While the inferior and secondary position of woman early became an integral portion of Christianity, its fullest efforts are seen in Church teachings regarding marriage. Inasmuch as it was a cardinal doctrine that the fall of Adam took place through his temptation into marriage by Eve, this relation was regarded with holy horror as a continuance of the evil which first brought sin into the world, depriving man of his immortality. It is a notable fact that the expected millennium of a thousand years upon earth with its material joys has ever had more attraction for Christians than the eternal spiritual rapture of heaven. Many of the old Fathers taught that “the world is a state of matrimony, but paradise of virginity.” To such extent was this doctrine carried it was declared that had it not have been for the fall, God would have found some way outside of this relation for populating the world, consequently marriage was regarded as a condition of peculiar temptation and trial; celibacy as one of especial holiness.
The androgynous theory of primal man found many supporters, the separation into two beings having been brought about by sensual desire. Jacob Boehme and earlier mystics of that class recognized the double sexuality of God in whose image man was made. One of the most revered ancient Scriptures, “The Gospel according to the Hebrews,” which was in use as late as the second century of the Christian era, taught the equality of the feminine in the Godhead; also that daughters should inherit with sons. Thirty-three fragments of this Gospel have recently been discovered. The fact remains undeniable that at the advent of Christ, a recognition of the feminine element in the divinity had not entirely died out from general belief, the earliest and lost books of the New Testament teaching this doctrine, the whole confirmed by the account of the birth and baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the feminine creative force, playing the most important part. It was however but a short period before the church through Canons and Decrees, as well as apostolic and private teaching, denied the femininity of the Divine equally with the divinity of the feminine. There is however abundant proof that even under but partial recognition of the feminine principle as entering in the divinity, woman was officially recognized in the early services of the church, being ordained to the ministry, officiating as deacons, administering the act of baptism, dispensing the sacrament, interpreting doctrines and founding sects which received their names.
The more mystical among priests taught that before woman was separated from man, the Elementals were accepted by man as his children and endowed by him with immortality, but at the separation of the androgynous body into the two beings Adam and Eve, the woman through accident was also endowed with immortality which theretofore had solely inhered in the masculine portion of the double-sexed being. These mystics also taught that this endowment of woman with immortality together with her capability of bringing new beings into existence also endowed with immortal life, was the cause of intense enmity toward her on the part of the Elementals, especially shown by their bringing suffering and danger upon her at this period.
Still another class recognizing marriage as a necessity for the continuance of the species, looked upon it with more favor, attributing the fall to another cause, yet throwing odium upon the relation by maintaining that the marriage of Adam and Eve did not take place until after they had been driven from Paradise. This doctrine was taught by the Father Hieronymus. Thus with strange inconsistency the church supported two entirely opposing views of marriage. Yet even those who upheld its necessity still taught woman’s complete subordination to man in that relation; also that this condition was one of great tribulation to man, it was even declared that God caused sleep to fall upon Adam at the creation of Eve in order to prevent his opposition. Lecky speaking of the noxious influences of ascetics upon marriage, says it would be difficult to conceive anything more coarse and repulsive than the manner in which the church regarded it; it was invariably treated as a consequence of the fall of Adam and regarded from its lowest aspect. But having determined that evil was necessary in order to future good, the church decided to compel a belief that its control of this contract lessened the evil, to this end declaring marriage illegal without priestly sanction; thus creating a conviction of and belief in its sacramental nature in the minds of the people. Despite the favoring views of a class regarding marriage, celibacy was taught as the highest condition for both man and woman, and as early as the third century many of the latter entered upon a celibate life, Jerome using his influence in its favor. Augustine, while admitting the possibility of salvation to the married, yet speaking of a mother and daughter in heaven, compared the former to a star of the second magnitude, but the latter as shining with great brilliancy. The superior respect paid to the celibates even among women is attributed to direct instruction of the apostles. The “Apostolic Constitutions” held even by the Episcopal church as regulations established by the apostles themselves, and believed to be among the earliest christian records, give elaborate directions for the places of all who attend church, the unmarried being the most honored. The virgins and widows and elder women stood or sat first of all.
The chief respect shown by the early fathers towards marriage was that it gave virgins to the church, while the possibility of salvation to the married, at first recognized, was denied at later date even to persons otherwise living holy lives. The Emperor Jovinian banished a man who asserted the possibility of salvation to married persons provided they obeyed all the ordinances of the church and lived good lives. As part of this doctrine, the church taught that woman was under an especial curse and man a divinely appointed agent for the enforcement of that curse. It inculcated the belief that all restrictions placed upon her were but parts of her just punishment for having caused the fall of man. Under such teaching a belief in the supreme virtue of celibacy—first declared by the apostle Paul,—was firmly established. To Augustine is the world indebted for full development of the theory of original sin, promulgated by Paul as a doctrine of the Christian Church in the declaration that Adam, first created, was not first in sin. Paul, brought up in the strictest external principles of Judaism, did not lose his educational bias or primal belief when changing from Judaism to Christianity. Neither was his character as persecutor changed when he united his fortunes with the new religion. He gave to the Christian world a lever long enough to reach down through eighteen centuries, all that time moving it in opposition to a belief in woman’s created and religious equality with man, to her right of private judgment and to her personal freedom. His teaching that Adam, first created, was not first in sin, divided the unity of the human race in the assumption that woman was not part of the original creative idea but a secondary thought, an inferior being brought into existence as an appendage to man.
Although based upon a false conception of the creative power, this theory found ready acceptance in the minds of the men of the new church. Not illiterate, having received instruction at the feet of Gamaliel, Paul was yet intolerant and credulous, nay more, unscrupulous. He was the first Jesuit in the Christian church, “Becoming all things to all men.” The Reformed church with strange unanimity has chosen Paul as its leader and the accepted exponent of its views. He may justly be termed the Protestant Pope, and although even among Catholics rivalling Peter in possession of the heavenly keys, yet the Church of Rome has accepted his authority as in many respects to be more fully obeyed than even the teachings of St. Peter. Having been accepted by the Church as the apostolic exponent of its views upon marriage, it was but to be expected that his teachings should be received as divine. That Paul was unmarried has been assumed because of his bitterness against this relation, yet abundant proof of his having a wife exists. For the membership of the Great Sanhedrim, marriage was a requisite. St. Clement of Alexandria positively declared that St. Paul had a wife. Until the time of Cromwell, when it was burned, a MS. letter of St. Ignatius in Greek was preserved in the old Oxford Library; this letter spoke of “St. Peter and Paul and the apostles who were married.” Another letter of St. Ignatius is still extant in the Vatican Library. Tussian and others who have seen it declare that it also speaks of St. Paul as a married man. But tenderness toward woman does not appear in his teachings; man is represented as the master, “the head” of woman. In consonance with his teaching, responsibility has been denied her through the ages; although the Church has practically held her amenable for the ruin of the world, prescribing penance and hurling anathemas against her whom it has characterized as the “door of hell.”
At a synod in Winchester in the eighth century, St. Dunstan, famed for his hatred of women, made strenuous effort to enforce celibate life. It was asserted to be so highly immoral for a priest to marry, that even a wooden cross had audibly declared against the horrid practice. Although in the third century marriage was permitted to all orders of the clergy, yet the very ancient “Gospel of the Egyptians,” endorsed as canonical by Clement of Alexandria, taught celibacy. These old christian theologians found the nature of woman a prolific subject of discussion, a large party classing her among brutes without soul or reason. As early as the sixth century a council at Macon (585), fifty-nine bishops taking part, devoted its time to a discussion of this question, “Does woman possess a soul?” Upon one side it was argued that woman should not be called “homo”; upon the opposite side that she should, because, first, the Scriptures declared that God created man, male and female; second, that Jesus Christ, son of a woman, is called the son of man. Christian women were therefore allowed to remain human beings in the eyes of the clergy, even though considered very weak and bad ones. But nearly a thousand years after this decision in favor of the humanity of the women of Christian Europe, it was still contended that the women of newly discovered America belonged to the brute creation, possessing neither souls nor reason. As late as the end of the sixteenth century an anonymous work appeared, arguing that women were no part of mankind, but a species of intermediate animal between the human and the brute creation. (Mulieres non est homines, etc.) Mediaeval christian writings show many discussions upon this point, the influence of these old assertions still manifesting themselves.
Until the time of Peter the Great, women were not recognized as human beings in that great division of Christendom known as the Greek church, the census of that empire counting only males, or so many “souls”—no woman named. Traces of this old belief have not been found wanting in our own country within the century. As late as the Woman’s Rights Convention in Philadelphia, 1854, an objector in the audience cried out: “Let women first prove they have souls; both the Church and the State deny it.”
