Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

As I have already said, I had passed the greater part of the night between the 21st and 22nd in meditation and thanksgivings. On the morning of the 22nd, long before the dawn of day, I was dressed and on my knees. This was to be the most holy and glorious day of my life! Raised the day before, to a dignity which was above the kingdoms and empires of the world, I was now for the first time, to work a miracle at the altar which no angel or seraph could do.

At my bidding Christ was to receive a new existence! The miracle wrought by Joshua, when he commanded the sun and moon to stop, on the bloody plain of Gibeon, was nothing compared to the miracle that I was to perform that day. When the eternal Son of God would be in my hands, I was to present myself at the throne of mercy, with that expiatory victim of the sins of the world pay the debt, not only of my guilty soul, but of all those for whom I should speak? The ineffable sacrifice of Calvary was to be renewed by me that day with the utmost perfection!

When the bell rang to tell me that the hour was come to clothe myself with the golden priestly robes and go to the altar, my heart beat with such a rapidity that I came very near fainting. The holiness of the action I was to do, the infinite greatness of the sacrifice I was about to make, the divine victim I was to hold in my hands and present to God the Father! the wonderful miracle I was to perform, filled my soul and my heart with such sentiments of terror, joy and awe, that I was trembling from head to foot; and if very kind friends, among whom was the venerable secretary of the Archbishop of Quebec, now the Grand Vicar Cazault, had not been there to help and encourage me, I think I would not have dared to ascend the steps of the altar.

It is not an easy thing to go through all the ceremonies of a mass. There are more than one hundred different ceremonies and positions of the body, which must be observed, with the utmost perfection. To omit one of them willingly, or through a culpable neglect or ignorance, is eternal damnation. But thanks to a dozen exercises through which I had gone the previous week, and thanks be to the kind friends who helped and guided me, I went through the performances of that first mass much more easily than I expected. It lasted about an hour. But when it was over, I was really exhausted by the effort made to keep my mind and heart in unison with the infinite greatness of the mysteries accomplished by me.

To make one’s self believe that he can convert a piece of bread into God requires such a supreme effort of the will, and complete annihilation of intelligence, that the state of the soul, after the effort is over, is more like death than life.

I had really persuaded myself that I had done the most holy and sublime action of my life, when, in fact I had been guilty of the most outrageous act of idolatry! My eyes, my hands and lips, my mouth and tongue, and all my senses, as well as the faculties of my intelligence, were telling me that what I had seen, touched, eaten, was nothing but a wafer; but the voices of the Pope and his Church were telling me that it was the real body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. I had persuaded myself that the voices of my senses and intelligence were the voices of Satan, and that the deceitful voice of the Pope was the voice of the God of Truth! Every priest of Rome has to come to that strange degree of folly and perversity, every day of his life, to remain a priest of Rome.

The great imposture taught under the modern word TRANSUBSTANTIATION, when divested of the glare which Rome, by his sorceries, throws around it, is soon seen to be what it is—a most impious and idolatrous doctrine.

“I must carry the ‘good god’ to-morrow to a sick man,” says the priest to his servant girl. In plain French: “Je dois porter le ‘Bon Dieu’ demain a un malade, dit le praitre a sa servante; mais il n’y en a plus dans le tabernacle.” “But there are no more in the tabernacle. Make some small cakes, that I may consecrate them to-morrow.” And the obedient domestic takes some wheat flour, for no other kind of flour is fit to make the god of the Pope. A mixture of any other kind would make the miracle of “transubstantiation” a great failure. The servant girl accordingly takes the dough, and bakes it between two heated irons, on which are graven the following figures, ✝
C.H.S. When the whole is well baked, she takes her scissors and cuts those wafers, which are about four or five inches large, into smaller ones of the size of an inch, and respectfully hands them over to the priest.

The next morning the priest takes the newly-baked wafers to the altar, and changes them into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. It was one of those wafers that I had taken to the altar in that solemn hour of my first mass, and which I had turned into my Saviour by the five magical words—Hoc est enim corpus meum!

What was the difference between the incredible folly of Aaron on the day of his apostasy in the wilderness, and the action I had done when I worshipped the god whom I made myself, and got my friends to worship? Where, I ask, is the difference between the adoration of the calf-god of Aaron and the wafer-god which I had made on the 22nd September, 1833. The only difference was, that the idolatry of Aaron lasted but one day, while the idolatry in which I lived lasted a quarter of a century, and has been perpetuated in the Church of Rome for more than a thousand years.