“Need we add that obedience has its limits. There are, firstly, things forbidden by the law of God, which a Superior cannot prescribe without injustice, since, being then no longer subordinate to the Divine will, he can no longer serve as a medium between him and his subject. They are without the pale of obedience, and the Superior has no authority to enforce them. The subject, therefore, is not to act contrary to the law of God, or to the rule which they profess to follow; in such obedience would be illicit.”
I must make a few observations on this matter of obedience. Notice how, by such an obedience, a professed nun (or monk) transfers to an erring mortal the whole responsibility of her actions. She has to find out God’s will through the Superior’s. The Superior is to her in the place of God, and practically his law and order becomes for her God’s law and order. How can she remonstrate, when the Superior commands what is against the law of God, when she has been taught that she can only learn what is God’s law through the medium of the Superior? And if she dared to resist her Superior’s will because she felt it to be leading her astray, do you suppose that the Superior would ever acknowledge himself or herself to be in the wrong? And is it likely that the poor nun would escape some terrible penance for daring to doubt the propriety of any behest?
But the last paragraph, commencing “Need we add that obedience has its limits,” and closing with “Such obedience would be illicit,” was carefully hidden, for Father Ignatius had told his nuns to paste a piece of paper over it, since he could not agree with the Romish doctor! He required an absolute and unconditional obedience, and believed it impossible for a Superior to prescribe any law that was against the law of God.
St. Alphonsus Liguori has always been considered an extreme exponent of Romish doctrines; but now we find a man holding orders in the Church of England going even beyond Liguori. I beg my readers to make a special note of this. I will now finish my extracts from the writing on foreign note-paper inserted in the book I am about to review.
“The religious is a person consecrated for ever to the divine service” (mark this “for ever”—a prisoner for life, my friends, nothing more or less), “and who cannot disgrace his high dignity without committing sacrilege. He has solemnly vowed that he will belong to no other but God; he has devoted himself to follow after eternal wisdom in order to become perfect, and the religious, in sinning, has stripped himself of his justice and merits and become a shameful ruin, a horrid corpse.”
(This is enough to frighten a poor, timid girl, and to bind her in chains to her prison.)
“The spiritual dangers of the religious life are not to be attributed to the vows, but rather to the fault, of him who, by changing his mind, transgresses those vows. Do not then, under the pressure of most cruel temptations”—(who makes them cruel? Read the experiences of Miss Povey or any other nun who has had the good fortune to escape, or to be turned out of her prison, and you will find out)—“regret the profession you have made in the fulness of liberty”—(remember that previous to profession the Superiors have cunningly woven their entangling web around the nun, and the profession may be compared to the spider, after he has secured his prey, carrying the poor helpless fly into the inner precincts of his home)—“but rather behave the more diligently to subject your impatient nature to so salutary a yoke.” Mark the word “salutary.” Is it not a well-attested fact that many nuns go mad from the unnatural confinement within convent walls?
I can only hope to give a very short review of this book, which was placed in the hands of a nun who was a member of the Church of England. I have not time for an elaborate or lengthy account of its contents. I do not think that it was only at Llanthony that this book was used, and it is to be feared that whilst the Feltham convent is now no longer under the wing of Father Ignatius, yet that, with the exception of unconditional obedience, the teaching there is as extreme and as Romish as at Llanthony, and yet I believe a clergyman, holding a licence to officiate in the diocese of London, acts as chaplain there. How long our bishops are going to allow and wink at this state of things, I know not! May God raise up many faithful men who will demand that the laws of our Protestant Church be complied with!
The above work is one of the so-called devotional books prescribed by Father Ignatius, to be used by the nuns under his control.