Everything connected with woman was held to be unclean. It is stated that Agathro desired the Sophist Herodes to get ready for him the next morning a vessel full of pure milk, that is to say which had not been milked by the hand of a woman. But he perceived as soon as it was offered to him that it was not such as he desired, protesting that the scent of her hands who had milked it offended his nostrils. In the oldest European churches great distinction was made between the purity of man and woman. At an early date woman was forbidden to receive the Eucharist into her naked hand on account of her impurity, or to sing in church on account of her inherent wickedness. To such an extent was this opposition carried, that the church of the middle ages did not hesitate to provide itself with eunuchs in order to supply cathedral choirs with the soprano tones inhering by nature in woman alone. One of the principal charges against the Huguenots was that they permitted women to sing in church, using their voices in praise of God contrary to the express command of St. Paul, Catherine de Medicis reproaching them for this great sin. The massacre at St. Bartholomew, when 30,000 men, women and children lost their lives, and the entire destruction of many families of purest character took place, with an additional great loss to France from the self-imposed banishment of hundreds more, may be traced to the teaching of St. Paul that woman should keep silence in the church. This doctrine also crossed the ocean with the Puritan Fathers, and has appeared in America under many forms.
The Christianity of the ages teaching the existence of a superior and inferior sex, possessing different rights under the law and in the church, it has been easy to bring man and woman under accountability to a different code of morals. For this double code the church is largely indebted to the subtle and acute Paul, who saw in the new religion but an enlarged Judaism that should give prominence to Abraham and his seed from whom Christ claimed descent. His conversion did not remove his old Jewish contempt for woman, as shown in his temple service, the law forbidding her entrance beyond the outer court. Nor could he divest himself of the spirit of the old morning prayer which daily led each Jew to thank God that he was not born a heathen, a slave or a woman.
He brought into the new dispensation the influence of the old ceremonial law, which regarded woman as unclean. The Jewish exclusion of forty days from even the outer court of the sanctuary to the woman who had given birth to a son, and of twice that period, or eighty days, if a daughter had been born, was terminated in both religions by a sin-offering in expiation of the mother’s crime for having, at the peril of her own, brought another human being into life. This Old Testament teaching degraded the life-giving principle exemplified in motherhood, and in a two-fold way lessened the nation’s regard for womanhood. First, through the sin-offering and purification demanded of the mother; second, by its doubling the period of exclusion from the temple in case a girl was given to the world. The birth of girls even under Christianity has everywhere been looked upon as an infliction, and thousands have been immured in convents, there to die of despair or to linger through years, the victim alike of father and of priest.
The influence of Judaism extended through Christendom. The custom of purification after maternity inherited by the church from Judaism brought with it into Christianity the same double restriction and chastening of the mother in case her infant proved a girl, a gift as propitiation or expiation being required. Uncleanliness was attributed to woman in every function of her being; the purification of the Virgin Mary, who was not exempt, when after the birth of a God, being used as an incontrovertible argument in proof. A festival of the purification of the Virgin Mary, adopted from paganism, was introduced into Rome at an early date, thus perpetuating a belief in the uncleanliness of motherhood. The Church in the Roman Empire soon united with the State in imposing new restrictions upon women. Since the Reformation the mother’s duty of expiation has been confirmed by the Anglican Church, and is known in England as “churching.” Directions as to the woman’s dress at this time was early made the subject of a canon. She was to be decently appareled. This term “decently,” variously interpreted, was at times the occasion of serious trouble. In 1661, during the reign of James I, the Chancellor of Norwich ordered that every woman who came to be churched should be covered with a white veil. A woman who refused to conform to this order was excommunicated for contempt. She prayed a prohibition, alleging that such order was not warranted by any custom or Canon of the Church of England. The judges of the civil court, finding themselves incompetent to decide upon such a momentous question, requested the opinion of the archbishop of Canterbury. Not willing to trust his own judgment, that dignitary convened several bishops for consultation. Their decision was against the woman, this Protestant Council upon woman’s dress declaring that it was the ancient usage of the Church of England for women who were to be churched to come veiled, and a prohibition was denied.
The doctrine that woman must remain covered when in the sacred church building shows itself in the United States. In many instances under Christianity, woman has been entirely excluded from religious houses and church buildings. When Pope Boniface founded the abbey of Fulda he prohibited the entrance of women into any of the buildings, even including the church. This rule remained unbroken during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and even when in 1131 the Emperor Lothair went to Fulda to celebrate Pentecost, his empress was not permitted to witness the ceremonies. When Frederick Barbarossa, 1135, proposed to spend his Easter there, he was not even allowed to enter the house because of having his wife with him. In 1138 Boniface IX, at the request of the abbot, John Merlow, relaxed the rule and permitted women to attend the services of the church. Shortly afterwards the building was destroyed by lightning, which was looked upon as evidence of the divine displeasure at the desecration. The monastery of Athos under the Greek church, situated upon an island, does not permit the entrance of a female animal upon its confines. Even in America woman has met similar experience.
At certain periods during the middle ages, conversation with women was forbidden. During the Black Death, the Flaggellants, or Brotherhood of the Cross, were under such interdict. In this last decade of the XIX century, the Catholic church still imposes similar restrictions upon certain religious houses. Early in 1892 the queen-regent of Spain visited the monastery of Mirzaflores; its rules not allowing a monk to speak to a woman, the queen was received in silence. Her majesty immediately telegraphed to the pope asking indulgence, which was granted, and during four hours the monks were permitted the sin of speaking to a woman. It is curious to note that the first sentence uttered by one of the monks was a compliment upon the simplicity of her majesty’s attire. But the most impressive evidence of the contempt of the church towards all things feminine was shown in a remark by Tetzel the great middle-age dealer in indulgences. Offering one for sale he declared it would insure eternal salvation even if the purchaser had committed rape upon the mother of God.
A knowledge of facts like these is necessary in order to a just understanding of our present civilization, especially as to the origin of restrictive legislation concerning woman. The civilization of today is built upon the religious theories of the middle ages supplemented by advancing freedom of thought. Lea, declares thus:
The Latin church is the great fact which dominates the history of modern civilization. All other agencies which molded the destinies of Europe were comparatively isolated or sporadic in their manifestations.
The influence of church teaching is most strikingly manifested in the thought of today. Without predetermined intention of wrong doing, man has been so molded by the Church doctrine of ages and the coordinate laws of State as to have become blind to the justice of woman’s demand for freedom such as he possesses. Nor is woman herself scarcely less bound, although now torn by the spirit of rebellion which burned in the hearts of her fore-mothers, so cruelly persecuted, so falsely judged, during past ages, when the most devout Christian woman possessed no rights in the church, the government or the family. The learning which had been hers in former periods, was then interdicted as an especial element of evil. Her property rights recognized in former periods then denied; as a being subordinate to man she was not allowed a separate estate or control over the earnings of her own hands. Her children were not her own but those of a master for whose interest or pleasure she had given them birth. Without freedom of thought or action, trained to consider herself secondary to a man, a being who came into the world not as part of the great original plan of creation but as an afterthought of her Creator, and this doctrine taught as one of the most sacred mysteries of religion which to doubt was to insure her eternal damnation, it is not strange that the great body of women are not now more outspoken in demanding equal religious and governmental rights with man. But another phase of heredity shows itself in the eagerness with which women enter all phases of public life which does not place them in open antagonism with Church or State. Education, industries, club life and even those great modern and religious organizations which bring them before the public, throwing active work and responsibility upon them, would be entirely unexplainable were it not for the tendency of inherited thought to ultimately manifest itself.
