XXXI. THE CHURCH OF TO-DAY.

The question of sacerdotal marriage was left in France, on the collapse of the empire, in a curiously unsettled condition, giving rise to very remarkable contradictions in the judicial decisions which since then have from time to time been rendered by the tribunals as cases were brought before them.

Under the Restoration, a priest named Martin, an old réfractaire of 1792, committed the imprudence of marrying in 1815. Not long after he died without issue. His relatives contested the succession with the widow, and in 1817 the inferior court decided in her favor. The next year the court of appeals reversed the judgment on the ground that sacerdotal marriage had only been sanctioned indirectly by the legislation of the Revolution, and that the Charter of 1814 (Art. 6) had restored Catholicism as the religion of the state. In 1821, however, the final decision of the court of cassation settled the question in favor of the widow, thus legalizing such unions, for the incontrovertible reason that the code did not recognize vows or holy orders as causes incapacitating for marriage.1576

Even yet, however, the matter was not held to be finally disposed of. In 1828, Louis Thérèse Saturnin Dumonteil, a priest of Paris, who desired to contract marriage, failed to obtain from the courts the customary assistance required by the law to set aside the refusal of his parents, who declined their assent to his projected union. The case was argued in all its bearings on civil and ecclesiastical law, and he found the tribunals resolutely opposed to him. When the Revolution of July unsettled the public mind with visions of the revival of the principles of ’89, Dumonteil endeavored to carry out his project. The lower court decided in his favor, March 26, 1831, but the higher courts reversed the decision and pronounced definitely that priests could not contract civil marriage,1577 and this in spite of the Charter of 1830, which simply affirmed Catholicism to be the religion of the majority of Frenchmen, while that of 1814 had declared it to be the religion of the state.

This curiously vexed question seems incapable of positive solution. The case of Dumonteil apparently discouraged aspirants for clerical marriage during the next thirty years, for I have met with no allusions to any attempt in that direction until 1861. In that year M. de Brou-Laurière, a priest already debarred from his sacred functions, engaged himself in marriage with Mdlle. Elizabeth Fressanges, of Deuville near Périgueux. On calling upon the mayor of the village to perform the ceremony and register the contract, that functionary refused to act. He was supported by the public authorities, and the expectant bridegroom was obliged to appeal to the tribunals to obtain his rights. The question was warmly contested and thoroughly argued, and it was not until a year had elapsed that the court of Périgueux rendered a decision ordering the mayor to perform his functions and to marry the patient couple. The case was then carried to the superior court at Bordeaux, which reversed the previous decision.

Again, in 1864, in the case of the Abbé Chataigneu, the court of Angoulême decided that a priest was, under the law of France, not competent to contract civil marriage.1578 On the other hand, in 1870, the court of Algiers, in the case of a M. Q——, delivered an elaborate decision to the effect that in France there is no law forbidding the civil marriage of priests.1579 Yet in 1878 the court of cassation confirmed a decision of the court of Rennes, pronouncing null and void the marriage of a priest, at the instance of his nephew and niece, to whom he had bequeathed his property by a will anterior to the marriage. When M. Loyson (Père Hyacinthe) married Mrs. Merriman, in 1872, the ceremony was performed in London, at the office of the Registrar of Marriages, and M. Loyson gave as the reason of his seeking a foreign land the refusal of the French officials to confirm the civil ceremony. So the Abbé Chavard, vicar at Marseilles, in 1874, went to Geneva for the same purpose, where he continued his priestly functions; and this leads me to regard as exceedingly improbable a recent statement in the daily journals that priestly marriages occur in France at the rate of twenty or thirty a year. In fact, so lately as September, 1883, there was before the courts a case which shows how uncertain is the question still in France. A certain Abbé Junqua was expelled from the church and was condemned to three months’ imprisonment for continuing to wear the priestly robes. He subsequently married and engaged in trade, when he failed, and his wife sought to secure her dowry from the bankrupt assets, but was resisted on the ground that her marriage was illegal under the Concordat, although the church had itself deprived the husband of his ecclesiastical character.

In Switzerland I have met with two or three cases of such marriages, but they have no special significance. In one of them, occurring in Lucerne some thirty years ago, the priest left the church in order to marry, and lived with his wife until her death, in 1880, when he permitted her to be buried as a Catholic, and had the mortification of seeing her name entered on the register, publicly exposed in the parish church, as an unmarried woman.

In Wiesbaden, in 1821, a priest named Koch, with the permission of the authorities, abandoned the priesthood and applied to the curé of the place to marry him, when, meeting with a refusal, he had the ceremony performed by a Protestant pastor, and was promptly excommunicated by the Vicar of Ratisbon. Not deterred by this, in 1828 a hundred and eighty priests of Baden petitioned the secular power for permission to marry, and the Chamber of Deputies showed a disposition to grant the request. This effort was imitated in 1831 by the Catholic clergy of Silesia, but the movement was repressed by the Prussian government; and in 1833, at Trèves, a clerical association was formed to carry out the same object.1580 These efforts brought forth from Gregory XVI. an encyclical letter, in which he urged the faithful to stand by the canons, and severely condemned the weakness of some prelates who were disposed to yield.1581 Some similar movements in Austria in the next decade led Pius IX., almost immediately after his accession to the papal chair, in his encyclical letter of November 9th, 1846, to condemn the foul conspiracy against celibacy which was favored by ecclesiastics plunged in sensuality and forgetful of their own dignity.1582 In 1851, moreover, he took especial pains to stigmatize a work, published in Lima by Francisco de Paula in 1848, entitled “Defensa de la Autoridad de los Gobiernos,” which impiously sought to decentralize the church, and which took strong grounds against enforced celibacy.1583

How immovable, indeed, is the position of the hierarchy on this matter is shown by the case of Panzini. Panzini is, or was, a Capuchin monk who, in 1854, conceived the idea that the greater part of the evils under which the establishment labors are the result of celibacy and its attendant immorality. He addressed to the pope an anonymous memorial urging him to submit the question to the bishops then assembled in Rome, and followed this with two similar subsequent applications. Finally, in the troubles of 1859, anticipating the assembling of a European congress, he resolved to print an essay on the subject, addressed to all the bishops of the church, thinking that the congress would afford him an opportunity of reaching them. The printer to whom he confided his manuscript promptly placed the dangerous matter in the hands of Cardinal Antonelli, when Panzini was at once thrown into prison and delivered to the Inquisition. After a trial which lasted six months, he was condemned to twelve years’ incarceration and perpetual suspension from the sacerdotal functions which were his only source of livelihood. After two years of his sentence had expired, he was released at the instance of the Italian government, and in 1865 he published his essay, rewritten from memory, under the title of “Pubblica Confessione di un Prigioniero dell’ Inquisizione Romana ed origine dei mali della Chiesa Cattolica.”

Now, Panzini’s persecution arose solely from his affirming that enforced celibacy is impolitic and unnatural. He professed unbounded reverence for the church in all matters of faith, and claimed that the point at issue was merely one of discipline on which the church might make a mistake. Even here, however, he was careful to declare his measureless admiration for voluntary asceticism. Virginity he believed to be immensely superior to matrimony, and he anathematized as cheerfully as the council of Trent could wish all who should proclaim the contrary. Even monasticism he defended as a state of perfection recommended by Christ. His sole objective point was the rigidity of the law which renders the single state indispensable to all ecclesiastics, and he essayed to prove that this is in direct antagonism to all the general principles of Catholic theology, that the purity which is its pretext is impossible to enforce, and that the effort itself is most disastrous to the church and to the faithful. The authorities were not disposed to consider that these opinions were an allowable dissidence on matters of policy, and they hastened to brand them as heretical. In the sentence passed upon Panzini the Inquisition took occasion to stigmatize as heresy the assertion that enforced celibacy is contrary to nature, that it is a stumbling-block and the cause of perpetual transgression.1584 That this theory was enforced in practice so long as the church could control the secular power is shown in the case of an Italian priest who, preferring to sanctify love by marriage rather than to indulge in illicit intrigue, married and fled with his bride to Africa, seeking among the Infidel the liberty denied him in Christendom. Three children blessed his union, but the unresting vigilance of the church discovered his retreat, when, with the aid of the French consulate, he was seized, carried back to Naples, and thrown into prison to repent indefinitely over his errors.1585

