. Though she is the most deadly enemy of liberty of conscience, though she has, time after time, anathemized liberty of conscience as one of Satan’s schemes, she suddenly steps on, as the great friend and apostle of liberty of conscience, and under that new mask she approaches your legislators with great airs of dignity, and says, “We are happy to live in a country where liberty of conscience is secured to every citizen. It is in its sacred name that we respectfully approach your honorable legislature to ask: First, to be exempted from sending our children to the Government schools. Second, to have the money we want from the public treasury in order to support our own schools. For two reasons: First, you read the Bible in your schools, and it is against our conscience to let our children read the Bible. Second, you have some prayers at the beginning and some religious hymns sung at the end of the hours of school, and it is against our conscience to allow the children of the Church of Rome to join you in those prayers and hymns.” The legislators, who, for the greater part are too honorable men to suspect the fraud, are won by the air of candor and honesty of the Roman Catholic petitioners. Considering the great benefit which will come to the country if all the children are taught in the same school, they are soon ready to make any sacrifice in order to have the Roman Catholic and the Protestant children under the same roof, to receive the same light and the same moral food and same instruction. As true patriots, the legislators understand that if they wish their beloved country to be strong and happy, the first thing they must do is to make the young generation one in mind, in heart. If the Protestant and Roman Catholic children are taught in the same school, they will know each other and love each other when young, and those sacred ties of friendship which will bind them in the spring of life, will be strengthened when their reason will be matured and enlightened by a good education under the same respected and worthy teachers. As Christian men, the legislators would perhaps like to keep the Bible, and have short prayers in the schools; but as patriots, they feel that those things, though good and sacred, are an insurmountable barrier to the Roman Catholic. The delicate conscience of the bishops and priests cannot allow such things in the school attended by their lambs! Through respect for the sacred rights of the Roman Catholic conscience, the legislators in many places throw the Bible overboard, and they say to God: “Please get out from our schools, and do excuse us if we order our teachers to ignore your existence!” They say to Jesus Christ: “We have not forgotten your sublime and touching words, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me.’ No doubt you would like to press our dear little ones on your loving heart and bless them for a moment in the schools; but we cannot allow them to go so near you in the school, we cannot even allow them to speak to you a single word there. Please be not offended if we turn you out from those very schools where you were so welcome formerly. We are forced to that sad extremity through the respect we owe to the tender consciences of our fellow-citizens of the Church of Rome. You know that they cannot allow their children to speak to you together with ours.” But when those awful, not to say sacrilegious, sacrifices have been made by the Protestant legislators to appease the implacable god of Rome—when, through respect for the scruples of the bishops and priests of Rome, the great God of Heaven, with His Son, Jesus Christ, have been unceremoniously turned out from the schools—when the Word of God has been prohibited, and the Bible is thrown overboard, is the Moloch god appeased? Will the Roman Catholic bishops and priests tell their children that they may unite with yours to go and receive education from the same teacher? No! But assuming, then, a sublime air of indignation, they turn against you as mad dogs; they call your schools godless schools! good only to form thieves, infidels and atheists!