In all 110 cases, of which nearly one-half were brethren connected with educational institutions, referred to above.
The earlier years of this list must be necessarily imperfect, and, indeed, M. Charles Sauvestre has given details of nine cases occurring in schools in 1861,[1632] all which have escaped Dr. Wahu, but, even making allowance for the impossibility of hunting up all the fugitive records of the past, the increase during recent years is not to be regarded as indicating an increase of immorality. It rather proves how powerful were the forces protecting the church and repressing publicity under the Second Empire. The absence of cases in 1870-1 is probably attributable to the preoccupations of the Franco-Prussian War and its consequent troubles. While the presidency of M. Thiers, in 1872, yielded 10 cases, the reactionary government of Marshal MacMahon showed but 12 cases in four years. After the fall of MacMahon the number rapidly increases, the first four months of 1879 affording no less than 19 cases. Whether, since then, this rate of progression has been maintained I have no means of knowing, but it is to be hoped that the breaking up of the unauthorized orders, and the increased vigilance of the authorities, aided by an aroused public sentiment, have led to a decrease in the dismal record. One deplorable feature of many of these cases is the large number of victims frequently represented in a single prosecution, and that the perpetrator had often been afforded the opportunity of continuing his crimes in successive situations. Thus, in the affair of the Abbé Debra, at Liège, in 1877, there were 32 offences charged against him; and, of those occurring in the single year 1878, frère Marien was condemned for no less than 299, frère Mélisse, at Saint-Brice, for 50, frère Climène at Candé, Mazé, and Martigné-Ferchaud, for 25, and frère Adulphe at Guipry, Saint-Meloir-des-Ondes, and Pleurtuit, for 67.
It would be a libel on human nature to assert that this catalogue of sin does not represent more than an average of wickedness, and the responsibility for the existence of so shocking a condition of morality must, at least in part, be attributed to the rule of celibacy, for there is nothing in the status of the church in France to attract to it those who seek merely a career of sloth and self-indulgence. The income of the parish priest in France only averages about 1100 francs per annum, and his position, in a vast majority of cases, is wholly insecure, being dependent altogether upon the pleasure of his bishop, who can dismiss him at any moment and thus deprive him of all means of livelihood. In 1866, out of a total of 33,707 priests in service, only 3715 held preferment of which they could not be thus deprived at the whim of their superiors.[1633] A profession so poorly rewarded, subjected to discipline nominally so severe, and held under such a tenure, can scarce be expected to draw to its ranks men of character and position; and in fact, the Bishop of Poitiers, in 1877, made in a pastoral letter the humiliating avowal that the better and more intelligent classes as a rule avoided the church, which was compelled to find its recruits among the children of peasants and laborers. This is confirmed by a work entitled “Le grand péril de l’église de France,” issued in 1879 by the Abbé Bougaud, Vicar-General of Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans, by which it appears that the districts which furnish the most recruits are those which are most ignorant, and that, as education increases, the willingness to enter the church diminishes. Moreover, not only is this the case, but even the numbers of the secular clergy, necessary for the ministrations of religion, are deficient. In his own diocese of Orléans there were 180 priests lacking, and in that of Troyes there were 100 parishes without curés; and though the want of qualified ministers was daily increasing, the pupils in the seminaries were diminishing, and it seemed impossible to fill the void.[1634] While some allowance must of course be made for the character of the material thus pressed into service, this fact only increases the responsibility of those who persist in subjecting youths fitted neither by nature nor training to the tremendous strain of enforced celibacy in a career which surrounds them with the most dangerous temptations.
Irrespective of questions of morality, the rule of celibacy in modern society is harmful to the state in proportion as it contributes to the aggrandizement of those who enforce it. A sacerdotal caste, divested of the natural ties of family and of the world, with interests in many respects antagonistic to the communities in which its members reside, with aims which, from the nature of the case, must be for the temporal advancement of its class, is apt to prove a dangerous element in the body politic, and the true interests of religion, as well as of humanity, are almost as likely to receive injury as benefit at its hands, especially when it is armed with the measureless power of confession and absolution, and is held in strict subjection to a hierarchy. Such a caste would seem to be the inevitable consequence of compulsory celibacy in an ecclesiastical organization such as that of the Catholic church, and the hierarchy based upon it can scarce fail to become the enemy of human advancement, so long as the priest continues to share the imperfections of our common nature. How little the aims of that hierarchy have changed with the lapse of ages may be seen in the pretensions which it still advances, as of old, to subject the temporal sovereignty of princes and peoples to the absolute domination of the spiritual power. The temper of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII. is still the leading influence in its policy, and the opportunity alone is wanting for it to revive in the nineteenth century the all-pervading tyranny which it exercised in the thirteenth. Even the separation of church and state is condemned as a heresy, and as the state is denied the privilege of defining the limits of its own authority, and as the right of the church to use force is asserted, it would be difficult to set bounds to the empire which is its rightful heritage, and of which it is deprived by the irreligious tendencies of the age.[1635]
Yet, in spite of this antagonism to the spirit of modern society and civilization, it would be futile to anticipate the downfall of the church, or even any marked modification in its general organization or teaching. It arose out of a necessity in human development. With all its aberrations, it has been, perhaps, the most efficacious of agencies for the improvement and civilization of man, and it will not disappear or undergo any essential change until the necessity for its existence shall have passed away in the elevation of mankind. The human race is not yet prepared for independence in religious and moral thought, and the masses in many lands will long require to be controlled with the awful authority claimed for an infallible church, and will find inexpressible comfort in that implicit faith which throws upon another the burden of sin and the responsibility of salvation. The church thus is doing its work, and has its work to do. We may, indeed, look forward hopefully to the time when the diffusion of education and the growth of intelligence will enable man to throw off the trammels which still are requisite to his well-being and well-doing, and will seek and obey his Creator without an intermediary, but that time is yet far off, and until it comes Latin Christianity has a mission from which it cannot be spared.