There evidently could be no reasonable ground for expecting a change of policy in this respect on the part of the Roman curia, and this was recognized in 1866 by some Catholic priests of Hungary, who desiring liberty of marriage, and seeing the futility of anticipating it at the hands of their superiors, united in petitioning the National Diet for the requisite permission. Yet in spite of the extravagance of supposing that a body which, since the Council of Trent, has become so thoroughly centralized as the church, would listen to the wishes of its lower classes, there were not wanting those who imagined that the Council of the Vatican in 1870 would adopt the discipline of the Eastern Church and permit marriage to the inferior orders. Any such expectations were destined to be disappointed as soon as the preliminary machinery of the council became known. A congregazione centrale was appointed by Pius IX. in advance, consisting exclusively of cardinals connected with the Inquisition, and to this body was delegated the sole determination of the matters to be submitted to the council for discussion. Under this congregazione, and presided over by its members, were five consulte, to act as sub-committees on the subjects respectively confided to their deliberations. The consulta on faith and dogma was under the presidency of Cardinal Bilio, notorious as the compiler of the Syllabus of December, 1864; and that on canons and discipline was committed to Cardinal Catarini, whose whole career had been passed in the Inquisition, and who had acquired a sinister fame by his rigorous punishment of all attempts at reform. If, as the church asserts, the proceedings of general councils are under the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost, it will be seen what reverent care was observed to keep Him in due subjection, and to spare the church the scandal of being brought, by thoughtless innovators, into opposition with Him.

As the destined outcome of the council was simply the dogma of papal infallibility, the hopes of the anti-celibatarians were transferred to the schism caused by that dogma, and known as that of the Old Catholics. In 1875, a Dean Suczinsky married the Baroness Gazewaska, and joined the schismatics, when the Prussian government decided to protect him in the enjoyment of his temporalities, and his new brethren agreed to receive him, and thus committed themselves on the question of celibacy—a decision confirmed in 1878 by the Synod of Bonn, which decreed, by a vote of 75 against 22, that the prohibition of the canons is not an obstacle to the marriage of ecclesiastics, or to the cure of souls by married priests. Yet the Old Catholic movement, despite the well-earned eminence of some of its leaders, such as Döllinger, was destined to failure from the start. It sought a compromise where no compromise was possible—asserting the right of private judgment against the Church Universal only to a certain point, and that point one which concerned itself rather with intellectual subtleties than actual daily affairs. The unbearable oppressions which lent practical application to the polemics of Luther no longer existed; and the secular powers of Europe felt too secure in their ability to defend themselves against ecclesiastical encroachment to give substantial aid to the opponents of Rome. The Old Catholic schism may therefore already be regarded almost as a thing of the past, and one which will exercise no influence over the future.

A more serious blow than that which Döllinger and his friends sought to aim at the Roman curia has been dealt, in the matter of marriage, by the adoption, in successive Catholic states, of what is known as Civil Marriage, by which matrimony is withdrawn from the exclusive control of the church, and the sacrament and benediction are declared to be accidents not necessary to the legal status of husband and wife or to the legitimacy and heritable capacity of children. We have already seen that this was one of the legislative results of the French Revolution, and the example thus early set by France has been followed of late by Italy and Austria after its adoption, in 1853 by Sardinia, as one of the earliest reformatory measures of Cavour. Yet the church positively refuses to regard such marriages as entitled to respect. When the project was under discussion in Italy, the Unità Cattolica, one of the papal organs, in its issue of July 16th, 1864, did not hesitate to assert that the establishment of civil matrimony was establishing the liberty of licentiousness, and that, after having scattered houses of ill-fame throughout Italy, it would convert the whole peninsula into one brothel. In a similar spirit, Pius IX., in his allocution of October 30th, 1866, denounced it as leading to an organized system of scandalous concubinage. When, in May, 1868, Austria followed the example of Italy, Pius, within a month, delivered an allocution, in which he not only condemned the “abominable law,” but declared it to be null and void; and Cardinal Rauscher, Archbishop of Vienna, issued a manifesto, in which he not only denied that the civil contract constituted marriage and directed that children sprung from such unions should be entered on the parish registers as neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but gave positive instructions that absolution should be denied, even in articulo mortis, to all parties who had cohabited in such unions—thus stigmatizing them as worse than concubinage. In a similar spirit, when, in 1869, civil marriage was proclaimed under the short-lived republic of Spain, the clergy, under inspiration from the Vatican, denounced it as concubinage, and threatened to suspend the celebration of the Mass. With the restoration of the monarchy the law was promptly repealed, and an effort to restore it was rejected by an emphatic vote of the Cortes in February, 1883, though, with the more liberal tendencies that have since arisen, the matter is again proposed for discussion. Leo XIII. has been vigorous in his opposition to the innovation. In his first Encyclical, issued April 21st, 1878, he declared that “citizens, profaning the dignity of Christian marriage, have adopted legal concubinage in place of religious matrimony;” and he returned to the attack in a special Encyclical on the subject, published February 10th 1880. In this he assumes that, as “by the will of Christ the church alone can and ought to legislate and decide concerning sacraments, so it is out of the question to attempt to transfer any, even the smallest part, of her power to the government of the state,” and therefore “judicial sentences on conjugal contracts, as to whether they have been entered upon rightly or wrongly,” are a direct infringement of the rights of the church, whether those judgments be adverse or not to the canons.

The earlier passages of this Encyclical are so warm and eloquent a defence of the holiness of matrimony, as the natural condition of man decreed by God, that it would probably trouble its author to explain why so exalted and divine a state should be prohibited to the ministers of the God who devised it and fitted his creatures specially for it. Yet the persistent and bitter opposition of the church to the civil marriage laws may not unreasonably be attributed to the fact that under them the state has the power to recognize and permit clerical marriage. For more than half a century such laws had existed in France, but as the French tribunals leaned towards upholding ecclesiastical celibacy, they were acquiesced in comparatively in silence. When Italy, however, followed the example, it was seen that the temper of the Italian government would lead to construing them in a sense favorable to priestly liberty, and hence the opposition, which has been justified and intensified by the result. Immediately on the passage of the Civil Marriage Act, Dr. Prota, of Naples, an energetic reformer within the church, in a letter of October 30th, 1865, advised all his clerical friends to marry and to persist in the exercise of their functions, “and the more who do so at once and simultaneously the safer for all, for the bishops will venture the less to persecute you in the face of public opinion.” Accordingly cases of priestly marriage commenced to occur, and when they were contested their validity was confirmed by the tribunals. The superior courts of Genoa, Trani, and Palermo successively decided in this sense, and finally, in 1869, occurred the case of Andrea Treglia, of the diocese of Salerno, which settled the question in Naples. The municipal officers of Vietri refused to marry him; the court of Salerno decided against him, but when the matter was carried up to the court of appeals of Naples judgment was rendered in his favor, and he was married forthwith—thus legitimating the unions of some fifty priests who had preceded him, without the question having been settled by the tribunal of last resort. In the organ of the reforming Catholics of Naples, the Emancipatore Cattolica, it is curious to see the successive marriages chronicled with the same satisfaction as that evinced by Spalatin in the stormy days of Luther.1586

Yet the whole question is one of but slender practical importance. In no country is the Catholic church subservient to the state. It controls its own sacraments, and no government is likely to venture upon interference with it in its own sphere. While, therefore, it may be deprived of the power to persecute and punish those of its members who enter upon civil marriage, it yet possesses the ability to deprive them of their functions, which in most cases is equivalent to depriving them of bread; and it has an unquestioned right to expel them from its communion. The priest who marries, therefore, is virtually separated from his church and deprived of his means of livelihood—motives which, combined with the moral forces at work to keep men within the accustomed bounds, are quite sufficient to prevent defection from growing common, or to render marriage with a priest attractive to women above the lowest class. Even in the United States, where there is no legal impediment to priestly marriage, and the tone of society is such as rather to welcome those who escape from the pale of Rome, such cases are very rare. A few years since one occurred in Philadelphia, and in February, 1882, Father Agudi, of Hartford, committed matrimony, but these are the only instances which I remember to have noted for many years past. While, therefore, the civil marriage laws of Europe unquestionably loosen the ties which in this respect bind the priest to his church, there are still sufficient material and moral forces at work to prevent desertions from this cause from assuming any serious proportions.

