They have the right to kidnap children: they have a right to restrain prisoners; they have a right to compel obedience: they have a right to shut out the State and its law: they have a right to punish the refractory, to flog the unruly girl, to starve her into submission, to degrade her with disgusting services, to use her person for their lusts!
That is the priest's point of view!
Study the horrible "theology" of Dens and Liguori: read what popes have said in denial of a layman's right to criticise a priest; read what Rev. Blanco White said of the systematic depravity of Romanism.
Cardinal Newman had to acknowledge that Blanco White was a man or irreproachable character, "a man you can trust." "I have the fullest confidence in his word," &c.
And what does this ex-Catholic, for whom Cardinal Newman vouched, have to say about convents?
"I cannot," says he, "find tints sufficiently dark to portray the miseries which I have witnessed in convents. Crime, in spite of the spiked walls and prison gates is there. The gates of the holy prison are forever closed upon the inmates: force and shame await them wherever they might fly."
Then the ex-priest tells the tragic story of his two sisters, virtually tortured to death in the Spanish convent, he being a witness to their misery and powerless to relieve it. The system held them all!
He continues—
"Of all the victims of the church of Rome, the nuns deserve the greatest sympathy."
White's book was published in 1826. Like "Pope, or President," published in 1859, it is now out of print. Only at long intervals may you see a copy advertised in the catalogues of Old-book stores. Some agency has been most active in destroying anti-Catholic books, and keeping them out of our Public Libraries.