Liguori threatens the captive, telling the poor creature that if she abandons herself to sadness and regret, she will be made to suffer a hell here, and another hereafter.
In other words, Smile, prisoner, smile! or we will make the convent a hell to you!
So says Saint Liguori, whose instructions to the priests, telling them what filthy questions they must ask the Catholic women, are so "obscene" that I was prosecuted by the Catholic Knights of Columbus for having quoted some of them. If I had quoted all that Liguori wrote in coaching the priests, and teaching them virtually how to disrobe women of their modesty as a prelude to their ruin, I suppose the Government would have ordered out the troops and had me shot.
Several times, Erasmus has been mentioned as one of the most terrific accusers of the papal system, its frauds, impostures, greed, ferocity, its fake miracles, its pagan adoration of images and relics, and its rotten immorality. Perhaps it is due to the reader that I cite him to "The Life and Letters of Erasmus," by the historian James A. Froude, published in this country by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1895.
From this comparatively recent work, the student can most readily obtain a general idea of Popery, as described by one who was a devout Catholic, but not a blind, servile papist. Erasmus was practically an orphan boy, of somewhat uncertain parentage, whose life mystery and romance inspired Charles Read to write the greatest of all novels, "The Cloister and the Hearth."
Mr. Froude tells the painful story of the forcing of Erasmus into monastic vows; and then follows him as he develops into the most learned and brilliant scholar of Europe.
Never a robust man, always more or less an invalid, Erasmus remained inside the Roman pale, but abhorred the inherent vices of the system, denounced those vices with a pen of fire, endured the terrors and agonies of persecution within his church, was bitterly abused by the vile priesthood whose putrid lives he uncovered, was menaced by the dread Inquisition, and really suffered more keenly the penalties than Luther did, for telling the truth on popery.
Luther, a bull-necked, fearless Man, broke out, and fought popery from the outside. Erasmus, like many of his predecessors, tried to reform it from within, and he discovered at last that he might as well have been trying to reform hell.
The enraged monks and monkesses did not murder Erasmus, as they had murdered Savonarola, Huss, Jerome, &c.; but it was because the Pope had his hands full of other matters, and the time was not favorable for burning the most illustrious scholar of Christendom.
What did Erasmus say and write and publish against the vast parasitical growth of paganism, fraud and imposture that had overgrown Christianity under the pope?