(Lest you heed the deceptive talk which endeavors to convince you that the old tree is now bearing different fruit, read Hogan's "Popish Nunneries," McCabe's "Ten Years in a Monastery," McCarthy's up-to-date "Priests and People in Ireland;" and the astounding, undenied statements of Bishop Manuel Ferrando, in "The Converted Catholic" magazine of New York City.)
In Delisser's powerful book, "Pope, or President?" there is a masterly summing up against "Romanism as revealed by its own writers."
Among other witnesses, he cites the evidence of Mahoney, the priest who was examined by a Committee of the House of Commons.
"A very nefarious use was made of convents," testified this honest Irishman. His disclosures corroborated what another honest Irish priest, Hogan, said several centuries later.
"A woman ... is seduced into a convent to live in sin with the bishop and other confessors. It is not human to place a priest where he is allowed to fall, and suppose him innocent. Reader, commit your daughter to the soldier or hussar who can marry her, rather than to a Romish priest." ("Pope, or President," p. 59.)
In fact, Delisser's chapter on "Convent Exposed" is one of the most frightful that I ever read—doubly frightful because the Romanist writers therein quoted assume it to be their right to mistreat women, just as they please!
It is only in such a chapter, composed of citations from orthodox Roman Catholics, that you can obtain anything like a true conception of the priest's point of view.
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.