Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

Do you see now that all those dignified scruples of conscience about reading the Bible, praying with you, etc., were only a mask to deceive you, and make you fall into a snare? Do you not perceive now that they did not care a straw for the Bible and the prayers in the schools? but they wanted your legislators to compromise themselves before the Christian world, lose their moral strength in the eyes of a great part of the nation, divide your ranks, your means, your strength, and beat you on that great question of education. They will take such airs of martyrs when you will try to force their children to your schools that many honest and unsuspecting Protestants will be completely deceived by them. At first, they could not, they said, trust the children to your hands, because you read the Word of God; you prayed and blessed God in the school. But now that the Bible and God are turned out from the schools, they baptize them by the most ignominious names which can be given—they call them “godless schools!” Have you ever seen a more profoundly ignominious and sacrilegious trick? Will not your legislators open their eyes to that strange act of deception, of which they are the victims? Will they not come out quickly from the traps laid before them by the bishops and the priests of Rome? Yes! let us hope that your patriots and Christian legislators will soon understand that they owe a reparation to God and to their country; with unanimous voice they will ask pardon from God for having expelled him from the very place where He has most right to reign supremely—the school.

For what is a school without God in its midst to sit as a father, and to form the young hearts and evoke the young intellect? What is a boy, what is a girl, what is a woman or a man without God? what is a family, what is a people without God? It is a monstrosity, it is a body without life, it is a world without light, it is a cistern without water. Let us hope that, before long, your patriotic and Christian legislators will remember that the Bible is the foundation of the greatness of Protestant nations. It is to the Bible the United States, as well as Great Britain, owe their liberty, power, prestige and strength. It is the Bible that has ennobled the hearts of your heroes, improved the minds of your poets and orators, and strengthened the arms of your warriors. Yes! it is because your soldiers have brought with them everywhere, the Bible, pressed on their hearts, that they have conquered the enemies of liberty. So long as the United States will be true to the Bible, their glorious banners will fly respected and feared all over the seas, and over all the continents of the world. Let the disciples of the Gospel, the children of God, and the redeemed of Christ all over the fair and noble country you inhabit, hasten to request their legislators to invite the Saviour of the world to come back and bless their dear children in the school. For it is not only in your homes and in your churches that Jesus tells you “Suffer little children to come unto me.” It is particularly in the school. Oh! give two or three minutes to those dear little ones, that they may press themselves on His bosom, bless him for having saved them on the cross, and proclaim his mercies by singing one of those hymns which they like so much. By this noble act of national reparation you will take away from the hands of the priests the only weapon with which they can hurt you; you will destroy the only argument they use with a true force against your schools when they call them godless schools. Do not fear any more the priests and the prelates of Rome. Do not yield any more and give up your privilege to please them and reconcile them to your schools. You will never be able to reconcile them to your schools; for there is light in your schools, and they want the darkness. There is freedom and liberty in your schools; they want slavery! There is life in your schools, and it is only on dead corpses that their church can have a chance to live a few years more. You see, by a sad experience, that their scruples of conscience against the Bible and the prayer of the school are mere hypocrisy just thrown into the eyes of the public. Do not say with some honest but deluded Protestants: Is it not enough that that child should learn his religion at home? No, it is not enough; for it is in our nature that we want two witnesses to believe a thing. What comes to our mind only through one witness remains uncertain; but let two good witnesses confirm a fact, and then we accept it. Your child wants two witnesses to believe the necessity of the sacredness of religion. His Christian home is surely a good witness to your child, but it is not enough; what he has heard from you must be confirmed by his school teacher. Without this second witness, nine times out of ten your children will be skeptics and infidels. Besides that, the very idea of God brings with it the obligation to bless, love and adore Him everywhere. The moment you take your child to a place where not only he cannot love, bless and adore God, but where the adoration and the praise of God are forbidden, you entirely destroy the idea of God from the mind and from the heart of your child. You make him believe that what you have told him, when at home, of God is only a fable to amuse and deceive him.

Do you see that noble ship in the midst of that splendid harbor, how she is tossed by the foaming waves, how she is beaten by the furious winds? What does prevent that ship from flying before the storm and running ashore, a miserable wreck? What does prevent her from being dashed on that rock? The anchor! Yes, the anchor is her safety. But let a single link of the chain that binds the ship to her anchor break, will she not soon be dashed on the rock and broken to pieces, and sink to the bottom of the sea? It is so with your child! So long as his intelligence and his heart are united to God by the anchor of faith, he will nobly stand against the furious waves, he will nobly fight his battles; but let the school teacher be silent about God, and here is a broken link, and the child will be a wreck. Do not fear the priest, but fear God! Do not try any more to please the priests, but do all in your power to please your great and merciful God, not only in your homes, but also in your schools, and those schools will become more than ever a focus of light, an inexhaustible source of intellectual and moral strength—more than ever your children will learn in the school to be your honor and your glory and your joy. They will learn that they are not ignoble worms of the dust, whose existence will end in the tomb, but that they are immortal as God, whose beloved children they are. They will learn how to serve their God and love their country. Be not ashamed, but be proud to send your children to schools where they will learn how to be good Christians and good citizens. When you will have finished your pilgrimage they will be your worthy successors, and the God whom they will have learned to fear, serve and love in the school will help them to make your country great, happy and free.

Chapter XIII.

THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH OF ROME: ITS ANTI-SOCIAL AND ANTI-CHRISTIAN CHARACTER.

Talleyrand, one of the most celebrated Roman Catholic bishops of France, once said, “Language is the art of concealing one’s thoughts.” Never was there a truer expression, if it had reference to the awful deceptions practiced by the Church of Rome under the pompous name of “Theological studies.”

Theology is the study of the knowledge of the laws of God. Nothing, then, is more noble than the study of theology. How solemn were my thoughts and elevated my aspirations when, in 1829, under the guidance of the Rev. Messrs. Raimbault and Leprohon, I commenced my theological course of study at Nicolet, which I was to end in 1833!

I supposed that my books of theology were to bring me nearer to my God by the more perfect knowledge I would acquire, in their study, of His holy will and His sacred laws. My hope was that they would be to my heart what the burning coal, brought by the angel of the Lord, was to the lips of the prophet of old.

The principal theologians which we had in our hands were “Les Conferences d’Anger,” Bailly, Dens, St. Thomas, but above all Liguori, who has since been canonized. Never did I open one without offering up a fervent prayer to God and to the Virgin Mary for the light and grace of which I would be in need for myself and for the people whose pastor I was to become.

But how shall I relate my surprise when I discovered, that in order to accept the principles of the theologians which my Church gave me for guides, I had to put away all principles of truth, of justice, of honor and holiness! What long and painful efforts it cost me to extinguish, one by one, the lights of truth and of reason kindled by the hand of my merciful God in my intelligence. For to study theology in the Church of Rome signifies to learn to speak falsely, to deceive, to commit robbery, to perjure one’s self! It means how to commit sins without shame, it means to plunge the soul into every kind of iniquity and turpitude without remorse!