Popery The Foe of the Church and of the Republic
Chapter IV. Popery and morality.
Contents
THE author of the “Invitation Heeded” entitles one of his chapters, “The Church the Guardian of Morals.” Whatever effect his argument may have had upon others, there is one whom it has signally failed in convincing. With even increased boldness, we now affirm that Popery is unfriendly to morality. We do not affirm that Romanists are enemies of private and public morals; nor deny that many are extremely exemplary, patterns of goodness; nor even assert that they knowingly advocate a system which is far less efficient than Protestantism in wedding its adherents to a life of morality. We make the assertion, however, without the fear of refutation, that Romanism, as a system, has failed in reforming the morals of the masses. It has been frequently said in certain quarters that Protestantism is a failure, what then shall be said of Popery? As a moral educator, her failure is deplorable. Compare Mexico and South America with the United States; Italy with New England; Spain with Scotland ; the Protestant counties of Ireland with those mostly Popish; Ulster with Tipperary.
In Roman Catholic Belgium there are, we are officially informed, eighteen murders to a million of the population; in France thirty-one; in Bavaria thirty-two; In Italy fifty-two; in Protestant England four. The illegitimate births in Brussels are thirty-five in the hundred; in Paris thirty-three; in Vienna fifty-one; in England five. In Chicago, according to the report of the Superintendent of Police, the Irish, who are about one-tenth of the entire population, supplied, in the year 1867, one hundred and seventy-four more offenders than all the other nationalities together. During the month in which the report was rendered (September), one in eight of the Catholic voters reported at the police court. Are Papists worse in Chicago than in the other cities of the Union? The Irish Republic says, “No.”
The Westminster Gazette, a Roman Catholic journal, recently made the following acknowledgment:— “The neglected children of London are chiefly our children, and the lowest of every class, whether thieves or drunkards, are Catholics.”
The Pope’s own city, it is well known, has been in the past, and is now, extremely immoral. His Holiness, Alexander VI., for eleven years the occupant of the Papal chair, the anointed head of the so-called true Church, the pretended successor of Peter, gave a splendid entertainment to fifty public prostitutes in the halls of the Holy Vatican. And in our own day no caricatures are so much enjoyed in Rome as those at the expense of the priesthood ; no stories are too astounding to be believed, if against priests and cardinals; no cry is so emphatic and frequent as this:—“Down with the priests.” When those claiming sanctity, wearing the honors of the Church, careful in the observance of her forms, and zealous in extending her influence, are, many of them, openly or secretly immoral, what is to be expected from the lower classes? If, according to one of their own historians, Baronius, “ He was usually called a good Pope, who did not excel in wickedness the worst of the human kind;” if moral character is not an essential qualification of a legitimate priest, but spiritual blessings of incalculable value may be pronounced by the tongue that an hour before, in a drunken revel, cursed its Maker; if grace flows through an unbroken succession direct from Peter, unimpeded in its blessed flow, as it streams from the jewelled fingers of a mitered monster of iniquity, then assuredly unbridled wickedness is excusable in the laity. Can they see any beauty in such holiness that they should desire it? To what organized iniquity do these remarkable words refer— “Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth?”
That profanity should prevail in Catholic countries none need wonder. The Popes have set examples that may challenge the blasphemous ingenuity of the most hardened reprobate.* Cursing—solemnly and deliberately done, but cursing none the less—seems to be one of the functions of their office. The Bull of Excommunication, dated Oct. 12, 1869, pronounces damnation upon all apostates and heretics, thus separating not only from the Church on earth, but from the Church in heaven, eight hundred millions of the human race, cutting them off, as Romanism affirms, from all rational hope of salvation. Even this, alas! does not exhaust his power of cursing. He fulminates a particular anathema against all who knowingly possess or read any book condemned by himself or his predecessors.