Predictions, as a rule, are idle, and yet it would appear entirely safe to assume that those who look forward to a change in the policy of the church as regards the enforcement of celibacy among its ministers are prompted rather by their wishes than by judgment, or by knowledge of the influences at work. It matters little what may be the aspirations of the vast body of men who form the working ecclesiastical force—the humble priests and curés upon whom it depends for its support among the populations. The autocratic theocracy, founded in the dark ages, and strengthened by the council of Trent, received its final and irrevocable shape when the church submissively adopted the Vatican decree, which declared “that the Roman pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals, to be held by the universal church, by the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that therefore such definitions are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the church. But if any one—which may God avert—presume to contradict this definition let him be anathema.”1587 It would be futile to imagine after this that any pressure could be brought to bear upon the Roman curia sufficient to induce a change in its immemorial policy—a change, moreover, which would overwhelm it with the bitterest humiliation by contradicting all its teachings since the days of St. Jerome. What was so unbendingly refused to all the princes and nearly all the clergy of Catholic Christendom in the doubtful days of the Reformation will not be granted now, when, despite the destruction of the temporal power in Italy, the spiritual influence of the church is as great as ever, and it sees the results of its policy in the rapidly extending area of its domination. When Pius IX. could boast that during his single pontificate he had founded twenty-nine metropolitan sees and one hundred and thirty episcopal dioceses, there would seem to be no valid reason, from the stand-point of the Vatican, for an act so revolutionary as the abrogation of celibacy, which would convert its janizaries into householders, with human interests dissociated from those of the church-militant.

The monastic orders have not escaped the innovating spirit of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the revolutionary cortes of 1820 enacted a law suppressing all the existing monastic foundations, excepting the Knights of Malta and the Hospitalarios de San Juan, and further prohibiting the founding of new institutions and the administering of vows; but when in 1823 the constitutional government fell under French bayonets, the Orders reëstablished themselves and took a bloody revenge upon their persecutors. Again in 1836 the government of Isabella II. undertook the same task, excepting the Padres de las Escuelas Pias, the Hospitalarios de San Juan, and the Clerigos de la Mision, but the attempt was short-lived; as was also that of 1868 under the Republic. In the Netherlands, a series of laws adopted between 1818 and 1826 forbade the admission of novices in the contemplative orders, which, being of no public utility, had no claim for recognition; and irrevocable vows, moreover, were declared illegal. In 1820 a similar effort was made in Naples, but it was unsuccessful. In the New World still more sweeping reforms have been undertaken. Thus Paraguay, in 1824, suppressed all monasteries as useless; Brazil, in 1829, prohibited the entrance of new devotees in the existing foundations, thus condemning them to gradual extinction; and in 1851 New Grenada not only expelled the Company of Jesus and forbade the establishment of any Order professing the doctrine of passive obedience, but threw open the doors of all religious establishments, and promised legal protection to those who should abandon them. Ten years later it suppressed them altogether, and in 1874 its example was followed in Venezuela.1588 In 1849, one of the first acts of the Roman Republic was to liberate all monks and nuns from obedience to their vows; and in 1853 Cavour suppressed all the monastic houses of the Kingdom of Sardinia, applying their property to the improvement of the clergy, in spite of the superstitious fears excited by the almost simultaneous deaths of several members of the royal family. After the formation of the Kingdom of Italy, the law of June 28th, 1866, completed the suppression of all the religious houses, pensioned or subsidized their members, and confiscated their property. This process of secularization was rapidly carried out, and early in 1867 the journals reported that nearly all the inmates of the monasteries were dispersed, some of them returning to their families, some of them accepting refuge offered by the charitable, but most of them clubbing together and hiring houses in which to live as of old. Two exceptions, indeed, were made in the enforcement of the law. Monte Casino, the venerable mother of western monachism, was spared, and provision made for its maintenance as a national monument; while Savonarola’s convent of San Marco was similarly favored, rather perhaps because of its frescoes than of its historical associations. Against all this the church of course protested vigorously, pronouncing the suppression of the orders and the secularization of their possessions to be null and void; but the readiness with which purchasers were found to give even more than the appraised value of the property, shows how futile was resistance to the tendency of the age.

So great a social revolution was of course not effected without much of individual suffering, which, in some cases at least, was not diminished by the methods adopted in enforcing the law. The fact that in 1856, 8000 monks petitioned Pius IX. for secularization, shows that the ideas of the age had penetrated into some of the monasteries, but in the greater number of cases the inmates were naturally averse to the change. Panzini, who can assuredly not be regarded as a prejudiced witness, speaks with bitter indignation of the files of soldiery sent to drive from their houses the terrified nuns, who were thrown upon the world without the means of subsistence or the training to earn a livelihood, while their vows precluded them from marrying or from worldly employment. Even the private fortunes brought by them in many cases to their convents shared the common fate of confiscation, and they sought in vain to have their dowers restored to them.1589 It is impossible not to feel sympathy for those whose misfortune consists in having been born too late, and who are made to expiate the sins of a system which they have reverently received from their forefathers. The student of the past, moreover, may be pardoned a feeling of regret at the destruction of the venerable institutions which, for a thousand years, fostered the religious growth of Christendom; but the civilization which they rendered possible has outgrown them. In the history of development it is inevitable that Zeus should dethrone his father Cronos; and the progress of humanity demands the removal of that which has outlived its usefulness, and has become only a stumbling-block in the path of human improvement.

Pius IX. himself had felt the need of some measure of reform in the religious orders, but was powerless to enforce it. It is asserted that before his early liberal tendencies had become completely eradicated, on his return from Gaeta, he entertained the idea of rendering life in common indispensable in all monastic institutions, of substituting for the irrevocable vow one which should be renewable at a fixed interval, and of deferring all ordinations to the priesthood until the applicant should have entered on his 36th year. These sensible measures, however, were opposed so strenuously by all the officials that the Pope gave way—the General of the Franciscans even proclaiming vehemently that they would assuredly result in the destruction of all the religious orders.1590 It would seem that Pius eventually, in this respect as in others, fell completely into the hands of the ultra-conservatives, for though in 1857 he defined that the simple vow of the novitiate should not be taken before the age of 16, and that the irrevocable vow should be deferred until the accomplishment of a novitiate of three years, yet the following year he decreed that the simple vow of the novice was irrevocable, except by papal dispensation, unless, indeed, the general of the order should see fit to expel the postulant.1591 It is remarked, moreover, that while he not infrequently exercised his dispensing power in releasing worthy applicants from the vows of poverty and obedience, he never absolved them from that of chastity;1592 though it is not unreasonably urged that all enlightened legislation holds engagements, even in matters of trifling import, to be invalid when made by minors, while the church permits, and even incites, children in their sixteenth year to enter into obligations the nature of which they are unable to appreciate, and then unyieldingly exacts of them the rigid execution of the rash promise, under pain of eternal damnation.

Yet, notwithstanding these successive shocks, monasticism has rarely been more flourishing or more vigorous than of late years. Warned by the successive secularization of its temporalities in one country after another, the church has learned to give to the monastic system the direction in which its evils are least sensibly felt, its benefits to humanity are greatest, and the influence which it is capable of exerting is most serviceable to the hierarchy. Though at times mistaken in the spirit of the age; though often misled by pride, by ambition, and by avarice, the Roman church has missed its aim and mistaken its vocation, yet, upon the whole, it has manifested that adaptation to the wants of successive generations which is the real secret of its power and the condition of its success. Clearly recognizing the scant toleration which our hard-working nineteenth century has for holy idleness and unproductive sanctity, it moulds its institutions to meet the necessities of the age. It no longer glories in new and fantastic forms of worship or insane feats of asceticism—not the pillar of Stylites, the poverty of Francis, or the thong of the Flagellants1593—but it seeks to organize systems by which the beneficence of the many may be efficiently administered by the trained labor of the few. It endeavors no longer to agglomerate around idle communities the wealth which could only pander to their vices, but rather to render useful by associated action the benevolent self-abnegation which in other communions is apt to be lost or frittered away for lack of judicious organization and direction. When thus the vow of celibacy is uttered, not in the hope of a life of ease and sensual indulgence, not in the pride of Pharisaical holiness, not in the lust of exaggerated maceration, not in the hope of purchasing by solitude and mortification the favor of an all-merciful Creator, but for the single-minded purpose of devoting a life to elevating fellow-creatures from degradation or to relieving their physical and mental miseries, no one can deny that institutions which in their wantonness of prosperity accomplished so much of evil possess fruitful germs of good to be developed through adversity and tribulation.

