The full report was destroyedby the fanatical papist Bishop Bonner, at the beginning of the reign of Bloody Mary. (See "English Reformation.") But Bishop Burnett saw extracts from it "concerning 144 Houses, that contains abominations in it, equal to any that were in Sodom!"
Put this original evidence side by side with the confession already quoted: put with it the testimony gathered by Duke Leopold of Tuscany: add what Blanco White and Erasmus say; add what S. J. Mahoney and Manuel Ferrando say: buttress this mass of evidence with what the Fathers of the Church said, what all the escaped nuns and priests have alleged, and compare this mountain of proof with what youknowabout human nature—and how can you harbor a doubt that nunneries and monasteries are today what they always have been? They are houses of hidden iniquity, and nameless crimes—AND YOU KNOW IT!
That marvellous man of letters, Erasmus, whowrotefor the Reformation, but who left Luther and others tofight for it, says this in his "Colloquies."—
"I hold up to censure those who entice lads and girls into monasteries against their parents' wills, abusing their simplicity or superstition, and persuading them that there is no chance of salvation but in the cloister. If the world were not full of such anglers; if countless minds had not been most miserablyburied alivein such places, then I have been wrong in my conclusions. But if ever I am forced tospeak outwhatI feel upon this subject, I will paint the portrait ofthese kidnappers, and so representthe magnitude of the evil, that every one shall confess I have not been wrong."
(Quoted in Day's "Monastic Institutions," p. 239.)
The infamous Liguori—a Roman Catholic "Saint"—calmly assumes that many inmates of the convents are captives, just as Erasmus had said they were, and he lays down the law to these helpless, kidnapped captives with all the malevolence of a grinning devil.
"Now that you are professed in a convent, and thatit is impossible for you to leave it," &c. (Monastic Institutions, p. 294.)
Liguori threatens the captive, telling the poor creature that if she abandons herself to sadness and regret,she will be made to suffer a hell here, and another hereafter.
In other words,Smile, prisoner, smile! or we will make the convent a hell to you!
So says Saint Liguori, whose instructions to the priests, telling them what filthy questions they must ask the Catholic women, are so "obscene" that I was prosecuted by the Catholic Knights of Columbus for having quoted some of them. If I had quoted all that Liguori wrote in coaching the priests,and teaching them virtually how to disrobe women of their modesty as a prelude to their ruin, I suppose the Government would have ordered out the troops and had me shot.
Several times, Erasmus has been mentioned as one of the most terrific accusers of the papal system, its frauds, impostures, greed, ferocity, its fake miracles, its pagan adoration of images and relics, and its rotten immorality. Perhaps it is due to the reader that I cite him to "The Life and Letters of Erasmus," by the historian James A. Froude, published in this country by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1895.
From this comparatively recent work, the student can most readily obtain a general idea of Popery, as described by one who was a devout Catholic, but not a blind, servile papist. Erasmus was practically an orphan boy, of somewhat uncertain parentage, whose life mystery and romance inspired Charles Read to write the greatest of all novels, "The Cloister and the Hearth."
Mr. Froude tells the painful story of the forcing of Erasmus into monastic vows; and then follows him as he develops into the most learned and brilliant scholar of Europe.
Never a robust man, always more or less an invalid, Erasmus remained inside the Roman pale, but abhorred the inherent vices ofthe system, denounced those vices with a pen of fire, endured the terrors and agonies of persecution within his church, was bitterly abused by the vile priesthood whose putrid lives he uncovered, was menaced by the dread Inquisition, and really suffered more keenly the penalties than Luther did,for telling the truth on popery.
Luther, a bull-necked, fearlessMan, broke out, and fought popery from the outside. Erasmus, like many of his predecessors, tried to reform itfrom within, and he discovered at last that he might as well have been trying to reform hell.
The enraged monks and monkesses did not murder Erasmus, as they had murdered Savonarola, Huss, Jerome, &c.; but it was because the Pope had his hands full of other matters, and the time was not favorable for burning the most illustrious scholar of Christendom.
What did Erasmus say and write and publish against the vast parasitical growth of paganism, fraud and imposture that had overgrown Christianity under the pope?
Read his "Praise of Folly," which has been translated into English and can be had through any book-dealer.
When you read it, remember that Erasmus was never answered, save byabuse and threats.
In his letters to the Prothonotary of the Pope, letters written for the Pope to read, and which the Pope did read, Erasmus arraigns the unmarried clergy of Rome, her monks and her nuns, her monasteries and her convents, in the same terms that are used by the Preamble to the Act of the British Parliament which stated that reasons for the dissolution of these Romish hell-holes.
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 priesthoodshould 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: "thesecan be got over, butmarriage 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."
But once a young man is entrapped, there is no escape. "They may repent, but the superiors will not let them go,lest they should betray the orgies which they have witnessed."
Then Erasmus tells of instances where men were buried alive inside the monasteries to prevent their escape. "Dead men tell no tales!"
Remember, reader! Erasmus was writing to the Pope's own Prothonotary, in order that the "Holy Fathers" might of a suretyknowwhat was going on inside the monastic houses! And in reply, the Prothonotary, Lambert Grunnius, writes to Erasmus—
"I read your letter aloud to the Pope, from end to end: several cardinals and other great persons were present. The Holy Father was charmed with your style!"
