I am sixty six years old; in a short time I shall be in my grave. I shall have to give an account of what I say to-day. Well, it is in the presence of my great Judge, with my tomb before my eyes, that I declare to the world that very few—yes, very few—priests escape from falling into the pit of the most horrible moral depravity the world has ever known, through the confession of females.
I do not say this because I have any bad feelings against those priests: God knows that I have none. The only feelings I have are of supreme compassion and pity. I do not reveal these awful things to make the world believe that the priests of Rome are a worse set of men than the rest of the innumerable fallen children of Adam. No, I do not entertain any such views; for, everything considered and weighed in the balance of religion, charity, and common sense—I think that the priests of Rome are far from being worse than any other set of men who would be thrown into the same temptations, dangers and unavoidable occasions of sin.
For instance, let us take lawyers, merchants, or farmers, and, preventing them from living with their lawful wives, let us surround each of them from morning to night by ten, twenty, and sometimes more, beautiful women and tempting girls, who would speak to them of things which can pulverize a rock of Scotch granite, and you will see how many of those lawyers, merchants or farmers will go out of that terrible moral battle-field without being mortally wounded.
The cause of the supreme—I dare say incredible, though unsuspected—immorality of the priests of Rome is a very evident and logical one. By the diabolical power of the Pope, the priest is put out of the ways which God has offered to the generality of men to be honest, upright, and holy[[1]]. And after the Pope has deprived them of the grand, holy, I say Divine (in this sense that it comes directly from God) remedy which God has given to man against his own concupiscence—holy marriage, they are placed unprotected, unguarded in the most perilous, difficult, irresistible moral dangers which human ingenuity or depravity can conceive. Those unmarried men are forced to be, from morning to night, in the midst of beautiful girls, and tempting, charming women, who have to tell them things which would melt the hardest steel. How can you expect that they will cease to be men, and become stronger than angels?
Not only are the priests of Rome deprived by the devil of the only remedy which God has given to help them to stand up, but they have, in the confessional, the greatest facility which can possibly be imagined for satisfying all the bad propensities of fallen human nature. In the confessional they know those who are strong, and they know those who are weak among the females by whom they are surrounded; they know who would resist any attempt from the enemy; and they know who are ready—nay, who are longing after the deceitful charms of sin. If they still retain the fallen nature of man, what a terrible hour for them! what frightful battles inside the poor heart! What superhuman efforts and strength would be required to come out a conqueror from that battle field, where a David, a Samson, have fallen, mortally wounded!
It is simply an act of supreme stupidity on the part of the Protestant, as well as Catholic public, to suppose, or suspect, or hope, that the generality of the priests can stand that trial. The pages of the history of Rome herself are filled with the unanswerable proofs that the great generality of the confessors fall. If it were not so, the miracle of Joshua, stopping the march of the sun and the moon, would be a childish play compared with the miracle which would stop and reverse all the laws of our common fallen nature in the hearts of the 100,000 Roman Catholic confessors of the Church of Rome. Were I attempting to prove by public facts what I know of the horrible depravity caused by the confessional-box among the priests of France, Canada, Spain, Italy, England, I should have to write many big volumes in folio. For brevity's sake, I will speak only of Italy. I take that country because, being under the very eyes of their infallible and most holy (?) Pontiff, being in the land of daily miracles, of painted Madonnas, who weep and turn their eyes left and right, up and down, in a most marvellous way, being in the land of miraculous medals and heavenly spiritual favors, constantly flowing from the chair of St. Peter, the confessors in Italy are in the best possible circumstances to be strong, faithful, and holy. Well, let us hear an eye-witness, a contemporary, an unimpeachable witness about the way the confessors deal with their penitent females, in the only holy, apostolical, infallible (?) Church of Rome.
The witness we will hear is of the purest blood of the princes of Italy. Her name is Henrietta Carracciolo, daughter of the Marshal Carracciolo, Governor of the Province of Bari, in Italy. Let us hear what she says of the Father Confessors, after twenty years of personal experience in different nunneries of Italy, in her remarkable book, "Mysteries of the Neapolitan Convents," pp. 150, 151, 152: "My confessor came the following day, and I disclosed to him the nature of the troubles which beset me. Later in the day, seeing that I had gone down to the place where we used to receive the holy communion, called Communichino, the conversa of my aunt rang the bell for the priest to come with the pyx.[[2]] He was a man of about fifty years of age, very corpulent, with a rubicund face, and a type of physiognomy as vulgar as it was repulsive.
"I approached the little window to receive the sacred wafer on my tongue, with my eyes closed, as it is customary. I placed it upon my tongue; and, as I drew back, I felt my cheeks caressed. I opened my eyes, but the priest had withdrawn his hand, and, thinking I had been deceived, I gave it no more attention.
"On the next occasion, forgetful of what had occurred before, I received the sacrament with closed eyes again, according to precept. This time I distinctly felt my chin caressed again; and on opening my eyes suddenly, I found the priest gazing rudely upon me, with a sensual smile on his face.
"There could be no longer any doubt: these overtures were not the result of accident.