The results of this wise policy have shown themselves especially in France and Belgium. When, in 1625, St. Vincent de Paul founded the Order of the Sisters of Charity, he accomplished a work which was destined to prove as useful to the church as the mendicant and preaching orders which resuscitated it in the thirteenth century, or the Company of Jesus, which enabled it to set bounds to the Protestant Reformation. It was a return to the primal and vital principles of Christianity, which bound anew the peoples to the hierarchy and bridged over the all but impassable gulf between them.

This tie, so delicate and yet so firm, proved lasting. Even amid the horrors of the Revolution, when conventual vows were forbidden, and the monastic orders were scattered ruthlessly abroad, the gentle virtues and the tireless ministrations of the Sisters of Charity won for them respect and toleration from the cruel fanatics who respected and tolerated nothing else. When, even under the Concordat of 1801, the reëstablishment of monastic orders was strictly forbidden, and those which endeavored timidly to organize themselves under the names of Pères de la Foi, Victimes de l’Amour de Dieu, Cœur de Jésus, etc., were broken up in 1804 without ceremony,1594 exceptions were made in favor of the charitable associations of females, the missionary societies of Saint-Esprit and the Lazaristes, and the brotherhood of the Écoles Chrétiennes. The missionary societies proved to be a focus of reactionary intrigue, which the First Empire was powerful enough to crush. They were accordingly suppressed in 1809, but at the same time an imperial decree placed under the fostering care of Madame Lætitia the women who devoted themselves to works of charity and mercy. Annual appropriations for their support were regularly made, and, thus favored, they prospered amazingly. The religious activity of the people seemed to flow in this channel with redoubled force from its long retention, and in the eight years from 1807 to 1815 there were no less than 1261 congregations authorized—an average of 157 per annum. At the same time the state refused to recognize the right of any person to abstract himself irrevocably from society. The law wisely prohibited engagements for life in any service, and this was held applicable to the religious congregations, in which, by the decree of 1809, the period of engagement was limited to five years.1595

In spite of the favor shown to the charitable associations, the prejudice against the monastic system was still so strong that the Restoration, with all its reactionary tendencies, did not dare to run counter to the convictions of the people. The law of 1809 forbidding male congregations was never repealed, and the most that the Bourbons ventured openly to do was to authorize a few by special decree, such as the Lazaristes, the Missions Etrangères, &c. Meanwhile the female congregations continued to increase; a general law was enacted in May, 1825, providing for their authorization under definite provisions, and between 1815 and 1830, 643 new ones were officially recognized. The efforts made from 1825 to 1827, under Charles X., to introduce the Jesuits and other male orders gave rise to lively agitation, and the elections of 1827 settled the question definitely in the negative.1596 The Revolution of 1830 put an end for the time to all hope of reëstablishing the monastic system in France, and a law in 1834 specially affirmed the application of Art. 291 of the Penal Code, directed against unauthorized associations, to those for religious purposes. The constitutional government of Louis Philippe showed itself persistently hostile to monachism. It is true that in 1840 Lacordaire succeeded in obtaining sufferance for his order of Dominicans, but this was exceptional; and even towards the female orders the policy of the monarchy was repressive. During the eighteen years of its existence, but fourteen authorizations for founding new congregations were granted, while the Jesuits, who had ventured to enter the kingdom without permission, were formally expelled in 1845 after a severe parliamentary struggle. The Second Republic was more liberal, and the Second Empire ostentatiously sought the alliance of the church. The Loi Falloux, in 1850, seemed to recognize the existence of male orders, and advantage was immediately taken of a vague phrase to assume their legality. At length, in 1852, a law was passed regulating, by a general form, the incorporation of all religious societies, and under this their growth was amazingly rapid—none the less so, perhaps, because they were not even required by the authorities to observe the law and go through the formality of procuring authorizations. In 1827 there were but 20,943 female devotees, while the number of males under conventual vows was too insignificant for computation,1597 and under the monarchy of July the growth was exceedingly small. In 1861 these had increased to 17,776 males and 90,343 females, and in 1877 to 22,207 males and 127,000 females.

In Belgium the figures are equally startling. In 1856 that little kingdom had 2383 monks and 12,247 nuns—a total of 14,630—an enormous proportion in so small a population, enabling the clergy, as has more than once been seen, almost to control the elections.

To comprehend the full significance of these figures, they may be compared with the undisturbed monasticism of an old Catholic state such as Austria. That empire, in 1859, had but 10,449 monks and 6463 nuns, or 16,912 in all. For the Catholic population alone of Austria, this gives one to every 1579 inhabitants, while, about the same period in France the proportion was one to every 346 souls, and in Belgium, one to every 308.

The Company of Jesus furnishes an equally instructive illustration of the flourishing condition and rapid growth of monachism despite the shackles apparently imposed on it by modern institutions. The Jesuits, formally reëstablished in 1814 by Pius VII. and gradually working an entrance into one kingdom after another, have increased with a rapidity which is exceedingly significant.

Thus in1834the Company numbered but2684,

”1844”4133,

”1854”5510,

”1864”7734,

and a still later computation gives them 7949 members, divided into 3389 priests, 2323 brother coadjutors, and 2237 novices—the large proportion of the latter indicating how great is the prospective increase. In France alone their number had grown from 200 in 1845 to 1085 in 1865, and to 1509 in 1877.

In this enormous spread of monachism, it is interesting to observe the change which has occurred from mediæval sensual indulgence and mystic asceticism to modern utilitarianism. Thus in France, by the census of 1861, there were, out of 17,776 men bound by vows,

Devoted to education,12,845,

Distribution of charity and care of the sick,389,

In charge of houses of refuge and farm schools,496,

Devoted to religious contemplation,4,046,

while of 90,343 women, there were

Devoted to education,58,883,

Distribution of charity and care of the sick,20,292,

In charge of houses of refuge and farm schools,3,073,

Devoted to religious contemplation,8,095.

The large proportion of almoners and hospital nurses among the women is easily explicable by what has already been stated as to the favor shown by successive governments to the Sisters of Charity, and the good which is effected by these organizations cannot easily be overrated. Who is there who can fail to do justice to these humble Christians, when once he has had the good fortune to witness their self-devotion and the benefits arising from their tireless ministrations, made doubly valuable by system and special training? In our own land, torn by sudden and gigantic civil war, when the sick and wounded had accumulated almost beyond the possibility of care, who that then noted the blessed agency of those angels of the hospital, would willingly pause to coldly criticise the institutions of which they are the most perfect development? In a Catholic country like France, the opportunities for good works are of course vastly greater, for almost every benevolent institution naturally seeks the aid of the church, and that aid is willingly given, not only from charitable motives, but also, we may assume, on account of the enormous influence thence accruing among the masses of the population who are the beneficiaries, and this is especially felt in the manufacturing centres and amid the periodical crises attendant upon modern financial and industrial development. The crèches where babies are kept while their mothers are at the factory are presided over by nuns; the distribution of bread and soup at the Bureaux de Bienfaisance is made by nuns; the neglected and wretched little children who are sent to the infant schools are washed and tended by nuns;1598 and, in fact, whatever tender, or humane, or charitable influence reaches the prolétaire in his grieving and despairing wretchedness, almost necessarily comes to him through some channel connected with a religious order.

A much more complex question, however, is presented by the numbers and the activity of the orders devoted to education. While giving due weight to the purely benevolent impulses which lead so many to undertake the task of training the young, and while freely acknowledging the vast amount of good arising from the education, in so many cases gratuitous, of those who might otherwise remain in the darkness of ignorance, the inquirer cannot shut his eyes to other considerations. The eagerness with which the church seeks to acquire for itself the direction of the docile mind of childhood shows how fully it is alive to the importance of this most fruitful source of influence. Previous to 1849, the educational system of France was, nominally at least, in the hands of the State, though even then the church had made large inroads upon its province. The leading instrumentality in this was the congregation of the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes, founded in 1680 by the Abbé de la Salle, for the gratuitous instruction of the poor, and Frère Philippe, the General of the Order, testified in 1849 before a parliamentary committee that the body then consisted of 3300 members with 200,000 children under their care. The spread of communism among the people, as manifested in the overthrow of the monarchy, alarmed the conservatives, and one of the first acts of the Republic under Louis Napoleon was to encourage by the Loi Falloux the efforts of the church to extend its operations. How successful was the attempt is shown by a comparison of the statistics of twenty years.