The long continued and powerfully repressing influence of church teaching in regard to the created inferiority of women, imposed upon millions of men and women a bondage of thought and action which even the growing civilization of the nineteenth century has not yet been able to cast off. To this doctrine we can trace all the irregularities which for many centuries filled the church with shame; practices more obscene than those of Babylon or Corinth dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in the most pagan countries—a darkness so intense that the most searching efforts of the historian but now and then cast a ray of light upon it;—a darkness so profound that in Europe from the seventh to the eleventh centuries no individual thought can be traced, no opinion was formed, no heresy arose. All Christendom was sunk in superstition. Lange says “The disappearance of ancient civilization in the early centuries of the Christian era is an event the serious problems of which are in great part still unexplained.” Had Lange not been influenced by the subtle current of heredity which unwittingly influenced nations and systems equally with individuals, he could easily have discovered the cause of this disappearance of olden civilization, to be in the degradation of the feminine element under Christianity. While this darkness of Christian Europe was so great that history knows less of it a thousand years since than it does of Egypt 5,000 years ago, one corner of that continent was kept luminous by the brilliance of Mohammedan learning. The Arabs alone had books from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries of the Christian era. The Moors of Spain kept that portion of Europe bright, while all else was sunk in darkness. Universities existed, learning was fostered and women authors were numerous. For many hundred years Rome possessed no books but missals and a few Bibles in the hands of priests. Men were bound by church dogmas looking only for aggrandisement through her. The arts ceased to flourish, science decayed, learning was looked upon as a disgrace to a warrior, the only occupation deemed worthy of the noble.
The priesthood who alone possessed a knowledge of letters, prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility when not engaged against a common foe, spent their time battling against each other; the peasantry were by turns the sport and victim of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of all. Her person and her rights possessed no consideration except as she could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of priest, noble, father, husband; some man-god to whose lightest desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most pronounced doctrine of the church at this period was that through woman sin had entered the world; that woman’s whole tendency was towards evil, and had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her creation, man would then be dwelling in the paradisal innocence and happiness of Eden, with death entirely unknown. When the feminine was thus wholly proscribed, the night of moral and spiritual degradation reached its greatest depth, and that condition ensued which has alike been the wonder and the despair of the modern historians, whose greatest fault, as Buckle shows, has been the reading of history from a few isolated facts rather than building up its philosophy from an aggregation of events upon many different planes.
Under all restrictions woman did not fail to show her innate power even within the fold of the church. She founded devout orders, established and endowed religious institutions, and issued her commands to the pope himself, in more than one instance seating that holy personage in the papal chair. From St. Paulina, whose life was written by St. Jerome, to the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary by the Ecumenical Council under Pius IX, and the later canonization of Joan of Arc, woman has not failed to impress even the Christian world with a sense of her intellectual and spiritual power. Yet despite the very great influence exerted by so many women in the affairs of the church—notwithstanding the canonization of so many women, she has only been able to show her capacity at an immense expenditure of vital force against constant priestly opposition and the powerful decrees of councils. Subtle and complex as are the influences that mould thought and character, we cannot comprehend the great injustice of the church towards woman in its teaching of her mental and spiritual inferiority without a slight examination of the great religious institutions that have been under her charge. Of these none possess more remarkable history than the Abbey of Fontervault, founded in 1099, for both monks and nuns. It belonged in the general rank of Benedictines, and was known as the Order of Fontervault. It was ruled by an abbess under title of General of the Order, who was responsible to no authority but that of the pope himself. Forming a long succession of able women in thirty-two abbesses from the most eminent families of France, woman’s capacity for the management of both ecclesiastical and civil affairs was there shown for six hundred years. It was the abbess who alone decided the religious fitness of either monk or nun seeking admission to the order. It was the abbess who decreed all ecclesiastical and civil penalties; who selected the confessors for the different houses of the order throughout France and Spain; who managed and controlled the vast wealth belonging to this institution; it was the abbess who drew up the rules for the government of the order, and who also successfully defended these privileges when attacked. For neither the protection of the pope, the wealth of the order, or the family influence connected with it, prevented priestly attack, and no argument in favor of woman’s governing ability is stronger than the fact that its abbesses ever successfully resisted these priestly assaults upon the privileges of their order. The abbey of Fontervault, with its grounds of forty or fifty acres, was surrounded by high walls; its soil was tilled by the monks of the abbey, who received even their food as alms from the nuns, returning all fragments for distribution to the poor.
The authority of women was supreme in all monasteries of the order. The ecclesiastical power maintained by these abbesses is the more remarkable, as it was in direct contravention of the dictates of the early councils, that of Aix-la-Chapelle, 816, forbidding abbesses to give the veil or take upon themselves any priestly function; the later council of Paris A.D. 824, bitterly complained that women served at the altar, and even gave to people the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Among the convents controlled by women, which have largely influenced religious thought, was that of the Paraclete in the 12th century under Heloise. Its teachings that belief was dependent upon knowledge, attacked the primal church tenet, that belief depends upon faith alone. The convent of Port Royal des Champs during the 17th century exerted much influence. Its abbess, the celebrated Mother Angelique Arnault, was inducted into this office in her eleventh year upon death of her abbess-aunt whose co-adjutrix she had been. This convent, both in person of the nuns as well as the monks connected with it, became a protest against the jesuitical doctrine of the seventeenth century, and like the Paraclete is intimately connected with reform questions in the Catholic Church. Notwithstanding such evidences of woman’s organizing mind and governing qualities under the most favorable conditions, as well as of piety so unquestioned as to have produced a long calendar of female saints, the real policy of the church remained unchanged; nor could it be otherwise from its basis of woman’s created inferiority and original sin. The denial to women of the right of private judgment and the control of her own actions, the constant teaching of her greater sinfulness and natural impurity, had a very depressing effect upon the majority of women whose lowly station in life was such as to deprive them of that independence of thought and action possible to women of rank and wealth. Then, as now, the church catered to the possessors of money and power; then, as now, seeking to unite their great forces with its own purpose of aggrandizement, and thus the church has ever obstructed the progress of humanity, delaying civilization and condemning the world to a moral barbarism from which there is no escape except through repudiation of its teaching. To the theory of “God the Father,” shorn of the divine attribute of motherhood, is the world beholden for its most degrading beliefs, its most infamous practices. Dependent upon the identified with lost motherhood is the “Lost Name” of ancient writers and occultists. When the femininity of the divine is once again acknowledged, the “Lost Name” will be discovered and the holiness (wholeness) of divinity be manifested.
As the theory of woman’s wickedness gathered force, her representative place in the church lessened. From century to century restrictive canons multiplied, and the clergy constantly grew more corrupt, although bearing bad reputation at an early date. Tertullian, whose heavy diatribes are to be found in large libraries, was bitter in his opposition to marriage. While it took many hundreds of years for the total exclusion of woman from the christian priesthood, the celibacy of the clergy during this period was the constant effort of the Church. Even during the ages that priestly marriage was permitted, celibates obtained a higher reputation for sanctity and virtue than married priests, who infinitely more than celibates were believed subject to infestation by demons.
The restriction upon clerical marriages proceeded gradually. First the superior holiness of the unmarried was taught together with their greater freedom from infestation by demons. A single marriage only was next allowed, and that with a woman who had never before entered the relation. The Council of A.D. 347, consisting of twenty-one bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice married or whose wife had been a widow. A council of A.D. 395 ruled that a bishop who had children after ordination should be excluded from the major orders. The Council of A.D. 444, deposed Chelidonius, bishop of Besancon, for having married a widow. The Council of Orleans, A.D. 511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that monks who married should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order. The Church was termed the spouse of the priest. It was declared that Peter possessed a wife before his conversion, but that he forsook her and all worldly things after he became Christ’s, who established chastity; priests were termed holy in proportion as they opposed marriage. The unmarried among the laity who had never entered that relation, and the married who forsook it, were regarded as saintly. So great was the opposition to marriage that a layman who married a second time was refused benediction and penance imposed. A wife was termed “An Unhallowed Thing.”
So far from celibacy producing chastity or purity of life, church restrictions upon marriage led to the most debasing crimes, the most revolting vices, the grossest immorality. As early as the fourth century (370) the state attempted purification through a statute enacted by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian, prohibiting ecclesiastics and monks from entering the houses of widows, single women living alone, or girls who had lost their parents. The nearest ties of relationship proved ineffectual in protecting woman from priestly assault, and incest became so common it was found necessary to prohibit the residence of a priest’s mother or sister in his house. This restriction was renewed at various times through the ages. The condemnation of the Council of Rome, Easter, 1051, under the pontificate of Pope Leo IX, was not directed against married priests, but against those who held incestuous relations. Yet although the Church thus externally set her seal of disapprobation upon this vice, her general teaching sustained it. Gregory, bishop of Venelli, convicted of this crime by the Council of Rome, was punished by excommunication, but in a short time was restored to his former important position. The highest legates were equally guilty with the inferior priests. Cardinal John of Cremona, the pope’s legate to the Council of Westminister 1125, sent by Pope Honorius for the express purpose of enforcing celibacy, became publicly notorious and disgraced, and was obliged to hastily leave England in consequence of his teaching and his practice being diametrically opposed.
