The accusations fathered by Erasmus and laid before the Pope, agree in every essential particular with the revelations of Blanco White, of S. J. Mahoney, William Hogan, Joseph McCabe, Bishop Manuel Ferrando, Margaret Shepherd, Maria Monk, and every other witness who has had the courage to uncover these papal dens of infamy, torture, vice and crime.
I have not the space to quote at any length from the Letters of Erasmus: get the book and read it for yourself.
But weigh this passage—
"Men are threatened or tempted into vows of celibacy. They can have license to go with harlots, but they must not marry wives.
They may keep concubines and remain priests. If they take wives, they are thrown to the flames.
Parents who design their children for a celibate priesthood should emasculate them in their infancy, instead of forcing them, reluctant or ignorant, into a furnace of licentiousness."
What was this furnace of licentiousness? The cloistered convent, or the monastery.
In his notes to the New Testament, a Greek translation of which Erasmus made, he said, after alluding to St. Paul's injunction about the "one wife," that the priests could commit homicide, parricide, incest, piracy, sodomy and sacrilege: " these can be got over, but marriage is fatal."
He adds that of all the enormous herds of priests, "very few of them are chaste."
In his letter to Lambert Grunnius, (in the year 1514) Erasmus gives an awful picture of monastic slavery in houses " which are worse than brothels."