1843.1863.

Religious of both sexes engaged in primary teaching,16,95846,840

Number of primary schools under their direction,7,59017,206

Number of scholars in these schools,706,9171,610,674

Children in salles d’asile, under sisterhoods,301,536

By 1861, in the next grade of schools, the religious orders had 55,151 male pupils, while those in the government institutions of similar class numbered only 63,291. In 1865 the whole number of children between the ages of 7 and 12 in France was 4,018,427; while, two years previous, out of 2,265,576 boys attending school, 443,732 were in institutions conducted by the religious orders, and of 2,070,612 girls, no less than 1,166,942, or more than half, were under the care of sisterhoods.

This enormous and rapidly increasing proportion shows how largely the coming generation is trained under monkish influences, and justifies the efforts made by the Ferry ministry, after the overthrow of the reactionary government of MacMahon, to check the growth of these schools. The religious orders are bound to a peculiar obedience to the Holy See; all other bonds, whether of family or of country, are as nothing in comparison. The monk who conscientiously regards his vows cannot be a citizen, or be fitted to train future citizens. The congregation, for instance, of the Frères de la Saintè-Croix is largely engaged in educating and furnishing teachers; and among the secret statutes of the order is one forbidding its members to admit the existence of any opinion, whether in politics, theology, or religion, contrary to the opinion of Rome.1599 What are the political opinions of Rome may readily be found in the Syllabus of 1864, among its anathemas directed against freedom of thought and of the press, against any liberty which threatens to abridge the temporal power of the hierarchy or to limit its absolute authority, and indeed against the simplest toleration in the matter of religious belief. That these are in fact the principles which govern education in clerical schools was shown during the debates on the Ferry laws in 1879, by M. Ferry, who had, after some difficulty, procured copies of text-books used in them, and who quoted from them passages praising feudal rights and reviling the Revolution, justifying the Inquisition and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, denouncing civil marriage as concubinage, alluding to religious toleration as a temporary necessity, and inculcating the doctrine of the submission of the state to the church. It needs no argument to show that institutions which teach such principles as these are not fit to be trusted with the training of those who are to constitute a self-governing Republic.

Nor was this the only evil arising from the successful efforts made by the church through its monastic legions to control the education of France. The enormous demand for recruits to fill the rapidly growing ranks of its army of teachers exceeded its capacity to provide suitable material, whether as regards mental or moral training. In its desire to favor the growth of clerical schools, the Second Empire waived in favor of the religious orders the rigorous examinations required of the laity as a condition precedent to employment as teachers. The supervision of the state being thus withdrawn, discretion was left with those whose unworldly duties can scarcely be supposed to render them competent judges, and that discretion has been necessarily much abused. It is related by Mdlle. Daubié, herself an instructress of high reputation, that when she was eight years old she was applied to, by a woman employed in tending cows, to teach her the catechism, and within a year she was surprised to find her whilom pupil suddenly reappear as a sister, duly authorized to teach. It is computed that, among the male religious employed in teaching, not more than one in ten has the brevet, which would be indispensable to them if they were laymen; while, of the sisters engaged in instruction, out of 8000 superiors of institutions, only about 1000 are brevetées, and, of their assistants, not more than one per cent. are so qualified.

If the mental qualifications of these educators were thus disregarded, their moral characters were equally relieved from proper scrutiny; and this, combined with the temptations inseparable from the celibate system, has not infrequently led to the most shocking results. The enormous influence of the ecclesiastical establishment, working upon the bureaus of the government, the officials of justice, and the press, was usually sufficient to prevent much public scandal under Louis Napoleon and Marshal MacMahon; but a list of the prosecutions reported in the newspapers from 1861 to April, 1879, collected by Dr. Wahu,1600 shows about fifty cases in which the male teachers had abused the children under their charge, many of these cases being of appalling turpitude. As eleven of these occurred during the first three months of 1879, it may reasonably be concluded that equal freedom on the part of the public prosecutors and the press during the previous eighteen years would have produced a vastly larger number of convictions; and not the least deplorable feature of the matter is that in more than one case the culprit had been previously transferred several times from one institution to another, giving grounds for the assumption that the authorities were cognizant of his wickedness, and preferred to allow him to spread contagion throughout different communities rather than incur the scandal of punishing him.

As illustrative of two phases of the subject, I may briefly refer to two cases from among a number which were brought to light in 1861, as the result of the efforts of a writer bold enough to brave the anger of the church, and who found a journal with the hardihood to second his efforts. One of these occurred at Saintes, in a school under the care of the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. Out of 300 boys, one hundred had been the victims of the monsters to whom they had been confided, and who enjoyed with a Satanic zest the corruption which they spread through so many households. The evil became rumored abroad, but no one dared to attack the members of so powerful an order, until an old soldier who held the post of gendarme found the evil in his family. Unused to prudence, he complained. The local board of supervision, afraid of compromising the “interests of religion,” endeavored to hush up the affair, but the prefect, fortunately, was of different temper, and took up the matter energetically. The guilty brethren disappeared, and their superior professed to know nothing about them, while the gendarme was soon afterwards dismissed from his post, and the matter passed over, leaving nothing behind it but a hundred ruined youths and corrupted families. The other case is that of Frère Cléonique at Jonsac, whose offences were too fully proved for denial, and whose counsel on his trial could only urge in palliation that the responsibility rested, not on his client, but on the system which employed such creatures and exposed them to temptations beyond their strength—“Gentlemen,” said he, “look at my client. What is he, after all? A clown, a goîtreux, almost a crétin; surely less than a man! He was herding flocks, when they undertook to persuade him that he had a call. A black gown was thrown on his shoulders, and, behold him in charge of a school! Such a nature could only attempt that career through pride and sloth. There he is, utterly untrained, ignorant of everything in life, and yet charged with teaching our children how to live!... Do you wonder that one day the beast awoke in that soul, into which nothing lofty had been instilled?... There he is before you, but who is really to blame; who is the criminal? Assuredly not this poor wretch, involved in the blindest ignorance, whom they drew from his obscurity, and to whom they taught nothing before confiding to him the grave responsibility of training youth.” It is satisfactory to add that this ingenious plea was unsuccessful, and that the brute was sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor—but he had been seven years at Jonsac, and his victims counted by the hundred.1601

It was during these prosecutions, in 1861, that Frère Philippe, the General of the “Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes,” was stimulated to issue a secret circular, in which, after alluding to two previous ones of the same nature sent out in 1854 and 1860, he said that the time had come to speak plainly about the “horrible disease which devours the Order,” and which, under the investigations then in progress, was leading one brother after another to prison, and was sowing scandal broadcast. But the prosecutions died away, and matters soon resumed their usual course. It is but two or three years since that the Bien-Public, in comparing the morality of the lay schools with those in charge of the church, was able to produce these statistics:—

In 10,000 lay schools,5.44crimesand22.29offences (delits).

In 10,000 church schools,65.10crimesand90.50offences (delits).

Nor are these shocking cases confined to France. In 1873 a similar scandal was suddenly brought to light in the great Barnabite college at Monza, in Lombardy, where there were more than 300 students, many of whom were found to have been debauched by their instructors. The institution was promptly closed by the authorities, but the chief criminals, Father Stanislas Cereza, the principal, and Father Villa, one of his assistants, escaped, having prudently disappeared at the first rumors of the development.