Through this clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions of celibacy and virginity were regarded as of the highest virtue. Jerome respected marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins to the church, while Augustine in acknowledging that marriage perpetuated the species, also contended that it also perpetuated original sin.
These diverse views in regard to marriage created the most opposite teaching from the church. By one class the demand to increase and multiply was constantly brought up, and women were taught that the rearing of children was their highest duty. The strangest sermons were sometimes preached toward the enforcement of this command. Others taught an entirely different duty for both men and women, and a large celibate class was created under especial authority of the church. Women, especially those of wealth, were constantly urged to take upon themselves the vow of virginity, their property passing into possession of the church, thus helping to build up priestly power. Another class held the touch of a woman to be a contamination, and to avoid it holy men secluded themselves in caves and forests. Through numerous decretals confirmation was given to the theory that woman was defiled through the physical peculiarities of her being. Even her beauty was counted as an especial snare and temptation of the devil for which in shame she ought to do continual penance. St. Chrysostom, whose prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning service of the Episcopal church, described women as a “necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.” But to escape her influence was impossible and celibacy led to the most direful results. Monks and hermits acknowledged themselves tormented in their solitary lives by visions of beautiful women. Monasteries were visited by an illness to which celibacy imparted a name, and impurity of body and soul spread throughout Christendom. The general tone of the church in regard to marriage; its creation of a double code of morality; its teaching of woman’s greater sinfulness, together with that of her absolute subordination to man, subverted the moral character of the Christian world within whose borders the vilest systems of immorality arose which the world has ever known; its extent being a subject of historical record.
According to the teaching of men who for many hundreds of years were molders of human thought, priests, philosophers and physicians alike, nature never designed to procreate woman, her intention being always to produce men. These authorities asserted that nature never formed the feminine except when she lost her true function and so produced the female sex by chance or accident. Aristotle whose philosophy was accepted by the church and all teaching of a contrary character declared heretical, maintained that nature did not form woman except when by reason of imperfection of matter she could not obtain the sex which is perfect. Cajetan enunciated the same doctrine many hundred years later. Aristotle also denied creative power to the mother. While throughout its history the course of the Christian Church against marriage is constantly seen, no less noticeable are the grossly immoral practices resulting from celibacy. Scarcely a crime or a vice to which it did not give birth. Celibacy was fostered in the interests of power, and in order to its more strict enforcement barons were permitted to enslave the wives and children of married priests. Those of Rome were bestowed upon the Cathedral church of the Lateran, and bishops throughout Christendom were ordered to enforce this law in their own dioceses and to seize the wives of priests for the benefit of their churches. At no point of history do we more clearly note the influence of the Church upon the State than in the union of the temporal power with the ecclesiastical for purposes of constraining priestly celibacy.
Under reign of Philip I of France, a council was held at Troyes which condemned the marriage of priests. In 1108, the following year, King Henry I of England summoned a council to assemble in London for purpose of upholding priestly celibacy, urging its enforcement upon the bishops, and pledging his kingly honor in aid. A new series of canons was promulgated, strengthened by severe penalties and the co-operation of the king. Finding it impossible either through spiritual or temporal power to compel absolute celibacy the king for the benefit of his exchequer established a license for concubinage upon the payment of a tax known as cullagium.
Notwithstanding all the powerful enginery of the church, priestly celibacy, so contrary to nature, was not rendered absolutely imperative until the thirteenth century. The Fourth Lateran Council (Twelfth Ecumenical), 1215, under pope Innocent III, is especially famous because of its final settlement of the policy of the church in regard to priestly marriage. This was a large council, 1300 prelates taking part in the adjudication of this question. While with St. Augustine acknowledging that marriage was requisite for the preservation of the race, it strictly confined this relation to the laity.
The subject of celibacy as we see had agitated the church from its foundation. A more renowned council even than the Twelfth Ecumenical, namely, the First Nicene or Second Ecumenical, having seriously discussed it, although after prolonged debate pronouncing against celibacy and in favor of priestly marriage. St. Paphinutius, the martyr bishop of Thebes, although himself a celibate advocated marriage which he declared to be true chastity, the council adopting his opinion. Although the tendency of the church for so many hundred years had been towards celibacy yet when adopted as a dogma, a belief in its propriety or its scriptural authority was by no means universal even among the most eminent members, but in no instance has the control of the church over the consciences and will of its adherents been more forcibly illustrated. Many illustrious and learned theologians as Gratian the Canonist, St. Thomas Aquinas and Giraldus Cambrensis, Arch-Deacon of St. Davids, while thereafter sustaining celibacy as a law of the church declared it had neither scriptural nor apostolic warrant; St. Thomas affirming it to be merely a law of human ecclesiastical origin.
Absolute celibacy of the priesthood proved very difficult of enforcement. At the great council of London, 1237, twenty-three years afterwards, Cardinal Otto deplored the fact that married men still received holy orders and held office in the church, and in 1268 only fifty-three years after the great council confirming celibacy as a doctrine of the church, another great council was convened in London, when Cardinal Legate Ottoborn, the direct representative of the Pope, demanded the establishment of concubinage for priests. The institutions of Otto and Ottoborn long remained the law of the English church. Yet to their honor be it remembered that despite council and cardinal, pope and church, there were priests who still persistently refused either to part from their wives or to relinquish their priestly functions, and who when excommunicated for contumacy, laughed at the sentence and continued their priestly offices. Others sufficiently conformed to the edicts to lock up their churches and suspend their priestly administrations, yet refusing to part with their wives. The relatives of wives also exerted their influence against the action of the church.
The struggle was bitter and long. New canons were promulgated and celibacy enforced under severe penalties, or rather marriage was prohibited under severe penalties. The holy robbery which made slaves of the wives and children of priests confiscating their property to the church, had more effect in compelling celibacy than all anathemas upon the iniquity of marriage. Priests who retained their wives preferring the chastity of this relation to the license allowed celibates, were prohibited from their offices and their wives denounced as harlots. If this did not suffice, such priests were finally excommunicated. But a way of return was left open. In case this measure coerced them into abandoning wives and children, a short penance soon restored the priestly rank with all its attendant dignities. Nor was the reinstated priest compelled to live purely. So little was it expected that the tax upon concubinage soon became a component part of the celibate system. So gross and broadspread became the immorality of all classes that even the Head of the Church pandered to it in the erection by Pope Sixtus V of a magnificent building devoted to illicit pleasure.
The example of Christ himself was pointed to in favor of celibacy, even upon the cross saying to his mother, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” The saints of the Old Testament as well as the New, were quoted as having opposed marriage. Abel, Melchisedeck, Joshua, Elias, Jonah, Daniel, St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul with his disciples, and all saintly personages were declared to have been celibates.
A concubinage tax was exacted from all the clergy without exception, and rendered compulsory even upon those priests who still kept their wives, or who lived chastely outside of the marital relation. Protests were of no avail. Those whom disinclination, age or ill-health kept chaste, were told the privilege of unchastity was open to them; the bishop must have the money and after payment they were at liberty to keep concubines or not. Under concubinage the priest was free from all family responsibility; his mistress possessed neither present nor future claim upon him; children, who according to church teaching followed the condition of the mother, were born to him, but for their education and maintenance neither ecclesiastical nor civil law compelled him to provide.
For many centuries this immoral tax brought enormous sums into the treasuries of both Church and State. Although the laws against the marriage of priests were enacted on pretense of the greater inherent wickedness of woman, history proves their chief object to have been the keeping of all priestly possessions under church control. It was openly asserted that the temporal possessions of the church were imperilled by sacerdotal marriage, and it has been declared with every proof of truthfulness that edicts against the marriage of priests were promulgated to prevent the alienation of property from the church. The saying of Paul was quoted; “He that is married careth for his wife, but he that is unmarried for the Lord.” Married bishops were occasionally confirmed in their sees upon condition that their wives and children should not inherit their property, which upon their death should fall to the church.
The struggle against the absolute celibacy of the priesthood was bitter. A few priests still kept their benefices while retaining their wives and acknowledging their children as legitimate. The sons of such contumacious priests were declared forever incapable of taking holy orders, unless by a special dispensation. The church showed almost equal determination in the establishment of concubinage as in the enforcement of priestly celibacy, each of these systems tending to its enrichment.
Opposition proved of no permanent avail. Holding control over the conscience of men, asserting the power to unlock the doors of heaven and hell, a strongly organized body working to one end, it is not a subject of astonishment that the church, its chief object the crushing of body and soul, should in the end prove conqueror, and the foulest crimes against woman receive approval of the entire christian world. Many notable consequences followed the final establishment of celibacy as a dogma of the church.