*Take the cursing and excommunication of the Pope’s alummaker as a specimen :—“ May God the Father curse him! May God the Son curse him! May the Holy Ghost curse him! May the Holy Cross curse him! May the Holy and Eternal Virgin Mary curse him! May St. Michael curse him! May John the Baptist curse him! May St. Peter, and St. Paul, and St, Andrew, and all the Apostles curse him! May all the martyrs and confessors curse him! May all the saints from the beginning of time to everlasting curse him! May he be cursed in the house, and in the fields! May he be cursed while living, and while dying! May he be cursed in sitting, in standing, in lying, in walking, in working, in eating, in drinking! May he be cursed in all the powers of his body, within and without! May he be cursed in the hair of his head, in his temples, his eyebrows, his forehead, his checks, and his jaw-bones, his nostrils, his teeth, his lips, his throat, his shoulders, his arms, his wrists, his hands, his breast, his stomach, his reins, . . . his legs, his feet, his joints, his nails! May he be cursed from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot! May heaven and all the powers therein rise against him to damn him, unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen.”—Spelman’s Glossary, p. 206. If this poor man is not suffering in the deepest pit of hell, it’s not the Pope’s fault. He was well cursed. If there is any hope, even the faintest, then the righteous indignation, the foaming fulminations of an infallible Pope, are harmless; then we more fortunate heretics may safely despise the feeble anathems pronounced against us.
As the interdicted list contains books in most of the cultivated languages, both ancient and modern, and upon almost every subject—Science, History, Religion, Morals, Metaphysics, and Literature, including most of our standard classics—down go the hopes of by far the greater number of educated Papists the world over. And then too, all who impede the work of the Church, directly or indirectly, especially such as subject priests to trial before civil courts—which even Catholic nations are now doing—are honored with a special malediction, sealing the fate of many millions more. That only a select few may escape a sound cursing, other classes also are pronounced anathema, all members of secret societies—Free Masons, Odd Fellows, Orangemen, and even his own dear children, Ribbonmen and Fenians. Still further to narrow the number of the elect, a curse is pronounced upon all who hold converse with excommunicated persons, upon all guilty of simony, and upon all ecclesiastics presuming to grant absolution to excommunicants, except in the article of death. The whole immense power of the keys is exerted, it would seem, in peopling the regions of the lost. “The Infallible teacher of faith and morals,” “the only mouth-piece of divine mercy,” dams more than four-fifths of the human family.
Nor is the character of Rome’s stanch adherents, the Jesuits, any less worthy of reprehension. Having taken one of the most solemn oaths ever administered of unflinching fidelity to the interests of “Mother Church,” they are thenceforth dead to every sentiment of virtue, to every motive of honor, to every feeling of humanity, unless these are means for the accomplishment of their deep-seated schemes of Popish aggrandizement. They have no love of morality, no fear of God before their eyes, no chord of sympathy with suffering humanity; they are simply, and almost solely, unprincipled, unreasoning, but shrewd, energetic, untiring devotion to Rome. Inheriting from their illiterate founder, Ignatius Loyola, a fanaticism the blindest conceivable – and for that very reason the most intense possible—they have been during all the years of their existence one of the greatest curses Europe has been called upon to endure.*
* The Parliament of France, in ordering their expulsion from the Empire (1762), set forth their moral character as follows:— “The consequences of their doctrines destroy the law of nature; break all bonds of civil society; authorize lying, theft, perjury, the utmost uncleanness, murder and all sins! Their doctrines root out all sentiments of humanity; excite rebellion; root out all religion; and substitute all sorts of superstition, blasphemy, irreligion and idolatry.”
Lord Macaulay says :— “It was alleged, and not without foundation, that the ardent public spirit which made the Jesuit regardless of his case, of his liberty, and of his life, made him also regardless of truth and of mercy ; that no means which could promote the interests of his religion seemed to him unlawful, and that by these interests he too often meant the interests of his society. It was alleged that, in the most atrocious plots recorded in history, his agency could be distinctly traced; that, constant only in attachment to the fraternity to which he belonged, he was in some countries the most dangerous enemy of freedom, and in others the most dangerous enemy of order. . . . Instead of toiling to elevate human nature to the noble standard fixed by Divine precept and example, he had lowered the standard till it was beneath the average level of human nature. . . . In truth, if society continued to hold together, if life and property enjoyed any security, it was because common sense and common humanity restrained men from doing what the Society of Jesus assured them they might with a safe conscience do.”—Vol. i., chap. 6
Some, perhaps, may be inclined to account for the increased prevalence of crime in Roman Catholic countries, by assigning other causes than the influence of the Romish Church. But certainly human nature is the same in all lands; and while external influences and modifying circumstances may indeed in some measure affect the state of morals, it is inconceivable that these should universally operate, in all climates and in all ages, to the evident greater deterioration of lands under the rule of the Pope. The conclusion is irresistible, that these gross immoralities are the result, the natural fruit of Rome’s teaching. The whole system tends to produce exactly this state of things. When men believe that the favor of heaven can be purchased for a few paltry dimes, why should they endeavor to secure it by a life of self-denying virtue? Why follow the despised, humble and meanly-attired Jesus, in the narrow way, with few companions, when taught from early infancy to believe that the gay, the worldly, and even the immoral, being within the Church, are sure of entering the bliss of heaven? With no just sense of the heinousness of sin as a violation of divine law; with no fear of the righteous indignation of Almighty God, in fact, with conscience thoroughly debauched by the teachings of the priest, what shall restrain them from the commission of any crimes they may desire to commit? Could any system be devised better fitted to spread vice, disorder and crimes; to dissolve the bonds of society? If men were left without any religion, it is believed that even the natural conscience, unenlightened by divine revelation, would prompt to a purer code of morals than that of Rome.