It was, however, political considerations rather than moral ones which led the French cabinet, shortly after the fall of MacMahon had destroyed the alliance between church and state, to commence an attack on the clerical schools. The measure proposed in what were known as the Ferry laws was certainly not a sweeping one, for the seventh article, on which the struggle took place, simply provided that “no man can be allowed to direct an establishment of public or private teaching, of whatever order this establishment may be, if he belongs to a non-authorized religious congregation;” and an official list of the non-authorized congregations showed them to consist merely of 1502 Jesuits, 327 Dominicans, 222 Marists, 230 Benedictines, 193 Eudists, 65 Basilians, 22 Barnabites, 14 Oratorians, 91 members of the Congregation of St. Bertin, and 105 of the Congregation of the Sacré Cœur de Jésus. The measure, in fact, was aimed rather at the Jesuits than at the others; but clerical influence was as yet too strong, and after a discussion, which lasted for about nine months, this section of the law was rejected by the Senate. Jules Ferry accepted the defeat, but at once announced that the existing statutes against the Jesuits and other unauthorized orders would be enforced—a declaration which received the approval of the Chamber of Deputies. Within a fortnight, on March 31st, 1880, accordingly, two decrees were issued. The first of these expelled the order of the Jesuits from France, giving them until June 30th to dissolve, and allowing a further delay until August 30th for the closing of their schools and colleges, in order not to inconvenience the students by dispersing them before the usual period of vacation. The other decree called upon all non-authorized congregations within three months to take the necessary steps to obtain the verification and ratification of their statutes and regulations, and the legal recognition of their establishments, and promising that when this was done provisions for the male congregations should be made by special acts, while those for female communities should be by either special acts or by simple decrees. The enforcement of the existing laws was threatened against all which should neglect within the given period to apply for authorization with all the prescribed details. Now, the laws required that the superiors of all orders should be residents of France, and that all congregations should submit in spiritual matters to the jurisdiction of the episcopal ordinaries, while, in fact, the more important orders have foreign superiors and are independent of episcopal jurisdiction. It was distasteful in the last degree to submit to this, and the indisposition to do so was strengthened by the prospect that each congregation would come before the Chambers as the subject of a special debate, in which their regulations would be discussed, with very slender prospect of ultimately obtaining the desired permission, since a special act would confer on them the right to hold real-estate—a right which many members, even of the Catholic Right, were not prepared to grant them.

The result of the first decree was that at the dates appointed the Jesuit establishments and colleges were closed, with but a faint show of passive resistance; but, as the members were not personally exiled, a large portion of them remained, and their colleges were continued by placing over them as nominal principals influential laymen under their control.

The second decree struck at 5917 members of unauthorized congregations. Its execution was postponed in hopes that the bodies thus threatened would endeavor to comply with the law, but the only concession they were willing to make was by putting forth a declaration containing a public act of submission to the constitution and a resolution to take no part whatever in public or political matters. At last, in November, 1880, the government found itself obliged to employ force, and the establishments were closed by the police, aided where necessary by the military. A general system of passive resistance had been organized; doors had to be violently broken open, and the inmates carried out through jeering or sympathizing crowds. The popular feeling, in fact, had been worked upon as far as possible, and at some places, as at Lyons, civil conflict seemed for a moment to be imminent, while at Turquoing (Nord) even blood was shed; but on the whole the crisis passed away with much less disturbance than had been anticipated. Since then the growing strength of republicanism throughout France, unimpeded by clerical and reactionary efforts, shows how much slighter a hold the religious orders had on the popular mind than had been supposed, and how mistaken had been Napoleon III. in regarding an alliance with the church as a necessity for the preservation of his dynasty. In fact, there has been no banishment of individuals nor expropriation of property. Though the unauthorized congregations have been dissolved, in accordance with laws which date back to the Ancien Régime, the members retain their property, enjoy all the rights of citizenship, and can perform Mass in the churches near their convents—indeed, the aristocracy, which naturally affiliates with them, has rather made a point of offering them ostentatious hospitality.

The effort to separate education from clericalism still continues. The execution of the decrees was accompanied by the adoption of laws establishing government colleges for women and providing free primary education, and, March 24th, 1882, there was passed an act rendering education compulsory. For nearly nine months there had been hot debate between the Deputies and the Senators over an amendment of Jules Simon’s, that instruction should be given in the public schools on the duties of the pupils “towards God and towards their country,” but the elections of January, 1882, deprived the clericals of their power, the Senate receded from the amendment, and the education provided for by the act is to be purely secular.

It may safely be assumed that France will not abandon the institutions thus established to attacks by the priesthood such as the Belgian clergy habitually make upon the public schools of that kingdom. In a parliamentary debate, February 22, 1881, on this subject, it was stated, without contradiction, that the curés were in the habit of refusing communion not only to the children who attend these schools, but also to their parents and grandparents, uncles, and aunts—in fact, admission to communion under the circumstances is the exception and refusal is the rule. Even threats are made to withhold baptism from future infants, the sacrament is denied to dying parents, and wives are urged to withdraw from all sexual relations with their husbands. When spiritual weapons are insufficient, more carnal means are employed by efforts to ruin the business of the disobedient by a system of “Boycotting,” which is sometimes successful; and the enthusiastic curé of Virginal admitted that he had pronounced it to be a less offence to commit murder than to vote for a Liberal, because Liberalism is heresy.1602 When such is the spirit of the church at the present day, French republicanism may be pardoned for desiring to limit its control over popular education.

It only remains for us to consider what is the present effect of celibacy on the moral condition of the church, and whether it has succeeded, after fifteen centuries of fruitless effort, in at last obtaining a priesthood whose chastity is more than nominal. At the commencement of the struggle, the great apostle of asceticism, St. Jerome, calmed the fears of those who dreaded a diminution of population from the spread of vows of continence, by assuring them that few would be found to persevere to the end in a task so difficult as the maintenance of virginity.1603 Has, then, human nature changed during the interval, and has the church been justified in its assertion at the council of Trent that God would not withhold the gift of chastity from those who rightly seek it, or permit us to be tempted beyond our strength?1604 It is certainly not so easy to answer this question now, as we have seen it in former ages, when men were more plain-spoken and less decent, when offences against morality were committed more openly, and when they were denounced both by the church and its enemies with a distinctness of utterance unfit for modern ears. Yet it is not impossible to find some evidence bearing on the question which may enable the impartial inquirer to arrive at a conclusion.

The church is unquestionably violating the precept “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” when, in its reliance that the gift of chastity will accompany ordination, it confers the subdiaconate at the age of 22 and the priesthood at 251605—or even earlier by special dispensation—and then turns loose young men, at the age when the passions are the strongest, trained in the seminary and unused to female companionship, to occupy a position in which they are brought into the closest and most dangerous relations with women who regard them as beings gifted with supernatural powers and holding in their hands the keys of heaven and hell. Whatever may have been the ardor with which the vows were taken, the youth thus exposed to temptations hitherto unknown, finds his virtue rudely assailed when in the confessional female lips repeat to him the story of sins and transgressions, and he recognizes in himself instincts and passions which are only the stronger by reason of their whilom repression. That a youthful spiritual director, before whom are thrown down all the barriers with which the prudent reserve of society surrounds the social intercourse of the sexes, should too often find that he has over-estimated his self-control, is more than probable.

This, of course, is merely a priori reasoning, and of itself proves nothing, except the extreme imprudence of a system which applies fire to straw and assumes that combustion will not follow. Doubtless there are cases in which the assumption is justified by the result—whole countries, indeed, where scandals are few. In Ireland, for instance, we rarely hear of immoral priests, though such cases would be relentlessly exposed by the interests adverse to Catholicism, and the proverbial chastity of the Irish women may be both a cause and a consequence of this. In the United States, also, troubles of the kind only come occasionally to public view; but here, again, the church is surrounded by antagonistic churches, the laborers are few and hardly worked, and the position is not one to attract those who might seek a life of sloth and indulgence. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that the extreme care with which the church avoids scandal renders it impossible for one not within the pale to ascertain what may really be the relations between ecclesiastics and the female servants whom, as we shall see, they are permitted to keep in their houses.