First: The doctrine of woman’s inherent wickedness and close fellowship with Satan took on new strength.
Second: Canon Law gained full control of civil law.
Third: An organized system of debauchery arose under mask of priestly infallibility.
Fourth: Auricular confession was confirmed as a dogma of the church.
Fifth: Prohibition of the Scriptures to the laity was enforced.
Sixth: Crime was more openly protected, the system of indulgences gained new strength, becoming the means of great revenue to the church.
Seventh: Heresy was more broadly defined and more severely punished.
Eighth: The Inquisition was established.
When Innocent III completed the final destruction of sacerdotal marriage, it was not upon disobedient priests the most severe punishment fell, but innocent women and children. Effort was made to force wives to desert their husbands. Those who proved contumacious were denied christian burial in an age when such denial was looked upon as equivalent to eternal damnation; property left such wives was confiscated to the church; they were forbidden the eucharist; churching after childbirth was denied them; they were termed harlots and their children bastards, while to their sons all office in the church was forbidden. If still contumacious they were handed over to the secular power for condign punishment, or sold as slaves for the benefit of the church. They were regarded as under the direct control of Satan himself, as beings who iniquitously stood between their husbands and heaven.
At numerous times in the history of the church women have been brought to despair by its teachings, and large numbers driven to suicide. A similar period was inaugurated by the confirmation of priestly celibacy. The wives of such men, suddenly rendered homeless and with their children classed among the vilest of earth, powerless and despairing, hundreds shortened their agonies by death at their own hands. For all these crimes the church alone is responsible.
Under celibacy, auricular confession, and extended belief in witchcraft, a new era of wrong toward woman was inaugurated. From thenceforth her condition was more degraded than even during the early centuries of Christianity. Accusations of heresy, which included witchcraft as well as other sins against the church were constantly made against that being who was believed to have brought sin into the world. Whosoever dared question the infallibility of the church by use of their own judgment, even upon the most trivial subjects, immediately fell into condemnation.
Canon Law gaining full control over civil law, the absolute sinfulness of divorce, which maintained by the church has yet been allowed by civil law, was fully established. Woman was entirely at the mercy of man, the Canon Law maintaining that the confession of a guilty woman could not be received in evidence against her accomplice, although it held good against herself and the punishment due to both was made to fall on the woman alone. The best authorities prove that while the clergy were acquainted with the civil codes that had governed the Roman Empire, they made but little use of them. Upon coming to the throne, Justinian had repealed the law of the Patriarchate which gave the father sole right and title to, and interest in the children of legal marriage, but this was soon again subverted by ecclesiasticism and under Canon Law a mother was prohibited all authority over her child, its relationship to her even being denied. While under Common Law children followed the condition of their fathers, who if free transmitted freedom to their children, yet in the interests of priestly celibacy, under church legislation, an entire reversal took place and children were held to follow the condition of their mothers. Thus serf-mothers bore serf-children to free-born fathers; slave mothers bore slave children to their masters; while unmarried mothers bore bastard children to both priestly and lay fathers, thus throwing the taint of illegitimacy upon the innocent child, and the sole burden of its maintenance upon the mother. This portion of Canon Law also became the law of the State in all Christian countries, and is in existence at the present time, both civil codes and statue laws enforcing this great wrong of the Church. The relations of men and women to each other, the sinfulness of marriage and the license of illicit relations for the priesthood, employed the thought of the church. The duty of woman to obey, not alone her male relatives, but all men by virtue of their sex, was sedulously inculcated. She was trained to hold her own desires and even thoughts in abeyance to those of man, as to one who was rightfully her master. Every holy principle of her nature was subverted by this degrading assumption.
When auricular confession became confirmed as a dogma of the church, it threw immense power over the family into the hands of the priesthood, a power capable of being converted to many ends, but was specially notable in its influence upon morals. Although auricular confession was not established as a dogma until the Council of 1215, it had been occasionally practiced at early date, carrying with it the same immorality in lesser form as that which afterwards became so great a reproach to the church. Through its means the priesthood gained possession of all family, social and political secrets, thus acquiring information whose power for evil was unlimited. The spirit of evil never found a more subtle method of undermining and destroying human will, its most debasing influences falling upon woman, who through fear of eternal damnation made known her most secret thoughts to the confessor, an unmarried and frequently a youthful man. It soon became a source of very great corruption to both priest and woman.
Another effect of this council was the formal prohibition of the scriptures to the laity, and thenceforth the Bible was confined to the priest who explained its teachings in the interests of his own order, adding to, or taking from, to suit his own interests; the recent new version showing many such interpolations. Nothing was held sacred by these men, who sacrificed everything to their own advancement and that of their order.
The insolence of the priesthood was that of all periods; claiming direct inspiration from God, they taught their own infallibility and in name of Him, whom they professed to serve, the grossest crimes were perpetrated, and this profession became a protecting sanctuary to men whose villainous lives would otherwise have brought them to the gallows.
With conviction of woman’s supreme wickedness, increased through the formal recognition of celibacy as a dogma of the church, with the establishment of auricular confession, and the denial of the Bible to the laity, the persecution of woman for witchcraft took on new phase. The belief that it was the ordinary method through which the devil won souls, together with the persuasion that woman through her greater wickedness fell more readily than men into such practices, acquired a firmer seat in theology. Heresy, of which witchcraft was one phase, became a greater sin; the inquisition arose, and the general characteristics of the christian world rapidly grew more inimical to humanity, and especially to woman’s freedom, happiness and security.
The influence of the church daily grew more unfavorable to all virtue; vice was sustained, immorality dignified. The concubines of priests called “wives,” in bitter mockery of that relation in which the legal wife was termed concubine, were known as “The Hallowed Ones,” “The Honored Ones.” No stigma attached to such a life; these women formed quite a class in mediaeval society, themselves and their children out-ranking the wives of ordinary laymen; the touch of a priest had sanctified them. In the estimation of the church an immoral life led with a priest was more honorable than marriage with a layman, and all the obligations such a relation implied. Priests assumed immunity from wrong doing. So far from celibacy causing purity of life, through it the priesthood grew to look upon themselves as especially set apart for indulgence in vice. Did not history so faithfully portray this condition, it would seem impossible that it had existed among people asserting the highest morality, and is proof of the danger of irresponsible power to possessor and victim alike, and the ease with which the true meaning of right and wrong is lost under such circumstances.
The theory of the church that as the fall and sin really existed, priestly immorality became a necessity in order to perpetuate the world even through a continuance of the original sin, was a species of fine casuistry for which the church in all ages has been remarkable. The general tenor of the church against marriage, together with its teaching of woman’s greater sinfulness, were the chief causes which undermined the morality of the christian world for fifteen hundred years. With these doctrines were also taught the duty of woman to sacrifice herself in every way for man, a theory of which the present century is not unfamiliar. The loss of chastity in woman was held as light sin in comparison to the degradation that marriage would bring to a priest, and young girls ruined by some candidate or priest, considered themselves doing God service in refusing a marriage that would cause the expulsion of the priestly lover from the ecclesiastical order. With woman’s so-called “divine,” but rather demoniac self-sacrifice, Heloise chose to be deemed the mistress of Abelard rather than by acknowledging their marriage destroy his prospects of advancement in the church.
The State sustained the Church in its opposition to marriage, and we find the anomaly of marriage for political reasons where the parties forever separated at the altar. St. Jerome, and at a later date St. Dunstan, sustained the policy of such marriages. The history of Britain gives instances of early queens thus separating from their newly made husbands at the close of the ceremony, dedicating their lives to celibacy and their fortunes to the church.
Nor did this institution neglect that large class of women to whom marriage was made impossible because of the numbers of men to whom it was forbidden. After the Lateran Council had permanently settled the action of the church in favor of priestly celibacy, great effort was made to draw women of wealth into a monastic life. Religion was the chief method of acquiring power, and as an abbess of a religious institution it opened opportunity for power to women scarcely possible outside the church. The two highest womanly virtues inculcated by the church were a celibate life and liberality to religious houses. It was taught if anything could possibly mitigate women’s sin through Eve’s transgression, it was the observance of these two conditions.
To the student this is the most remarkable period in the history of the church, not merely as a culmination of the effort of centuries in finally deciding the questions of celibacy, so long agitated with such varying results, but in the immediate change and permanent settlement it brought about in regard to other church dogmas, as well as its pronounced influence in causing the Lutheran Reformation.
