"Marriage cannot be given, unless there be, one and at the same time a sacrament, consequently that any other union between man and woman among Christians, made in virtue of what civil law soever, is nothing else than a shameful and miserable concubinage, so often condemned by the church." (Allocution on the State of Affairs in New Grenada ).
So in the judgment of the present Pope, the non-Catholics in the United States consist of strumpets and bastards. According to the principles of the Catholic Church, thus officially enunciated, every person, the marriage rites of whose parents have not been performed by a Catholic priest, is an illegitimate offspring divested of all legal right to inherit property of his parents. If the church shall ever gain in America the numerical strength for which she is striving, what will be the consequence to non-Catholics? Will she declare them legitimate, or respect their property titles? Have not her priests made this land ring with the assertion, that Infidels and Protestants have no right where Catholicism is triumphant.
But who is she that has the audacity to proclaim such principles? A church, which has been dripping with the blood of innocence for ages, yet is thirsting for more. Who are they that prate about chastity? A body of the most corrupt, unprincipled, and licentious priests that ever disgraced the name of religion. The cold dissoluteness of the Catholic orders is not only undeniable, but it is even frightful. Had history been silent, and the real conduct of Catholic priests, and the interior of Catholic nunneries remained a profound secret, yet, an ordinary knowledge of human nature would have warranted the suspicion that the priests were not models of chastity, nor the nunneries asylums of innocence. But history has not been silent; she has spoken distinctly, and spoken often. A nun escaped from her prison-house, or a priest not yet steeled by hypocrisy to all the pleadings of virtue, or who was disgusted beyond endurance at the corruption that festers in the heart of the Catholic Church, has furnished history with startling records, and raised the sacred veil, that the superstitious might behold the horrible compound of duplicity, lust, and murder which secretly pollutes the interior of the institutions which they reverence. But these fitful revelations, although appealing to the noblest sympathies of mankind, have seldom produced an effect equal to the exigency. Like bursts of unexpected thunder, they have startled for a moment, but soon rumbled into silence and forgetfulness.
Such is the general infatuation, that people seldom question that around which the sanctions of religion are thrown, and when they do the doubt is soon obliterated. They will reverently bow to a priest without thinking it is possible that under the guise of his chaste and holy profession, avarice, lust and murder may reign supreme. They will heedlessly pass a nunnery without thinking how many broken hearts may there be hopelessly imprisoned; how many gifted and accomplished females may there be pining in anguish and despair, who, while they sought an abode of unsullied chastity, found themselves entrapped in a den of infamy, to be profaned by holy confessors! But reluctantly as charity would believe these statements, they are substantiated beyond the possibility of doubt or denial, by the records of Catholic authority of the highest order.
An insight into the mysteries of Catholicism, and the mode by which priests conceal from publicity their acts of seduction and adultery, may be learned from the following extract from Hogan's "Auricular Confession." "The secular orders," says he? "are composed chiefly of parish priests and their curates, whose duty it is to hear their parishioners. The orders of regulars are composed of friars, who are subdivided into several minor orders, and who have no particular duties to discharge, unless especially deputed to do so by the bishop, or the deputy of the diocese into which they may be divided. It is so managed by the secular priests, that whenever they fail in seducing their penitents, and are detected by them that one of those friars shall immediately be at hand to hear the confessions of all such females, and forgive their sins, on condition that they shall never reveal to moral being the thoughtless peccadillos of their parish priest, who for the moment forgot himself, and whose tears of penitence now moisten the ground on which he walks." (Auric. Confess, vol. ii. p. 168).
The adaptation of the confessional to prepare the way for seduction and adultery may be comprehended by the following extract from the "Synopsis of Popery" by the same author. "Do any of these families," asks he, "know the questions which a priest puts to their families at the confessional? Do husbands know the questions which priests put to their wives at the confession?.... Fathers, mothers, guardians and husbands fancy to yourself the most indelicate, immodest, libidinous questions which the most immoral and profligate mind can conceive,—fancy those ideas put into plain language, and that by way of questions and answers, and you will then have a faint conception of the conversation which takes place between a priest and your hitheto pure daughter. If after two or three examinations, in that sacred tribunal, they still continue virtuous, they are rare examples." (Synopsis, p. 170, 171).
