The secrecy with which the Inquisition worked may be conjectured from the fact that during the whole time its officers were busy gathering evidence upon which to condemn Galileo, his friends in Rome, none of whom occupied high position in the church, not only did not suspect his danger, but constantly wrote him in the most encouraging terms.
[95] The acts of the Metropolital Visitation of the Archbishops of Wareham states that in the Diocese of Bangor and St. Davids, in time of Henry VIII., more than eighty priests were actually presented for incontinence.
[96] Against this separation the bitter animosity of Pope Leo XIII. was seen in his refusal of the gifts tendered him by the royal family of Italy at the time of his jubilee.
[97] And the summary was not brief. Dwight.—Roman Republic in 1849, p. 115. Pope John XIII., having appeared before the council to give an account of his conduct, he was proved by thirty-seven witnesses, the greater part of whom were bishops and priests, of having been guilty of fornication, adultery, incest, sodomy, theft and murder. It was also proved by a legion of witnesses that he had seduced and violated 300 nuns.—The Priest, Woman and Confessional, p. 268.
Henry III., bishop of Liege, was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children. Lecky.—Hist. European Morals, p. 350. This same bishop boasted at a public banquet that in twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. Ibid, Vol. 2, p. 349. It was openly asserted that 100,000 women in England were made dissolute by the clergy. Draper.—Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 498.
[98] Familiar Discourses and other works. In Rome are born such a multitude of bastards that they are constrained to build particular monasteries, where they are brought up and the pope is named their father. When any great processions are held in Rome, then the said bastards go all before the pope.—Familiar Discourses, 383.
After Pope Gregory confirmed celibacy he found 6,000 heads of infants in a fish pond, which caused him to again favor the marriage of priests.—Ibid. Bishop Metz, to my knowledge, hath lost the annual revenue of 500 crowns, which he was wont to receive from the county for pardoning of whoring and adultery.—Ibid, 260.
[99] In 1874, an old Catholic priest of Switzerland, about to follow Pere Hyacinthe’s example in abandoning celibacy, announced his betrothal in the following manner: “I marry because I wish to remain an honorable man. In the seventeenth century it was a proverbial expression, ‘As corrupt as a priest,’ and this might be said today. I marry, therefore, because I wish to get out of the Ultramontane slough.”—Galignani’s Messenger, September 19, 1874.
[100] See Biographical Sketch. (Died January 16, 1899.)
[101] pp. 86 to 140.