Energetic as was the legislation of Benedict, it by no means put an end to the trouble. The year after his Bull appeared, in 1742, the synod of Namur found it necessary to remind confessors that they could not absolve women whom they had seduced;[1538] and in 1768 the Bishop of Ypres was obliged to recall to the attention of his clergy the Bulls of Gregory and of Benedict, and to threaten their transgressors with excommunication.[1539] The abuse was by no means confined to Europe, but extended to the missionary stations of the church. In 1775 the Apostolic Vicar of Cochin China inquired of Pius VI. whether the Bull of Benedict XIV. applied to the Franciscan missionaries under his charge, and, if so, whether it could not be moderated, to which Pius replied affirmatively as to the first question and negatively as to the second. That the scandal continued is shown by a pastoral letter of the Apostolic Vicar of Suchuen in 1803.[1540] It is not surprising that St. François de Sales should have declared that a confessor was to be selected out of ten thousand, seeing that so few among them were fitted for the function.[1541]
In considering the slow progress of improvement in the character of the clergy, we must bear in mind not only the debased material which required to be reformed, and the prevailing low standard of sexual morality throughout Europe, but also the prevalence within the church of the casuistic spirit, which tended to obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong and to extenuate all offences against the Decalogue. This spirit received a powerful impulse from the rising influence of the Company of Jesus, which furnished the most distinguished casuists and fostered the habit of testing everything by an artificial standard. If scandal could be averted, if the immediate temporal interests of the Order or of the church could be subserved, it mattered little whether morality suffered; and the subtle dialectics of the schools could always invent a justification for any line of action which appeared expedient at the moment. We have already seen how the successive Bulls of reforming pontiffs directed against the abuses of the confessional were virtually nullified in this manner; and the same processes were employed to soften the harshness of the canons which sought to repress the other vices of the clergy.[1542] To one who examines the works of these skilful dialecticians, the only wonder is that a church which not only tolerated but exalted them could retain any respect for virtue or any reverence for law, human or divine.
When these resources failed, recourse could be had to other means to avert scandal, as in the case of Father Mena, a priest of the Company of Jesus, at Salamanca, who persuaded one of his female penitents that God required her to abandon herself to him. He kept her in a hermitage conveniently near to the College of Jesuits where he officiated, and several children were the result of the union, when the matter became so notorious that the Inquisition interfered and threw the culprit into its prison at Valladolid. The Company of Jesus undertook his defence, and on the strength of certificates of his illness obtained his transfer to their college, where he was to be watched by officials of the Inquisition. His apparent illness increased, until a report was spread of his death; an image with a mask resembling him was interred with all the ceremonies of religion, and he was secretly conveyed to Genoa, where he was intrusted with a mission to convert the Jews.[1543]
More strenuous exertion, however, was required in the struggle over the case of Father Girard and la Cadière, which, in 1730 and 1731, convulsed society in Provence. Girard was a Jesuit of high reputation, who came to Toulon in 1728, where he soon obtained the spiritual direction of a number of women, among whom he selected seven to minister to his lusts. One of them, Catharine Cadière, a girl of 19, was especially distinguished for her exaltation of religious sensibility, which rendered her eminently fitted for the dangerous extravagances of Quietism. Under his guidance she speedily had ecstatic visions of heaven and hell, and was marked as the favorite of Divine Love by the stigmata which appeared on hands, feet, forehead, and side. While enjoying the popular veneration as a saint, it was not difficult for her spiritual guide to persuade her that God required her submission to him. This continued for some months, until, convinced that Girard had led her into sin, in place of the state of perfection to which she aspired, she changed her confessor, when the matter leaked out, and she brought a formal accusation against her seducer. At once the Company of Jesus took up the quarrel, and, as it suited the policy of Cardinal Fleury, the all-powerful minister, to gratify them, the unfortunate girl had no chance. The Episcopal courts, in which the case was first brought, sided with the guilty, and even the secular tribunals, to which the matter was transferred, were bitterly hostile to her. The accuser became the accused. She was persecuted, imprisoned, and threatened with torture, and in the Parlement of Aix, before which the case was finally brought, two members actually proposed that she should be burnt alive, but agreed, in order to secure the support of others, to accept the milder sentence of strangling after due infliction of torture, and this verdict was brought before the Parlement for debate. Despite the social influence of the Jesuits, this atrocity aroused public opinion throughout Provence and excited tumults which frightened the friends of Girard, so that when the final vote was taken only half the members of the Parlement pronounced him innocent, the other half voting for his condemnation, and he was saved by the casting vote of the President, Lebret. So strong was the popular feeling against him that he had to be conveyed away secretly to escape the vengeance of the mob, and died two years afterwards in the odor of sanctity, fully upheld by the Company of Jesus. As for la Cadière, she disappeared from sight, and the fate of the unfortunate girl is unknown.[1544]
[XXX.]
THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION.
If the council of Trent had thus failed utterly in its efforts to create that which had never existed—purity of morals under the rule of celibacy—it had at length succeeded in its more important task of putting an end to the aspirations of the clergy for marriage. With the anathema for heresy confronting them, few could be found so bold as openly to dispute the propriety of a law which had been incorporated into the articles of faith; and the ingenious sophistries and far-fetched logic of Bellarmine were reverently received and accepted as incontrovertible. Urbain Grandier might endeavor to quiet the conscience of his morganatic spouse by writing a treatise to prove the lawfulness of priestly wedlock, but he took care to keep the manuscript carefully locked in his desk.[1545] A man of bold and independent spirit, fortified by unfathomable learning, like Louis Ellies Du Pin, might secretly favor marriage, and perhaps might contract matrimony.[1546] Du Pin’s great antagonist, Bossuet, might incur a similar imputation, and be ready to partially yield the point if thereby he might secure the reconciliation of the hostile churches.[1547] All this, however, could have no influence on the doctrines and practice of Catholicism at large, and the principle remained unaltered and unalterable.
Yet it was impossible that the critical spirit of inquiry which marked the eighteenth century, its boldness of unbelief, and its utter want of faith in God and man, could leave unassailed this monument of primæval asceticism, while it was so busy in undermining everything to which the reverence of its predecessors had clung. Accordingly, the latter half of the century witnessed an active controversy on the subject. In 1758, a canon of Estampes, named Desforges, who had been forced to take orders by his family, published a work in two volumes in which he attempted to prove that marriage was necessary for all ranks of ecclesiastics. The book attracted attention, and by order of the Parlement it was burnt, September 30, 1758, by the hangman, and the unlucky author was thrown into the Bastile. These proceedings were well calculated to give publicity to the work; it was reprinted at Douay in 1772; a German translation was published in 1782 at Göttingen and Munster, and an Italian one, with some omissions, had already appeared in 1770, without an acknowledged place of publication. The Abbé Villiers undertook to answer Desforges in a weak little volume, the “Apologie du Célibat Chretien,” published in 1762, which consists principally of long extracts from the Fathers in praise of virginity. Even Italy felt the movement, and an anonymous work, entitled “Pregiudizi del Celibato,” appeared in Naples in 1765, and was reprinted in Venice in 1766. Some more competent champion was necessary to answer these repeated attacks, and the learned Abate Zaccaria brought his fertile pen and his inexhaustible erudition to the rescue in his “Storia Polemica del Celibato Sacro,” which saw the light in 1774, and which not long afterwards was translated into German. In 1781 appeared a new aspirant for matrimonial liberty in the Abbé Gaudin, who issued at Geneva (Lyons) his work entitled “Les inconveniens du célibat des prêtres,” a treatise of considerable learning and no little bitterness against the whole structure of sacerdotalism and Roman supremacy. This was followed, in 1782, by Andreas Forster, in his “De Cœlibatu Clericorum Dissertatio,” published at Dillingen, and dedicated to Pius VI., for the purpose of replying to the attacks of the innovating Catholics.