[60] Supplement to Lumires, 50th question, Art, III.
[61] St. Anselm, although very strict in the enforcement of the canons favoring celibacy, found recalcitrant priests in his own diocese whose course he characterized as “bestial insanity.”
[62] So says Bayle, author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary, a magnificent work in many volumes. Bayle was a man of whom it has justly been said his “profound and varied knowledge not only did much to enlighten the age in which he lived by pointing out the errors and supplying the deficiencies of contemporaneous writers of the seventeenth century, but down to the present time his work has preserved a repository of facts from which scholars continually draw.”
[63] Those who support celibacy would perhaps choose rather to allow crimes than marriage, because they derive considerable revenue by giving license to keep concubines. A certain prelate boasted openly at his table that he had in his diocese 1,000 priests who kept concubines, and who paid him, each of them, a crown a year for their license.—Cornelius Aggrippa.
[64] For years in Germany the word Pufferkind signified “priest’s bastard.” Montesquieu declared celibacy to be libertinism.
[65] Amelot (Abraham Nicholas), born in Orleans 1134, declared the celibacy of the clergy to have been established a law in order to prevent the alienation of the church estate.
[66] Pope Pelagius was unwilling to establish the Bishop of Sagola in his see because he had a wife and family, and only upon condition that wife and children should inherit nothing at his death except what he then possessed, was he finally confirmed. All else was to go into the coffers of the church.
[67] Cardinal Otto decreed that wives and children of priests should have no benefit from the estate of the husband and father; such estates should be vested in the church.
[68] In 1396 Charles VI forbade that the testimony of women should be received in any of the courts of his kingdom.
[69] The council of Tivoli, in the Soisonnais, 909, in which twelve bishops took part, promulgated a Canon requiring the oath of seven witnesses to convict a priest with having lived with a woman; if these failed of clearing him he could do so by his own oath.