Some of the humiliating penances are the kissing of the floor many times a day, kissing the feet of our companions, fasting, silence, eating off the floor, and many other little, petty practices and self-denials too numerous to mention.
Think of it, a system here in free, Protestant America, in this day of advanced civilization, holding women in subjection and demanding practices of this nature!
To illustrate the teaching of this system in regard to penances, I wish to quote from "St. Rita's Prayer Book," compiled by Rev. Chas. Ferina, D.D., and this publication has the imprimatur cross of John M. Farley, then Archbishop elect of New York. On pages 35-36: "She (St. Rita) renounced her property in favor of the poor, renounced every earthly tie to devote herself entirely to austere penance. She professed to have no compassion for her body. She scourged herself thrice every day, the first time being the longest and the instrument composed of little iron chains. Vigils, hair-shirt, the discipline, and rigid fasts were the arms used to afflict her body, knowing that penance is the only means of expiation and salvation for fallen man, although our material age would utterly ignore it. In changing her costume Rita had no need to change her habits, for, as we have seen, as a girl, a wife and widow, she had ever led a stainless life. Her aim now was to attain the height of perfection. But amidst her penances, she had the sweetest consolations; and during her lengthy prayers, her fervent colloquies with God, her daily and nightly meditations on the passions of our Lord Jesus Christ, rapt in her Creator, her soul totally absorbed in Him and almost detached from her body, experienced heavenly delights."
CHAPTER VII.
Sacrament of Penance—Mass and Communion—Extreme Unction—Indulgences—Annual Retreat.
I have previously mentioned that I was compelled by rule to go to confession every eight days. I wish to comment on this Sacrament of Penance, as confession is called, and some of the other practices and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion.
Of all the practices that holds adherents to the Roman Catholic system, the telling of the many faults to the so-called mediator between God and man—the priest—stands paramount. Why not? Roman Catholics are raised to think and believe that by confessing their sins to the man representative of Christ in the confessional and receiving absolution, God has also forgiven them. God's Word says in 1st Timothy, second chapter, fifth verse, "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus." Not any representative of Christ, but Christ Himself.
The confessional box is a trap for the convent, and after the poor girls are once there they are shackled more than ever in the faith of the religion by the priest in the confessional. The girls abandon themselves, body, heart and soul, to the instructions and directions of this ungentlemanly man—for no true gentleman would ever ask the dirty, filthy, indecent questions in public or private that these men ask many of the girls and women in this so-called holy private place, the confessional—this man, whom we, as sisters and Roman Catholics look to as the mediator between us and God, often in the form of a drunken man. Yes, I have known not a few, and have waited on them in my work at the hospital for a great many years, and I cannot call to my mind one of these "holy men of God" who did not partake of the best liquors obtainable, and I have had to protect more than one from the people there so there would be no scandal.
Then to these liquor-soaked priests I was forced to turn and kneel to confess my sins, to lay bare the innermost thoughts of my soul and most sensitive feelings of the heart and then submit to the most humiliating, shameful questions—so shameful and degrading that I am not permitted to print them or to repeat them.