“C. Chiniquy.”
The effect of that letter upon Mr. Brassard was still more powerful than I had expected. It forced him to blush at his own cowardice, and to ask me pardon for the unjust sentence he hadpassed upon me to obey the bishop. Here are the parts of the letter bearing upon that subject:
St. Roch, 29 Mai, 1857.
Moncher Chiniquy:—“Je suis plus convainen que jamais que tu n’as jamais ete interdit legalement, depuis que j’ai appris par Monseigneur de Montreal, que l’eveque de Chicago t’a interdit de vive voix, dans sa chambre; ce que Ligoury dit etre nul te de nul effet.”
I am more than ever convinced that you have never been legally interdicted, since Bishop Bourget told me that Bishop O’Regan had interdicted you privately, “viva voce” in his private room. Ligoury says that it is a nullity and that it can have no effect. I beg your pardon for what I wrote against you. I have been forced to do it. Because I had not yet sufficiently condemned you, and that my name, which you were citing in your writings, was giving you too much power, and a too clear condemnation of Bishop O’Regan, the Bishop of Montreal, abusing his authority over me, forced me to sign that document against you. I would not do it to-day if it were to be done again. Keep silence on what I tell you in this letter. It is all confidential. You understand it.
Your devoted friend,
L. M. Brassard.
No priest in Canada had more deservedly enjoyed the reputation of a man of honor, than Mr. Brassard. Not one had ever stood so high in my esteem and respect. His sudden and unexpected fall, filled my heart with an unspeakable sadness. I may say that it snapped the last thread which held me to the church of Rome. Till then, it was not only my hope, but my firm conviction, that there were many honest, upright priests in that church, and Mr. Brassard was, to me, the very personification of honesty.
How can I describe the shock I felt when I saw him, there, in the mud, a monument of the unspeakable corruption of my church!
The perfidious Delilah had seduced and destroyed this modern Sampson, enchained, as a trembling slave, at the feet of the new implacable Moloch, “the authority of the bishop!” He had not only lost the fear of God, and the respect he owed to himself, by publicly declaring that I was guilty, when he knew that I was innocent, but he had so completely lost every sentiment of honesty, that he wanted me to keep secret his declaration of my innocence, at the very moment he was inviting my whole country,through the press, to abhor and condemn me as a criminal!
I read again and again the strange letter. Every word of it was destroying the last illusions which had concealed from my mind, the absolute and incurable perversity of the church of Rome. I had no hard feelings against this last friend whom she had poisoned with the wine of her prostitutions. I felt only a profound compassion for him. I pitied and forgave him from the bottom of my heart. But every word of his letter sounded in my ears as the warning voice of the angel sent to save Lot from the doomed city of Sodom. “Escape for thy life. Look not behind thee; neither stay thou in all the plain. Escape thou to the mountain, lest thou be consumed!”