While the Catholic Church imposes on the priests and monks the vow of celibacy, it accords them the privilege of acting licentiously with impunity. In the life of Bishop Scipio de Ricci, written by an eminent Catholic, the practice of the church in allowing bishops and priests to keep concubines, while it forbids them to marry under pain of excommunication, is asserted and defended. The Council of Toledo passed a canon forbidding priests to keep more than one concubine in public. William Hogan asserts that every priest keeps a concubine, and every teacher in a school attached to a Catholic nunnery, has been seduced by her teacher. Chamancis says: "The adultery, obscenity and impiety of the priests are beyond description." St. Chrysostom thinks the number of them that will be saved, bears a very small proportion to those who will be damned. Cardinal Conpaggio asserts that "the priest who marries commits a more grievous sin than if he kept many concubines." Pope Paul protected houses of ill-fame, and acquired great riches by selling them licenses. The Council of Augsburg ordered that all suspected females should be driven by whips from the dwellings of the clergy, and have their hair cut off. A monk relates that he once made a contract with the Devil that if he would cease to fill his mind with lascivious ideas, he would omit some prayers to the saints whose pictures decorated the walls of his cloister, but upon communicating the substance of the agreement to the bishop, he was informed by him, that "rather than abstain from adoring Christ and mother in their holy images it would be better to enter every brothel and visit every prostitute in the city." Richard of England replied to Fulk Nuelly, the legate of Pope Innocent III., commissioned to blow the trumpet of another crusade: "You advise me to dismiss my three daughters, Pride, Avarice and Incontinence. I bequeath them to the most deserving: my pride to the Knights Templars; my avarice to the monks of Ciste; and, my incontinence to the prelates." Pope John XXIII, was deposed by the Council of Constance for having committed seventy different sorts of crimes, among the number of which was illicit commerce with three hundred nuns. The Trappists, a monkish order of highway robbers, were constantly employed in abducting females, confining them in their monastery, and perpetrating the most atrocious rapes. At the Council of Canterbury King Edgar declared that the houses of the clergy were nothing but brothels, Petrarch laments over the fact that the clergy at the papal court were shamefully licentious. Cardinals lived openly with their concubines; and it became a question of etiquette whether a bishop's concubine should not, at the court of His Holiness, precede other ladies. Llorente, chief secretary of the Spanish Inquisition in 1789, relates that the inquisitors having granted permission to the females of a certain locality to denounce their guilty confessors, the number of priests denounced was so great that thirty secretaries were employed for sixty days in taking down depositions, and that the profligacy of the clergy so far exceeded all calculation that it was concluded to suspend investigation, and to destroy the records of the proceedings. The extent and depth of clerical depravity can never be divulged by those who know it, for St. Bernard asserts that "Bishops and priests commit acts in private which it would be scandalous to express."
From nunneries governed and visited by priests of such a character, what is the logical inference? Chamancis, an unimpeachable Catholic authority, answers this question when he says: "To veil a woman in these convents is synonymous to prostituting her." The seventh General Council of Nice prohibited the erection of double convents for the accommodation of both sexes; but the prohibition was not regarded. In Europe every nunnery has attached to it a foundling asylum; in the United States, a grave-yard. Llorente relates a curious account of Aquida, an abbess of a Carmelite nunnery at Liemo. It appears that this female had, on several occasions, professed to have become pregnant with stones, and to have retired for the purpose of giving them birth. She had often exhibited her miraculous progeny to the credulous, and pretended to be enabled, by their divine nature, to cure diseases with them. Her success in working miracles by them procured for her the reputation of a saint. But unfortunate for her eventual canonization, a rumor became current that instead of having given birth to stones, she had given birth to children, and strangled them; and that she had obliged the holy nuns under her supervision to practise the same iniquity. The informant, an inmate of the nunnery, pointed out the place where the murdered babes were buried; and subsequent excavation revealed the horrible fact, that half the tale of blood had not been told.
The following additional facts, related by William Hogan, as having transpired under his personal cognizance, afford further confirmative proof of the general character of priests and nuns, and that it remains as it has always been, in all countries, and at all periods of civilization:
"The Roman Catholics of Albany," says he, "had, about three years previous to my coming among them, three Irish priests among them, occasionally preaching, but always hearing confessions.... As soon as I got settled in Albany I had, of course, to attend to the duty of auricular confession, and in less than two months found that the priests, during the time they were there, were the fathers of between sixty and one hundred children, besides having debauched many who had left the place previous to their confinement." (Auricular Confession, p. 46).