Enforced celibacy in normal priests, simply means adultery, hidden behind walls and disguised as religion. Therefore, when adultery has to be tolerated, as an incident to a certain form of Christianity, the crime eludes the law, the illicit intercourse of the sexes identifies itself with a religious system, and it becomes as impossible to control as does the robber who gains control of the machinery of government. When the robber is the Law, who is to punish the criminal? When adultery is elevated into a system which is recognized as a religion, who is to punish the adulterer?
Robbery enthroned in the law, and advancing its demands too far, has to be dealt with by revolutions. Thus it was in England, when the Great Charter was won. Thus it was in the Revolution of 1688. Thus it was in Switzerland, in France, in the American Colonies, in Italy, in Germany, and even in Spain and Portugal—not to mention South America, and Mexico.
Adultery, interwoven in a religious system, was one of the main-springs of the Revolution in Germany, in England, in Holland and in the States of the libertine Popes, themselves.
The enormous popular support given to Calvin, Luther, and Knox, to Henry VIII., to Garibaldi, to Bolivar, and to Juarez, was largely fanned and fed by the intense wrath of the people against the pope-protected immorality of the priests— the adultery which could not be punished because it was interwoven into the system of popery.
The Popes could not punish the priests, because the Popes were equally criminal. The system required celibacy: the system was against the law of God: the system gave the priest absolute power over women, and secret access to them. The system needed the unmarried priest, and the system had to pay the price. The adultery of the priest had to be cloaked and tolerated, for the simple reason that it was incidental and inseparable.
But who made the system? Not God, nor the Bible, nor the Apostles, nor the early Fathers of the Primitive Church: the system was peculiarly the work of Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII.
It was this Pope who formulated the dogma of universal dominion.
It was Gregory who said that, "The world derives its light from two sources, the sun and the moon, the former symbolizing the Papacy, the latter the Civil State."
In Gregory's mind, the entire Christian world was his Empire. The temporal Princes were his vassals, every King dom of Europe was his fief, every crown, his to give and to take away. The keys of Heaven and of Hell were in his hands; he was the Infallible representative of Jehovah; and when he spoke, nations must shout, " The voice of the Pope, is the voice of God! "
To defend such a power and advance its banners, a disciplined and devoted soldiery was necessary: hence, the priests who could not take wives and have children. A family would divide their allegiance. Hence, also, the convent and the confessional, to furnish an outlet to the ungovernable natural desires of full-sexed men.