In lands where Catholicism is dominant I fear that there can be little doubt as to this, although Ernest Renan, a witness of unquestionable impartiality, whose clerical training gave him every opportunity of observation, declares emphatically that he has known no priests but good priests, and that he has never seen even the shadow of a scandal.1606 In spite of the Nicæan canon, on which the rule of celibacy has virtually rested, the church, after a struggle of more than a thousand years, was forced to admit the “subintroducta mulier” as an inmate of the priest’s domicile. The order of Nature on this point refused so obstinately to be set aside, that the Council of Trent finally recognized women as a necessary evil, and only sought to regulate the necessity by forbidding those in holy orders from keeping in their houses or maintaining any relations with concubines or women liable to suspicion.1607 It is true that the severe virtue of St. Charles Borromeo refused to grant to a septuagenary priest a license for more than a year for the residence of a sister equally aged, and forced him to apply annually for its renewal; it is also true that the council of Rome, in 1725, allowed the residence of women only within the first and second degrees of kindred;1608 but in modern times the Tridentine canon has been interpreted as allowing the residence of female servants or house-keepers, in view of the hardship of doing without domestics and the expense of employing men. In order to meet the Tridentine caution to avoid suspicion, efforts have sometimes been made to define a minimum “canonical” age for these women, varying from thirty to fifty years, but usually placed at forty—a palliative which, as might be expected, accomplishes little, even when, as is not always the case, the rule is observed more scrupulously than by the device of dividing the canonical age and keeping two girls of twenty.1609

Few priests, it may be assumed, have the self-denial to live without this female companionship, which is permitted by the church as a matter of course. Indeed, the census-paper officially filled in at the Vatican and returned in January, 1882, stated the population of the palace to be 500, of which one-third were women. While, of course, it does not follow that the relations between these women and the grave dignitaries of the papal court may not be perfectly virtuous, still, considering the age at which ordination is permitted, it would be expecting too much of human nature to believe that, in at least a large number of cases among parish priests, the companionship is not as fertile of sin as we have seen it to be in every previous age since the ecclesiastic has been deprived of the natural institution of marriage. The “niece” or other female inmate of the parsonage throughout Catholic Europe still excites the smile of the heretic traveller, and is looked upon as a matter of course by the parishioner, while the prelates, content if open scandal be avoided, affect to regard the arrangement as harmless, knowing that it serves as a preventive of more flagrant and more public trouble, though the fact that this companionship is made the subject of discussion and regulation at virtually every council or synod or episcopal convention held by the church shows that privately it is recognized as a necessary evil at best. Yet the old sophistry is not forgotten, which proves that such sin is less than the infraction of ecclesiastical laws. In a tract in favor of celibacy, published at Warsaw in 1801, with the extravagant laudation of the authorities, argument is gravely made that as priestly marriage is incestuous, such adultery is vastly worse than simple licentiousness, the latter being only a lapse of the flesh, while marriage would be schism and arrogant disobedience, involving sin of a far deeper dye.1610

It would, of course, be vain to expect, at the present day, from the rulers of the church, the outspoken candor of the Middle Ages, when evils were denounced openly and in the coarsest terms. In those days councils could speak, because none but those connected with the church were likely to be cognizant of their proceedings; while, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the immorality of ecclesiastics was so notorious that no harm could arise from admitting it in the efforts made for its correction. In modern times, however, when an external veil of decency is to be maintained before the eyes of antagonistic critics, when scandal is, of all things, to be avoided, and when the proceedings of ecclesiastical bodies are carefully revised at Rome, before they are allowed to become public, with the consciousness that they may be spread by the press before a world of hostile mockers, ready to jeer at the woes of the church, only the most guarded allusions can be made to such subjects, and these only when the case is urgent. When, therefore, we see that almost every council held in modern times has deemed it necessary to insist on the supreme importance of preserving chastity—lying, swearing, stealing, and other sins not being even alluded to; when the caution against undue familiarity with women, even devotees, is constantly urged; and when the relations between the priest and his servant are frequently indicated by directions that he must not admit her to companionship at the table, or on walks and journeys, and especially not in visiting fairs and merrymakings, it would be difficult not to recognize under this guarded phraseology an admission of the actual relationship existing between the good pastors and their female inmates, and a friendly warning, si non caste saltem caute.1611

It is not often that we can obtain an inside view of these matters, especially from a source that is at once well informed and not hostile, but such a view, confirming the worst suspicions, is afforded by an indignant remonstrance addressed, in 1832, to Monseigneur Sterckx, Archbishop of Mechlin, by the Abbé Helsen, who for twenty-five years had been a popular preacher in Brussels.1612 The abbé calls upon his prelate to enforce the Tridentine canon by banishing the women who are universally inmates of the houses of priests, and thus put a stop to the sin and the scandal which destroy the influence of the church and spread immorality among the faithful. Even the bishops and dignitaries of the church are not spared, and the archbishop himself is summoned to dismiss the “Petronilla” who had accompanied him from the curacy of Bouchout to the cathedral of Antwerp, and from Antwerp to the metropolitan seat of Mechlin.1613 Throughout this plain-spoken epistle the author assumes as a matter of course not only that the relations between the clergy and their servants are guilty, but that they are so recognized by every one—so notorious, indeed, as to need no proof—and, as a natural consequence, he regards the priesthood as a source of infection destructive to public morals. The cure is to be found in putting a stop to these irregular unions—“If women were forever banished from the houses of ecclesiastics vowed to celibacy, I think we should not see so great a number of prostitutes who ply their trade at night in our great cities, nor so many illegitimate children who curse their destiny as they multiply more and more around us. We ridicule the Seraglio of the Grand Turk and the polygamy of the Moslem, but they too, on their side, ridicule the infinite number of strumpets with whom Christian Europe is deluged, and the custom of keeping as many concubines as can be afforded. Whence comes to us this shameful trade, so hurtful to society, which is found under our religion more than under any other? We dare not doubt that it is the result of our own misconduct; we dare not accuse only the heretics and the philosophers of modern times; no, no! the most poisonous spring is in us, among us, with us, and it will not dry up without us. Let us blush to our eye-balls; let us hide ourselves from public sight! Oh for the times and the virtues of the primitive church! Why come ye not again?”1614 That this sort of scarcely veiled concubinage is, in fact, a fruitful source of prostitution can scarcely be doubted if, as Helsen asserts, the ordinary custom is, when one of these priest’s servants becomes pregnant and cannot be saved by a prudent absence, to dismiss her and take another, perhaps younger and more attractive; and that this may occur repeatedly without the ecclesiastic being subjected to any special annoyance or supervision—unless, indeed, he is so ill-advised as to take pity on the unfortunate girl and refuse to send her away. In that case he becomes a public concubinarian, liable to the canonical penalties, with which he is sometimes disciplined. As Helsen indignantly exclaims, “Would the Mahometans tolerate such infamy in their fakirs and dervishes? The Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindus in their bonzes? The pagans in their Vestals? Our ancestors in their Druids? Even the Jews and Protestants have blushed for it, since they advise their Rabbis and ministers to marry rather than thus to contaminate themselves.”1615 Helsen does not fail to allude to the public familiarity of these servants with their employers—the familiarity condemned in almost the same words by many of the councils cited above—and it would seem the extreme of Pyrrhonism to doubt that almost universal concubinage is tolerated, even where on the surface there are no public scandals to attract the attention of the malicious.

Testimony of the same nature exists as to Italy, where the upheaval of the last quarter of a century has created discussion and brought forth statements of facts and opinions which reveal to some extent the internal condition of the church. That immorality should be prevalent would seem to be inevitable, if only from the overgrown number of the clergy, which has been fostered by the ambition of the church. In Rome itself, by the census of July 1st, 1867, there were no less than 7404 ecclesiastics of both sexes, in a population of 215,573, or one to every 29 inhabitants of all ages. In the Pontifical States, prior to their absorption by the Kingdom of Italy, the proportion was one to every 55 of the population. In Northern Italy, embracing the Pontificate, the Duchies, Lombardo-Venetia and Piedmont, there was one to every 140; while in the whole of Italy, exclusive of the Pontificate, in 24,231,860 souls there were 174,001 ecclesiastics, showing a proportion of one to 239. These numbers are so wholly beyond the spiritual needs of the people that it is evident that an ecclesiastical career must be sought by thousands who have no vocation for a life of abstinence and self-denial; while even among those who are induced in the fervor of youth to bind themselves by the irrevocable vow of chastity, there must be other thousands who find too late that they have over-estimated their strength. That passions thus denied their appropriate relief in the institution of marriage should degenerate often into brutal license, is too natural to excite special wonder.1616

It would be difficult to restrain the appetites of so vast a body as this even with the most determined vigilance on the part of prelates and in the presence of the sternest popular feeling, but both of these elements of repression may safely be assumed to be lacking. The scandal of the Countess Lambertini, whose suit for a share of the estate of her father, Cardinal Antonelli, has for ten years been before the Roman courts, would seem to show that even the virtues of Pius IX. were powerless to eradicate the license which has been traditional in the papal court; and when a theological manual, which is still largely used as a text-book in Catholic seminaries, coolly states that in Italy lust is not regarded as disgraceful,1617 though we may hope that the standard of morality has improved since it was written, yet we cannot expect to find in the people of which such a statement could be made, the virtue that would hold to strict account a priesthood whose example has been one of the efficient means of its degradation. That there is no restraining influence would in fact appear from the consensus of opinion of all who have had an opportunity of forming a judgment.