It was asserted that the spiritual office of the priest sanctified sin; it became a maxim that whatever a priest might do was holy; by their taking part in lasciviousness it became consecration. To disobey a priest was to endanger salvation; it was libellous and treasonable to question the purity of a priest’s motives, hence religion became a screen for all vice and a source of moral degradation to all woman. To such extent was belief carried in the superior purity of a celibate life that but little more than 300 years since a man was burned at the stake in England for asserting the lawfulness of priestly marriage. The action of the council of 1215, so powerfully sustaining the olden claims of the superior holiness of celibacy soon created a belief in the inability of a priest to commit sin. During the middle ages his infallibility was constantly maintained, his superior sanctity in consequence of his celibacy universally asserted. It was impossible not to connect the idea of great wickedness with those incapable of entering this holy office, and as woman by virtue of sex was prohibited priestly functions, and as her marriage had been declared a necessity for the world, these conditions were used as arguments against her. The conscience and morality of tens of thousands were destroyed by these teachings, enforced as they were by all the dread authority of the church. The christian world was under entire control of a class whose aim was chiefly that of personal aggrandizement, and that hesitated at no means for securing wealth and power.
The Inquisition was firmly established; under its reign six hundred methods of torture were known, and it was conducted with such secrecy that not until dragged before it were many of its victims aware they were under suspicion. Even when imprisoned in its torture chambers, the charges against them were kept secret in hopes thereby to compel self-accusation upon other points. The inferiority of woman, her proneness to evil and readiness to listen to all suggestions of Satan, was taught with renewed vigor and power for evil.
The priest regarded himself as the direct representative of divinity; the theory of infallibility was not confined to the pope, but all dignitaries of the church made the same claim. Asserting themselves incapable of wrong doing, maintaining an especial sanctification by reason of their celibacy, priests nevertheless made their holy office a cover for the most degrading sensuality. Methods were taken to debauch the souls as well as the bodies of women. Having first taught their special impurity, it was not maintained that immorality with a priest was not sin, but on the contrary hallowed the woman, giving her particular claim upon heaven. It was taught that sin could only be killed through sin. The very incarnation was used as a means of weakening woman’s virtue. That Christ did not enter the world through the marriage relation, stamped with christian honor a system of concubinage in the church, for whose warrant woman was pointed to the Virgin Mary. As an enforcement of her duty of absolute surrender of soul and body to the will of the priest the course of the Virgin was adduced, “who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived without fear of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit.” The chastity of concubinage and the unchasteness of marriage was constantly asserted by the church, and thus the mysteries upon which its foundations were laid were used by it for the degradation of woman, who was at all times depicted as a being of no self-individuality, but one who had been created solely for man’s pleasure. As late as the seventeenth century, it was taught that a priest could commit no sin. This old doctrine took new strength from the Illumes, who claimed an inner divine light. We find reference to priestly immorality and claim of infallibility among old writers, Boccaccio in many of his stories putting arguments of this kind in the mouth of his priestly characters.
It was asserted too that sin was of the body alone, the soul knowing nothing, partaking nothing of it. As an argument in favor of woman’s throwing herself entirely in the hands of priests for immoral purposes, it was declared that, “The devout having offered up and annihilated their own selves exist no longer but in God; thenceforth they can do no wrong. The better part of them is so divine that it no longer knows what the other is doing.”
In confirmation of this doctrine it was said that Jesus threw off his clothing and was scourged naked before the people. The result of this teaching was the almost universal immorality of christendom. Under such religious doctrine it could but be expected that the laity would closely imitate the priesthood. Europe became a continent of moral corruption, of which proof is overwhelming. Could we but relegate christian immorality to the dark ages we might somewhat palliate it under plea of ignorance. But unfortunately for such claim ample proof is found to show that the enlightenment of modern civilization has not yet been able to overthrow the basic idea upon which this immorality rests. Amid the material and intellectual advancement of the last hundred years we find spiritual darkness still profound in the church and the true foundation of immorality almost unrecognized.
As long as the church maintains the doctrine that woman was created inferior to man, and brought sin into the world rendering the sacrilige of the Son of God a necessity, just so long will the foundation of vice and crime of every character remain. Not until the exact and permanent equality of woman with man is recognized by the church, aye, even more, the greater power and capacity of woman in the creative function, together with the accountability of man to woman in everything relating to the birth of a new being, is fully accepted as a law of nature, will vice and crime disappear from the world. Until that time has fully come, prostitution in its varied forms will continue to exist, together with alms-houses, reformatories, jails, prisons, hospitals and asylums for the punishment, reformation or care of the wretched beings who have come into existence with an inheritance of disease and crime because of church theory and church teaching.
The system of celibacy produced its same effects wherever preached. So constant was the system of debauchery practiced in England during the reign of Henry VII that the gentlemen and farmers of Carnarvonshire laid complaint against the clergy of systematically seducing their wives and daughters. Women were everywhere looked upon as slaves and toys, to obey, to furnish pleasure and amusement, and to be cast aside at will. Under the religious teaching of christendom it could not but be expected that the laity would closely imitate the priesthood, and to victimize women became the custom of all men. When a priest failed to take a concubine his parishoners compelled him to do so in order to preserve the chastity of their own wives and daughters. Draper tells us that in England alone 100,000 women became victims of the priests. Houses of vile character were maintained for especial use of the priesthood. The marriage of a priest was called a deception of the devil who thus led him into an adulterous relation for sake of alienating property from the church.
This mediaeval doctrine that sin can only be killed through sin, finds expression today not alone in religion but in society novels; its origin, like many other religious wrongs, being directly traceable to the teaching of St. Paul.
The incontinence of these celibate priests ultimately became so great a source of scandal to the church that it was obliged to take action. Edicts and bulls were fulminated from the papal chair, although the facts of history prove Rome itself, its popes and its cardinals, to have been sunk in the grossest immorality. Spain, the seat of the Inquisition, and at that period the very heart of Christendom, was the first country toward which investigation was turned, Pope Paul IV issuing a bull against those confessors who solicited women, provoking them to dissolute action. When this bull of investigation first appeared in Spain, it was accompanied by an edict commanding all those who knew of monks or priests that had thus abused the confessional to make it known within thirty days under grievous penalty. The terrible power of the church intimidated those who otherwise for very shame would surely have buried the guilt of their priests in oblivion, and so great was the number of women who thronged the palace of the Inquisition in the city of Seville alone, that twenty secretaries with as many Inquisitors were not sufficient to take the deposition of the witnesses. A second, a third and a fourth thirty days were appointed for investigation, so great were the number of women making complaint. So large a number of priests were implicated that after a four months’ examination, the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition put a stop to the proceedings, commanding that all those immoralities and crimes against womanhood only rendered possible in the name of religion, and which has been proven by legal evidence, should be buried in eternal oblivion. The deposition of thousands of women seduced by their confessors, was not deemed sufficient evidence for removal of the guilty priests from their holy offices. Occasionally a single priest was suspended for a short time but in a few months restored again to his priestly position.
It was not uncommon for women to be openly carried off by priests, their husbands and fathers threatened with vengeance in cases of their attempted recovery. During the height of the Inquisitorial power it was not rare for a family to be aroused in the night by an ominous knock and the cry “The Holy Fathers, open the door!”
To this dread mandate there could be but one reply, as both temporal and spiritual power lay in their hands. A husband, father or son might thus be seized by veiled figures; or as frequently a loved wife or young daughter was dragged from her bed, her fate ever to remain a mystery. When young and beautiful these women were taken to replenish the Inquisitional harem; the “dry pan,” “boiling in oil,” and similar methods of torture, threatened, in order to produce compliance upon part of wretched victims. No Turkish seraglio with bow-string and sack ever exhibited as great an amount of diabolical wickedness as the prison-harems of the Inquisition. As late as the seventeenth century Pope Gregory XV commanded strict enforcement of the bull against priestly lechery not alone in Spain, but in all other parts of the Christian world. In England after the reformation, the same condition was found to exist. But edicts against lasciviousness were vainly issued by a church whose foundation is a belief in the supremacy of one sex over the other, and that woman brought sin into the world through having seduced man into the marriage relation. Despite the advance of knowledge and civilization the effects of such teachings are the same now as during the middle ages, as fully proven at time of separation between the temporal and spiritual power in Italy; and these proofs are taken from Catholic sources. In 1849 when the Roman people opened the palace of the Inquisition there was found in the library a department entitled “Summary of Solicitations,” being a record of cases in which women had been solicited to acts of criminality by their confessors in the pontifical state. The testimony of Luther as to the moral degradation of the church at time of the Reformation has never been invalidated, and is entirely in accord with its character throughout history.