Another powerful agent in producing these abounding immoralities, there can be no doubt, is the confessional. The influence of this can be only bad, both on the minds of those who recount all their sins to the confessor, and on the mind of the priest. The heart of Father Confessor is a receptacle for all the villanies and immoralities of an entire congregation. If these do not corrupt even one who holds his office under the authority of St. Peter, he must be more than human. But, alas! we have innumerable evidences all around us that priests are men of like passions with others. Defiled in mind by becoming familiar with forms of sin, the listener becomes the tempted; the tempted becomes the tempter.
And the maxims laid down for the direction of confessors in the discharge of their duties with the faithful are worthy a passing notice. “After a son has robbed his father, as a compensation, the confessor need not enforce restitution, if he has taken no more than the just recompense of his labor.” “Servants may steal from their masters as much as they judge their labor is worth more than the wages they receive.” There would seem to be some virtue in doing the deed secretly.+ Are we to infer that Papists, like the ancient Spartans, deem theft honorable, if so adroitly done as to escape detection? And how convenient the standard by which to determine how much may be taken without sin—as much as the Catholic judges his or her services worth more than the wages received. Some servants, under such instruction, learn to set a very high estimate on their labors. Not only may servants steal from their employers, but wives may from their husbands. “A woman may take the property of her husband to supply her spiritual wants, and to act as other women act.”
+The Catechism approved by French Bishops—their catechisms, like their prayer-books, are unnumbered—asks, “Is one always guilty of robbery when he takes the property of another? No. It might happen that he whose goods he takes has no right to object. For instance, when he takes in secret of his neighbor by way of compensation.”
According to the moral theology of Liguori, “To strike a clergyman is sacrilege;” but, “It is lawful for a person to sell poison to one who, he believes, will use it for bad purposes, provided the seller cannot refrain from selling it without losing his customer.” It is likewise lawful to keep a concubine, to shelter prostitutes, to rent them a house, and to carry messages between them and their gallants. “In case of doubt whether a thing which is commanded be against the commandment of God, the subject is bound to obey the command of his superior.” The same high authority assures us that gambling, betting, disobedience of parents, gluttony, vain-glory, hypocrisy, opening another’s letters, babbling, scurrility, and the ordination of drunkards and debauchees to the priesthood, are lawful under certain circumstances. Condemning the Wycliffites for opposing simony, he makes an excuse for its prevalence in the Romish Church. “A voluntary confession to a priest,” he affirms, “is a sign of contrition.”
For the practical carrying out of their cherished principle, “The end justifies the means,” the injured Catholic may read, “ If a calumniator will not cease to publish calumnies against you, you may fitly kill him, not publicly, but secretly, to avoid scandal.” Again :— “It is lawful to kill an accuser, whose testimony may jeopardize your life and honor.” And to make this code of infamous morals as convenient as possible, it is further affirmed:— “In all the above cases, when a man has a right to kill any person, another may do it for him, if affection move the murderer.”
We know it may indeed be said, these precepts are not widely known, nor generally practiced; they are only found in Rome’s books; they are merely a portion of the legacy of the dark ages, and to hold Rome to account for them is, in every sense, and to the highest degree, unfair. No, not unfair; for immutability changes not, and a Church which assumes the right to place its ban on every immoral issue from the press, to tell the world what to believe, what to read, and now to act, and has gone to the most distant publishing houses of the civilized world to drag thence for condemmation the principles of Protestantism, might surely take the trouble to expunge these and similar teachings from books written by her own sons, and once sanctioned.