NOTE.
A Catholic reviewer of my first edition has assured me that I am in error in assuming clerical celibacy to be a point of faith in his church. To use his own words—“The writer is mistaken when he calls the celibacy of the clergy a point of faith. It never was more than a point of discipline, as is keeping the fasts and other commandments of the church, which may be modified by the same authority which prescribed them.” That it may, even as a point of faith, be abrogated by the same authority which defined it, I do not doubt, for everything is possible to a General Council guided by an infallible Pope; that it may now be occasionally represented and even treated as a point of discipline, I think quite possible and shall not undertake to dispute, seeing that the Greek discipline is tolerated in that portion of the Greek church which admits the supremacy of Rome,[1636] but that the council of Trent intended to make it a point of faith and did so make it is susceptible of the plainest demonstration. Any one who will read the Tridentine canons (ante, pp. 536-7) will see that their form is purely doctrinal and not disciplinary. If this be questioned, I may refer to Chr. Lupus, whose orthodoxy and accuracy in such matters no good Catholic can doubt, and who informs us, what indeed is self-evident, that the council of Trent classified its anathemas of faith as canons, and its regulations of discipline as decrees of reformation—“Sacrosancta Tridentina synodo fidei anathematismos, canones; morum autem regulas appellet decreta reformationis” (App. ad Synod. Chalced. Art. I.—Opp. II. 248), and the anathemas on the subject will be found classed under the title “Doctrina de Sacramento Matrimonii,” followed by disciplinary regulations under the rubric “Decretum de Reformatione Matrimonii.” The form of the canons in fact tells its own story. The dread anathema, the final and highest condemnation of the church (“Anathema est æternæ mortis damnatio et non nisi pro mortali debet imponi crimine et illi qui aliter non potuerit corrigi”—Grat. Decret. P. II. Caus. XI. Q. iii. c. 41) is directed, not against him who actually marries, but against those who assert that all may marry who have not the gift of chastity; and the same condemnation is pronounced on those who hold that marriage is preferable to celibacy. It is therefore treated purely as a matter of belief, the mere discussion of which is practical heresy. This was the form adopted by the council throughout in defining points of faith, as, for instance, in treating of Original Sin, which no one will pretend to be a matter of discipline—“Si quis per Jesu Christi Domini nostri gratiam quæ in baptismate confertur, reatum originalis peccati remitti negat ... anathema sit” (Sess. V. de Peccat. Orig. c. 5). Any one believing in the validity of priestly marriage is therefore not merely a contemner of a point of discipline but a heretic, and it is simply a libel on the good fathers of Trent to assert that they would anathematize as worthy of perpetual perdition a simple theoretical opinion on a matter of discipline.
Their intentions, moreover, as to this, are rendered indisputable by the answer of Pius V. in 1561, just before the final meeting of the Council, to the demand of Charles IX. for the concession of the cup to the laity. The pontiff states that he had considered that point and the marriage of the clergy to be matters of law, and therefore capable of alteration by due authority, but that, on expressing this opinion in the last conclave, he had been stigmatized as a Lutheran (Le Plat, Monument. Concil. Trident. IV. 734). This is confirmed by the remarks of Fra Paolo on the canon which pronounces the anathema on those who deny that a non-consummated marriage is dissolved by the vow of either spouse (Sess. XXIV. de Sacram. Matrim. c. vi.), where he alludes to the surprise caused by making it a point of faith—“Nel sesto anathematimismo del Matrimonio restarono molti ammirati che fosse posto per articolo di fede” (Ist. del Concil. Trident. Lib. VIII.—Ed. Helmstadt. II. 382).