That the same iniquities are connected with the confessional today, we learn from the testimony of those priests who have withdrawn from the communion of the Catholic Church; Father Hyacinthe publicly declaring that ninety-nine out of one hundred priests live in sin with the women they have destroyed. Another priest following the example of Father Hyacinthe in marrying, asserted that he took this step in order to get out of the ultramontane slough and remain an honest man. That the Catholic Church of the present day bears the same general character it did during the middle ages is proven from much testimony. Among the latest and most important witnesses, for minuteness and fullness of detail, is Rev. Charles Chiniquy in his works “The Priest, The Woman and the Confessional,” “Fifty Years of Rome,” etc. Now over eighty years of age, Rev. Mr. Chiniquy was for more than fifty years a Catholic priest of influence and high reputation, known in Canada, where thousands of drunkards reformed under his teaching, as the “Apostle of Temperance.” Becoming convinced of the immorality of the Romish Church, he left it in 1856, taking with him five thousand French Canadians with whom he settled at St. Anne, Kankakee County, Illinois. Having united with a branch of the Protestant church, he was invited to Scotland to take part in the Tercentenary of the Reformation, and later to England, where he lectured on invitation of ministers of every evangelical denomination. His “Fifty Years of Rome” indissolubly links his name with that of Abraham Lincoln, through the information there made known regarding the Catholic plot for President Lincoln’s assassination.
It is as fully a law of moral as of material nature that from the same causes the same effects follow. In his work upon the confessional Rev. Mr. Chiniquy relates incidents coming under his own personal knowledge while he was still a catholic priest regarding its present abuses. The character of the questions made a duty of the priest to ask during confession, are debasing in the extreme, their whole tendency towards the undermining of morality. Too broadly indelicate for translation these priestly instructions are hidden in Latin, but are no less made the duty of a priest to understand and use. In 1877, a number of prominent women of Montreal, Canada, addressed a declaration and protest to the bishop of that diocese against the abuses of the confessional of which their own experience had made them cognizant.
DECLARATION
To His Lordship Bourget, Bishop of Montreal
Sir:—Since God in his infinite mercy has been pleased to show us the errors of Rome, and has given us strength to abandon them to follow Christ, we deem it our duty to say a word on the abominations of the confessional. You well know that these abominations are of such a nature that it is impossible for a woman to speak of them without a blush. How is it that among civilized christian men one has so far forgotten the rule of common decency as to force women to reveal to unmarried men, under the pains of eternal damnation, their most secret thoughts, their most sinful desires and their most private actions?
How unless there be a brazen mask on your priest’s face dare they go out into the world having heard the tales of misery which cannot but defile the hearing, and which the women cannot relate without having laid aside modesty and all sense of shame. The harm would not be so great should the Church allow no one but the woman to accuse herself. But what shall we say of the abominable questions that are put to them and which they must answer?
Here, the laws of common decency strictly forbid us to enter into details. Suffice it to say, were husbands cognizant of one-tenth of what is going on between the confessor and their wives, they would rather see them dead than degraded to such a degree.
As for us, daughters and wives from Montreal who have known by experience the filth of the confessional, we cannot sufficiently bless God for having shown us the error of our ways in teaching us that it was not at the feet of a man as weak and as sinful as ourselves, but at the feet of Christ alone that we must seek salvation.
Julia Herbert,
Marie Rogers,
J. Rocham,
Louise Picard,
Francoise Dirringer,
Eugenie Martin, and
forty-three others.
In reply to a letter of inquiry addressed by myself to Rev. Mr. Chiniquy, the following answer was received.
St. Anne, Kankakee County, Illinois
January 4, 1887
Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage,
Madam
In answer to your honored letter of the 29th Dec. I hasten to say: First. The women of Montreal signed the declaration you see in ‘The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional,’ in the fall of 1877. I do not remember the day. Second. As it is ten years since I left Montreal to come to my Missionary field of Illinois, I could not say if these women are still in Montreal or not. Great, supreme efforts were secretly made by the Bishop of Montreal to show that these names were forged in order to answer and confound me, but the poor Bishop found that the document was too correct, authentic and public to be answered and attacked, and he remained mute and confounded, for many of these women were well known in the city.
Third. You will find the answer to your other questions, in the volume ‘Fifty Years in the Church of Rome,’ which I addressed you by today’s mail.
Respectfully yours in Christ,
C. Chiniquy
The same assertion of priestly infallibility is made today as it was centuries ago, the same declaration of change of nature through priestly celibacy. Upon this question Mr. Chiniquy says:
If any one wants to hear an eloquent oration let him go where the Roman Catholic priest is preaching on the divine institution of auricular confession. They make the people believe that the vow of perpetual chastity changes their nature, turns them into angels and puts them above the common faults of the fallen children of Adam. With a brazen face when they are interrogated on that subject, they say that they have special graces to remain pure and undefiled in the midst of the greatest dangers; that the Virgin Mary to whom they are consecrated is their powerful advocate to obtain from her son that superhuman virtue of Chastity; that what would be a cause of sin and perdition to common men is without peril and danger for a true son of Mary.
A work entitled “Mysteries of the Neapolitan Convents,” its author Henrietta Carracciola, a woman of the purest blood of the princes of Italy, daughter of the Marshal Carracciola, Governor of the Province of Pasi in Italy, is quoted from, by Rev. Mr. Chiniquy, in confirmation of his statements as to the continued impurity of the confessional.
Finally another priest, the most annoying of all for his obstinate assiduity, sought to secure my affections at all cost. There was not an image profane poetry could afford him, nor a sophism he could borrow from rhetoric, no wily interpretation he could give to the word of God, which he did not employ to convert me to his wishes. Here is an example of his logic:—
“Dear daughter,” said he to me one day, “knowest thou who thy God truly is?”
“He is the Creator of the Universe,” I answered dryly.
“No-no-no-no! that is not enough,” he replied laughing at my ignorance; “God is Love, but love in the abstract which receives its incarnation in the mutual affection of two hearts which idolize each other. You must then not only love God in the abstract existence, but must also love him in his incarnation, that is, in the exclusive love of a man who adores you. Quod Deus est amor nec colitus nisi amando.”
“Then,” I replied, “a woman who adores her own lover would adore Divinity itself?” “Assuredly,” reiterated the priest over and over again, taking courage from my remark and chuckling with what seemed to him the effect of his catechism.
“In that case,” said I hastily, “I should select for my lover rather a man of the world than a priest.”
“God preserve you, my daughter! God preserve you from that sin. To love a man of the world, a sinner, a wretch, an unbeliever, an infidel! Why, you would go immediately to hell. The love of a priest is a sacred love, while that of a profane man is infamy. The priest purifies his affections daily in communion with the Holy Spirit.... If you cannot love me because I am your confessor, I will find means to assist you to get rid of your scruples. We will place the name of Jesus Christ before all our affectionate demonstrations and thus our love will be a grateful offering to the Lord and will ascend fragrant with perfume to Heaven like the smoke of the incense of the Sanctuary. Say to me for example ‘I love you in Jesus Christ, last night I dreamed of you in Jesus Christ,’ and you will have tranquil conscience, because in doing this God will sanctify every transport of your love.”
Rev. Mr. Chiniquy who in his fifty years of Romish priesthood possessed every opportunity for knowing the truth, does not hesitate to affirm that the popes are today of the same general immoral character they were in the earlier centuries of the Church. He says:
Let not my readers be deceived by the idea that the popes of Rome in our days are much better than those of the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are absolutely the same—the only difference is that today they take a little more care to conceal their secret orgies. Go to Italy and there the Roman Catholics themselves will show you the two beautiful daughters whom the late Pope Pius IX had from two of his mistresses. Inquire from those who have personally known Pope Gregory XVI the predecessor of Pius IX; after they will have given you the history of his mistresses, one of whom was the wife of his barber, they will tell you that he was one of the greatest drunkards in Italy.
