On page 247, Ex-Priest William Hogan says, in reference to the popish school-teachers, so numerous now in our Protestant schools—
"These ladies, when properly disciplined by the Jesuits and priests, become the best teachers. But before they are allowed to teach, there is no art, no craft, no species of cunning, no refinement in private personal indulgences, or no modes or means of seduction, in which they are not thoroughly initiated.
I may say with safety, and from my own personal knowledge through the Confessional, that there is scarcely one of them who has not been herself DEBAUCHED BY HER OWN CONFESSOR.
The reader will understand that every nun has a confessor; and here I will add, for the truth must be told at once, that every confessor has a concubine, and there are very few of them who have not several."
Remember that this fearful charge against celibacy was made in 1856, in the edition of Hogan's work which was the 76th thousand. Therefore, the ex-priest who had brought the best letters of introduction from Europe, and who had been unanimously elected Chaplain of the New York legislature, had hurled this hideous indictment at popery and its priest 76,000 times.
What answer was made to him? None!
They furiously abused him, but did not dare to either prosecute or reply. He had been a priest, and he knew too much.
Popery has never dared to prosecute an ex-priest, or an ex-nun, where there was any chance to lift the veil that conceals the rottenness of life inside the convents, and the monasteries.
After quoting Michelet and Courier and Llorente on the inevitable lasciviousness and depravity necessarily resulting from denying the priests the right to marry, William Hogan proceeds—
"Shall the cowl shelter the adulterous monk in this land of freedom? Are the sons of freemen to countenance, nay, asked to build impassible walls around a licentious, lecherous, profligate horde of foreign priests and monks, who choose to come among us, and erect a little fortification, which they call nunneries for their protection?