Yet, when we are told the same story by Father Chiniquy, Dr. Justin Fulton, ex-priest William Hogan, ex-priest Fresenborg, ex-priest Manuel Ferrando, ex-nun Margaret Shepherd, ex-nun Maria Monk, ex-priest Blanco White, ex-priest Seguin, and by such submissive Catholics as Erasmus, Rabelais, Campanella and scores of other unimpeachable witnesses, we are more inclined to listen to the impudent denials of the lecherous priests than to the evidence of those who escape AND TELL!
The denial made by the unmarried priests is at variance with their looks, is at variance with admitted facts, is at variance with what we ourselves know of the overwhelming strength of our carnal desires: yet the impudent denial is so brazen, so persistent, and so threatening, that we either accept it, or enter the plea of nolle contendere.
The accusation against the pretended virgins involves so many apparently good men and chaste women, that we shrink from remembering the difference between publicity and privacy; we forget that the treacherous inclination is not felt in the church and in the crowd, but that it creeps to the secret couch, under cover of night, when there is silence, freedom from interruption and security from detection.
We forget how this passion takes advantage of night, of undress, and of secret contact of the physical man and woman, to heat their normal blood, no matter how sanctified they may really be in their daily visible life.
"Saint" Bernard of the 10th century exhausts his wrath upon the hideous vices of the monks and nuns "behind the partition." "What abominable lust!" cries this stern old anchorite. He exclaims—
"Would that those who cannot rule their sexuality would fear to give their conduct the name of celibacy. It is better to marry than to burn.... Take away from the church honorable marriage and the undefiled bed, and do you not fill it with concubines, incestuous persons, onanists, male concubines, and with every kind of unclean person?"
(Bernard's Sermons V. 29, cited in Elliott, II., 410.)
Take away honorable marriage from the priests, and what do you get in place of the bed undefiled? Read again that tremendous sentence of Saint Bernard, and then ask yourself, Has human nature changed?
A typical illustration of priestly seduction is the following:
"A lady of the name of Maria Catharine Barni, of Santa Croe, declared on her death-bed, that she had been seduced through the confessional, and that she had during twelve years maintained a continual intercourse with priest Pachiani. He had assured her that by means of the supernatural light which he had received from Jesus and the holy virgin, he was perfectly certain that neither of them was guilty of sin, &c." (Secrets of Female Convents, p. 58, cited by Elliott, Vol. II., p. 448.)