And the Holy Father waxes wroth at some personal grievances of Erasmus, and grantedhimrelief from monkish diabolism; but what was done to correct the frightful conditions which Erasmus had brought to the Pope's personal attention?
Nothing! Absolutely nothing. It was the same way when the exposures were made in Spain, when they were made in Tuscany, when they were made in England, when they weremade in the Philippines! The answer of Rome is ever the same:Nothing can be done.
The Popeknowswhat enforced male celibacy does, when screened from the civil law behind thick walls,and given unlimited license among young women, who cannot resist, and who cannot tell!
And youknowthat the Popedoesknow—for he also is a male like me and you.
Again, Erasmus asks what would Saint Augustine saynow, if he were to see these convents and monasteries become "public brothels."
In those standard works, "The History of Prostitution" and "Human Sexuality," you will learn the fearful fact that the utter lewdness of nuns and of wives who had been debauched by the priests, became so universal thatthe trade of the professional harlot was almost entirely taken away from her. Why should loose menpay, when there were so many places of gratuitous entertainment?
(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 ofthe most frightful that I ever read—doubly frightful because the Romanist writers therein quotedassume it to be their rightto 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 ofthe 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.
Cardinal Newman had to acknowledge that Blanco White was a man or irreproachable character, "a man you can trust." "I have the fullest confidence in his word," &c.
And what does this ex-Catholic, for whom Cardinal Newman vouched, have to say about convents?
"I cannot," says he, "find tints sufficiently dark to portray the miseries which I have witnessed in convents. Crime, in spite of the spiked walls and prison gates is there. The gates of the holy prison are forever closed upon the inmates:force and shameawait them wherever they might fly."
Then the ex-priest tells the tragic story of his two sisters, virtually tortured to death in the Spanish convent, he being a witness to their misery and powerless to relieve it. The system held them all!
He continues—
"Of all the victims of the church of Rome,the nunsdeserve the greatest sympathy."
White's book was published in 1826. Like "Pope, or President," published in 1859, it is now out of print. Only at long intervals may you see a copy advertised in the catalogues of Old-book stores.Someagency has been most active in destroying anti-Catholic books, and keeping them out of our Public Libraries.
Consider this sentence in Hume's "History of England," Vol. II., p. 592.
"Monstrous disorders are therefore said to have been found in many of the religious houses,whole convents of women abandoned to lewdness; signs of abortions procured,OF INFANTS MURDERED, of unnatural lusts between persons of the same sex."
Did poor Margaret Shepherd, or Maria Monk make any accusations that were worse than these which we find in a standard history of England?
In Aubrey's "Rise and Growth of the English People," the indictment against the convents and the monasteries is equally severe. See Vol. I., p. 80 and 81.
In Lecky's "History of European Morals," we have exactly the same arraignment of this unnatural and polluting system.
In Bower's "History of the Popes," in Hallam's "Constitutional History of England," and in every trustworthy account of the system of enforced celibacy we have the same horrible,but natural, description of the lives led by those full-sexed members of both sexes, who cannot mate legally and decently, but who are given access to each other under cover of night, behind the curtain of thick walls, and with the assurance that,so long as no scandal leaks out, no notice will be taken of what is done inside the "holy" brothel.
The very language in which the virgin girl is made to pledge herself as "the spouse of Christ," is so abominably obscene and suggestive that it is bound to plant impure curiosity in her mind—and, with a girl,impure curiosityis the lure to the fall. Not especially wishing to be again indicted for quoting the Pope's nasty language, I will forbear. Even in the Latin, it is so vile, lewd, lascivious, filthy,and nasty, that I marvel how any white woman, under any circumstances, can allow a beast of a man to use that language to her,and not slap his face.
The language is quoted in "Pope, or President," pages 86 and 360. The "Nun Sanctified," of "Saint" Alphonsus Liguori, and the Theology of Peter Dens will give the reader a fairly correct idea of what sort of a slave the priests make of a woman,aftershe has been ensnared into taking the black veil.
In the famous investigation of the convents of Tuscany, in 1775, one of the nuns gave testimony which, is singularly piquant and unique. Besides, it remained uncontradicted. The name of the witness was Sister Flavia Peraccini. After telling of many escapades she had witnessed inside the convents, andof many merry times the priests and the nuns had with one another, Sister Flavia Peraccini deposed—
"A monk said to me that if a nun's veil were placed on one pole, and a monk's cowl on another, so great is the sympathy between the veil and the cowl they would come together,and unite." ("Unite" is the modest word: "copulate," ismeant.)
"I say," continues the Sister, "I say, and repeat it, that whatever the Superiors know, they do not knowthe least portionof the great evils that pass between the monks and the nuns."
The foregoing is a mere trifle compared to the whole amount of the undisputed testimony taken by Duke Leopold of Tuscany in 1775. Have men and women changed? Is human nature the same?
It was for all people and all ages that the inspired writer wrote—
"Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, letevery manhave his own wife; and letevery womanhave her own husband." (I. Cor. 7:12.)
The most powerful argument and authority against the Roman papacy on this questionis that of Jesus Christ.
Virtually, he said thata man must make himself a eunuch—if not born so—before he could live like a eunuch!
If the word of Christ is not conclusive and binding, where shall we seek the truth?
The trouble with papists is, they are educated outside of the Bible and common sense; and they seldom free their minds from the priestly domination established in childhood.
(THE END.)