The practice of the Popes in dispensing with oaths, obligations and contracts, and absolving, subjects from allegiance to their lawful sovereigns in cases where kings rebel against the authority of Rome, has had no little influence in producing immoralities. It is a principle with Rome that “no faith is to be kept with heretics.”*
* Gregory IX. decreed :—“Be it known to all who are under the dominion of heretics, that they are set free from every tie of fealty and duty to them; all oaths and solemn agreement to the contrary notwithstanding.” Pope Innocent VIII, in his bull against the Waldenses, gave his nuncio full authority “to absolve all who are hound by contract to assign and pay anything to them.” Gregory VII., in a solemn council held at Rome, enacted:—“We, following the statutes of our predecessors, do, by our Apostolic authority, absolve all those from their oath of fidelity who are bound to excommunicate persons, either by duty or oath, and we loose them from every tie of obedience.” Martin V. says:—“Be assured thou sinnest mortally, if thou keep thy faith with heretics.”
And this dogma of Roman Infallibility has on several occasions been practically interpreted. John Huss was conducted to the Council of Constance, under the solemn pledge of protection from the Emperor. The Council, however, condemned the reformer as a heretic, and ordered him to be burned at the stake. In vain the Emperor interposed, pleading his pledged word of honor. It was solemnly decreed:—”The person who has given the safe conduct to come thither shall not, in this case, be obliged to keep his promise, by whatever tie he may have been engaged;” and poor Huss perished in the flames! Did ever ingenuity in devising rules of casuistry excel this? It is only equalled by the treachery of Judas. And even he, without attempting a defense of faithlessness, exclaimed, in the bitterness of remorse, “I have sinned.” But Rome, to this day, has never expressed the slightest regret in having—not merely on this occasion, but on hundreds of others—deliberately broken faith, and consigned to the rack, the dungeon, or the flames those whose only crime was, that they loved Christ, the Bible, and a pure Christianity more than the Scarlet Mother on the seven hills of Rome.
In remembrance of such deeds, it is with a sense of holy satisfaction that the follower of Jesus reads, “Her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.” And the prayer of the devout soul is, “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly;” vindicate truth and justice; let the angel’s voice be heard above the waves of earth’s turmoil, saying, “Is fallen, is fallen, Babylon the great.”
Did space permit we might easily prove that unblushing atheism is a natural fruit of Popery. In every Catholic country of the present day the more intelligent classes are either infidel or atheistic. Without pausing to ascertain whether Popery is condemned or taught in Scripture, but presuming it is all it claims to be, the only form of religion having the sanction of the Bible, they deliberately reject God’s Word as a guide to morality, holiness and happiness. To receive as a boon from our Father in heaven a book which, it is believed, wrongly indeed, yet firmly believed, sanctions such enormities, is justly considered a slander on the Creator. Accordingly, they look upon it as a cunningly devised fable, admirably adapted to bind the fetters of despotism on an ignorant people, precisely fitted to uphold and enrich an arrogant priesthood, but no guide to the sin-burdened soul on the way to eternal favor with God. Some, however, of the educated in Romish countries, perhaps the greater number, do not pause short of atheism. In rejecting a system of religion which cannot command even common respect, they, alas! reject also the triune God, who, although worthy the devout homage of every heart, is so dishonored by those who profess to serve him, as to be despised by those outside the Church claiming to be his. By the excesses of Popery they are drawn away from the Bible and God, and driven into atheism. Consciously or unconsciously they have reasoned, if this be the true religion of the true God (and they who claim talent, knowledge and piety so affirm), then we deliberately prefer to believe there is no God. The atheism, which, in the bloody excesses of the French Revolution, disgraced humanity, was the legitimate offspring of Romanism.
With the testimony of Coleridge as to the ruinous moral effects of Popery, we close :—”When I contemplate the whole system of Romanism as it affects the great principles of morality, the terra firma, as it were, of our humanity; then trace its operations on the sources and conditions of human strength and well being; and lastly, consider its woeful influence on the innocence and sanctity of the female mind and imagination; on the faith and happiness, the gentle fragrancy and unnoticed ever-present verdure of domestic life, I can with difficulty avoid applying to it the Rabbi’s fable of the fratricide, Cain—that the firm earth trembled wherever he trod, and the grass turned black beneath his feet.”