The views of the Catholic Church in regard to marriage of the priesthood was recently demonstrated in the United States, 1885, by the persecution of a priest of the Uniate Greek Church sent as a missionary from Austria to Pennsylvania. The Greek Church, it must be remembered, permits a single marriage to a priest. The Uniate while in this respect following the discipline of the Greek Church, yet admits the supremacy of the Pope which the regular Greek Church does not. The Uniate Greek Church accepts, as binding, all the decisions of Rome subsequent to the division between the eastern and the western parts of christendom. Endowed with authority from both branches, Father Wolonski came to this country accompanied by his wife, in full expectation of fellowship with his catholic brethren. His first contrary experience occurred in Philadelphia when Archbishop Ryan of the Cathedral refused all intercourse with him because of his marriage. Reaching Shenandoah where commissioned by his own Austrian Bishop, he discovered himself still under ban; the resident priest of the catholic church having warned his congregation under pain of excommunication to shun both himself and his church, upon the ground that the Roman Church under no circumstances tolerated a married priest. Eventually the subject grew to such proportions that Father Wolonski was recalled, and an unmarried priest sent in his stead.
From the experience of Father Wolonski less than a decade since, with the bitter hostility shown by the church towards Father Hyacinthe, we find that a belief in the special holiness of celibacy is as dominant in the Catholic church today as at any period of its history; concurrent testimony teaching us that its greatest evils remain the same as of old. It is less than twenty years since the whole christian world was interested in a suit brought against the heirs of the deceased Cardinal Antonelli in order to secure recognition of his daughter’s claim to inheritance. This girl was everywhere spoken of by the Catholic Church as “a sacrilegious child,” that is, a being who had violated sacred things by coming into existence. The destruction of her mother’s life, her own illegitimacy, the wrong done to her mother’s family and to society were held as of no moment beside the fact that her claims, if allowed, would take property from the church. The love of the Great Cardinal for this girl’s mother was fully proven, but the church having established celibacy in order that it might control the property of its priests, was not inclined to permit any portion to be diverted from that source. Honesty, justice, and the ties of natural affection, now as of yore are not part of the Church system. In consequence, this suit of the illegitimate child of the Great Cardinal Secretary, filled not alone Italy, but the whole Catholic world with disgrace.
Among the countries now striving to free themselves from Church dominion is Mexico. A letter to the New York Herald, winter of 1892, regarding the revolution there in progress, said of Diaz:
Instead of his being assisted by the Church it has been his bitterest and most relentless enemy and opponent. The Church in Mexico is opposed to all enlightenment of the people. The clergy, if they can be honored with that name, fight all improvements. They want no railways or telegraphs and when he adopted a system of compulsory education the war began in earnest. Diaz was determined, however, and he retaliated by closing up the convents and prohibiting the establishment of monasteries. Being further opposed in his efforts at reform and defied by the priests he put hundreds of them in Pueblo in jail and prohibited the ringing of Church bells in certain localities. He forcibly impressed on them the fact that he was running Mexico, not they. He gave them to understand that his idea of Christianity was, that priests should preach Christ crucified and not revolution and infraction of the laws.
In Mexico, priests can keep mistresses with impunity. From a church to a gambling-table is but a step, and the priests gamble with the rest. The rentals of houses of ill-fame, of gambling-houses, of bull-pens all go to a church which is supposed to teach religion. Because Diaz, a catholic himself, will not tolerate such crimes under the guise of religion he is fought by the church and is the recipient of their anathemas.
Take the leading church in Monterey outside of the cathedral. You step from the church-door to a plaza owned by the church and in which stand fifty tents in which are conducted monte, roulette and other games of chance. Behind this stand the bull-pen, and the profits and rentals go to the Church.
With all these lights the most plausible inference or theory is that the clerical party, as they see all these privileges being swept away, will cheerfully contribute the sinews of war with which to carry on a revolution against Diaz. They have agents in Europe and the money can come through that source without detection.
The agent of the Clerical Party in Europe is the Church itself. As a body, it has ever opposed advancement and reform. It anathematized the printing press as an invention of the devil and has steadily opposed education of the people. Its work is best done in the darkness of ignorance and superstition. For this cause it has opposed all new discoveries in science, all reforms of whatever character. Not by the Catholic Church alone, but under the “Reformation,” as we have seen, the same prohibition of the Bible to common people, has existed the same resistance to education of the masses, the same opposition to anti-slavery, to temperance, to woman’s demand for equality of opportunity with man. The general nature of the church does not change with change of name. Looking backward through history we even find the same characteristics under the patriarchate; love of power, greed for money, and intense selfishness combined in a general disregard for the rights of others.
M. Renan’s drama, “L’Abbesse de Jouarre,” was written because he wished to prove the worthlessness of those vows imposed on catholic priests and nuns, as well as show the bondage under which they held the feminine conscience, while the masculine conscience throws them aside. It is not alone the nuns whose conscience is bound, but all feminine members of the catholic church are more closely held in a spiritual bondage, than the male members of that church. In 1885, a letter from Chili to the New York Sun graphically pictured certain Chilian women penitents who are known by a peculiar dress they are required to wear. Others whose sins are so great that they cannot be purged by a penitential dress, retire for a season to the “Convent of Penitents,” where by mortification of the body they hope to gain absolution for the soul. Still more severe than this retreat are other convents known as “Houses of Detention,” where wayward daughters are sent, and young mothers without husbands are cared for. But the whole country of Chili fails to show a similar dress, or house of penitence, or correction for men. Shame and penance, equally with sin, have been relegated by the church to women alone.
The confessional is not frequented by men, and mass is but seldom attended by them. For this laxity a double reason exists: First, immorality in men is not looked upon as contrary to its discipline. Second, through woman having been trained to a more sensitive conscience than man, the confessional wrests secrets from her lips, which gives the church knowledge of all it wishes to learn in regard to the family. No more certain system could have been devised for the destruction of woman’s self-respect than the one requiring penance from her for sins the church passes lightly over in man. Nor would penance of this character be demanded from women were the offices of the church open to her the same as to man. No greater crime against humanity has ever been known than the division of morality into two codes, the strict for woman, the lax for man. Nor has woman been the sole sufferer from this creation of Two Moral Codes within the Christian Church. Through it man has lost fine discrimination between good and evil, and the Church itself as the originator of this distinction in sin upon the trend of sex, has become the creator and sustainer of injustice, falsehood and the crimes into which its priests have most deeply sunk. Nor is this condition of the past. As late as the fall of 1892 a number of articles appeared in Canadian papers openly accusing the catholic priesthood of that province of the grossest immorality. That priestly celibacy yet continues in the Romish Church is not a subject of surprise, when we realize the immense power and wealth it has been enabled to secure through its means; but it is one of astonishment, carrying with it a premonition of danger, that we now see a similar tendency in the ritualistic portion of the Episcopal Church, both in England and the United States. The evils of monasticism, although less potent than during the middle ages, are still great, and in finding entrance into Protestant denominations are a fresh warning of their dangerous tendency. The experience of the past should not appeal to us in vain.
We have noticed the perils to society arising from those classes of persons who, under plea of religion, evade the duties of family and social life. No crime against the world can be greater than the deliberate divestment of responsibility by one’s self, because tired of the warfare of life, that struggle which comes to every human being; the becoming “fascinated with the conceptions of an existence” outside of ordinary cares; and the entrance into an order in which one’s own personal responsibility is largely surrendered to others is not alone a crime against the state, but a sin against one’s own self and against humanity. An order which thereafter assumes the task of directing the thoughts and lives of its members into a channel of “repose and contentment” as certain protestant orders do, is one of the dangerous religious elements of the present day. No crime against one’s self or against society can be greater than this. In the Ritualistic Episcopal Church are to be found monks and sisterhoods upon the celibate plan, confessors and penance, all of them primal elements in moral and spiritual degradation. If religion has a lesson to teach mankind, it is that of personal responsibility; it is that of the worth and duty of the individual; it is that each human being is alone accountable for his or her course in life; it is the lesson of the absolute equality of each human being with every other human being in relation to these cardinal points. The lesson should have been learned ere this, that ecclesiastical pretense of divinely appointed power has ever made the priesthood arrogant, coarse and tyrannical; the male laity dependent and dissimulating; woman, self-distrustful and timorous, believing in the duty of humiliation and self-sacrifice; that her life is not to be lived primarily for herself alone, but that her very right to existence is dependent upon the benefit thereby to accrue to some other person.
Today, as of old, the underlying idea of monasticism, of “brotherhoods,” “sisterhoods,” and their ilk even in Protestant denominations, is the divine authority of some priestly superior, and that the power of remitting sins inheres in some system under control of some priest. The Ritualistic party of the Episcopal Church, equally with the Roman Catholic Church, makes frequent reference to these words of Christ—St. John XX, XXIII—“Whatever sins you remit they are remitted unto them, and whatsoever sins you retain are retained,” thus premising the divine power of the priesthood.