An address purporting to emanate from sixteen bishops to Cardinal Catarini, begging for an enlargement of the questions to be discussed in the Vatican Council, assumes the rule of celibacy to be the cause, not only of heresy and schism, but of scandal to the people and of disgrace to the church. It speaks of the disgusting trials which are perpetually coming before the tribunals, making the priestly garb a source of shame to its wearers, and leading the people to regard them, not as the flower of the soldiers of Christ, but as a colony sprung from Sodom.1618 The Archbishop of Tarento, Giuseppe Capecelatro, has had no scruple in urging the abrogation of the canon in order to reduce the immense number of bastards whose existence disgraces the church.1619 In a similar mood, D. Marco Petronio, a priest of Pirano, in Istria, declares that the boasted chastity of the priesthood has filled the church with demons in place of angels, who lead their flocks to ruin by their acts and example,1620 and Panzini describes the church as a brothel filled with men ruined by the attempt to deprive them of marriage. When the latter, indeed, was on his trial before the Inquisition, he asserted that in consequence of the canon, there were daily committed in Rome itself more than twenty thousand mortal sins, and the advocate of the Holy Office, D. Giuseppe Cipriani, contented himself with quietly responding, “Perhaps not so many.”1621 We may therefore feel confident that there is no exaggeration in the remarks of the Rev. William Chauncy Langdon, who had ample opportunities of observation during his long residence in Italy as agent of the American Episcopal Church—“I learned to regard a priest, who had lived all his mature life, openly and faithfully with a woman to whom he had not of course been married; by whom he had children now grown up, and for all of whom he was faithfully providing—with a relative respect as one who had greatly risen above the morality of his church, and of the society around him, and whose life really might be considered, on the dark moral background behind him, a source of relative light.”1622

We have here an example of the tolerated concubinage which Helsen describes as universal under the interpretation put upon the Tridentine canons. It would seem that it ought to be in some degree a safeguard against worse offences and more public scandals, as a kind of substitute for marriage; but unlawful indulgence weakens the power of resistance to temptation and hardens the conscience to sin. In spite, therefore, of this practical relaxation of the canons, we see the old troubles of the relations between spiritual directors and their fair penitents continue to vex the pious. As we have seen with the less delicate matter of the female companions of the clergy, the councils of modern times are not likely to be outspoken with regard to such a subject, but the frequency with which they reiterate commands that the confessions of women shall not be heard, save in case of infirmity, except in church; that when heard elsewhere it shall always be with open doors, and that in church the confessional shall be in a spot publicly visible, with a grating between the confessor and his penitent; that before and after sunset the lamps shall always be lighted, with other similar precautions, shows that the risk is fully recognized and requires constant watchfulness.1623 Helsen, in fact, alludes to the scandals of the confessional as a cause of its avoidance by the faithful and as contributing powerfully to the growth of religious indifference;1624 and that these scandals exist is not a mere matter of conjecture or inference. If it were so, there would be no need for reiterating the prohibitions against the absolution by confessors of their fair partners in guilt, which is still occasionally found to be necessary by modern councils;1625 nor would Pius IX. in 1866 have felt himself obliged to declare that the power granted to bishops to absolve in cases reserved to the Pope shall not in future extend to offences reserved for papal absolution by Benedict XIV.’s Bull “Sacramentum Pœnitentiæ.” In fact, the crime of “solicitation” must have become notoriously frequent before the Congregation of the Inquisition of Rome could have felt impelled, in 1867, to put forth an Instruction addressed to all archbishops, bishops, and ordinaries, complaining that the constitutions on the subject did not receive proper attention, and that in some places abuses had crept in, both as to requiring penitents to denounce guilty confessors, and as to the punishing of confessors guilty of solicitation. It therefore urged the officials everywhere to greater vigor in investigating such offences and gave a summary of the practice of the Inquisition in regard to these matters, supervision over which, it will be remembered, was confided to the Holy Office by the Bulls of Pius IV. and Gregory XVI. From this it appears that when such a denunciation is received, it is the custom of the Inquisition to order the accused to be watched, and not to prosecute him unless he is the subject of three separate accusations. When this number has been reached, a special court is convened whose business it is to examine whether there may not be some special enmity on the part of the accusers. Failing this, the accused is then examined under oath, care being taken not to reveal the names of the accusers nor to violate the seal of the confessional. If the transgressor confesses or is convicted, he is deprived forever of the faculty of hearing confessions and must abjure the heresy implied in his crime; but the severer punishments decreed by Gregory XV. of degradation from holy orders and delivery to the secular arm are not to be inflicted. Those who voluntarily confess without being denounced, even though they may subsequently be denounced, are allowed to escape with a suitable penance and are ordered merely not to hear subsequently the confessions of those whom they have solicited; confession after denunciation, but before trial, also diminishes the penalty. The utmost secrecy is enjoined on all concerned, who are to be sworn to silence, and so great a stress is laid on this that even priests are required to take the oath on the Gospels. The accuser is not to be asked whether she consented to the solicitation, and if she voluntarily makes such a statement it is not to be entered in the proceedings of the case. After the trial is finished, moreover, the whole is to be consigned to oblivion.1626 In view of this nervous anxiety for secrecy, and the tenderness manifested throughout to the offender, it is surely not uncharitable to conclude that scandal is more feared than sin in these matters.

Possibly the abuses of the confessional may be less frequent now than they were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet it is evident that they are still quite prevalent enough to require a much more efficient system of repression than they are at all likely to receive. It is true that the questions put to the penitent by the confessor are divested of the extremity of brutal coarseness prescribed by Bishop Burckhardt, but they are still sufficiently suggestive to be revolting to the pure-minded, and dangerous in no small degree to those who are likely to lapse.1627

What in reality is the extent of these abuses can only be a subject of conjecture. Their very nature causes them to be scrupulously concealed not only by the principals, but by those who may incidentally find themselves wronged, and the church itself exerts all its influence to shield the guilty and suppress the scandal. How powerfully and how unscrupulously its influence is exerted to this end may be judged from a few examples. In 1817, at Availles, in France, the sacristan complained to the mayor that his daughter was received every night by the curé, to the scandal of the people. The mayor thus invited entered the priest’s house suddenly one night and found the girl in dishabille, hidden in a corner. He drew up an official statement of the facts and forwarded it to the authorities, and the response to this was his summary dismissal from office on the ground of having violated the domicil of the curé and increased the scandal.1628 More recent than this is the notorious case of the Abbé Mingrat, who while curé of Saint-Opre, near Grenoble, got into trouble by seducing one of his penitents, but was saved from prosecution and transferred to Saint-Quentin. Here he established relations with a devout young married woman, which ended in his cutting her in pieces with his pocket-knife and throwing the fragments into the river Isère. Even yet no action would have been taken had not the mayor of the place insisted, but Mingrat was enabled to escape to Savoy, where he was provided for as a persecuted saint.1629 Similarly, in 1877, the Abbé Debra, condemned at Liège in default, for no less than thirty-two offences, was, after proper seclusion in a convent, given a parish in Luxembourg by the Bishop of Namur.1630 In the case of the Abbé Mallet, which occurred in 1861, the church was unable to save the culprit from punishment, but did what it could to conceal his crimes from the faithful. As a canon of Cambray, he seduced three young Jewish girls and procured their confinement in convents under pretext of laboring for their conversion. One of his victims lost her reason in consequence of her sufferings, and the court of Douay condemned him to six years at hard labor—a sentence which was announced by an orthodox journal thus—“M. le chanoine Mallet de Cambrai, accusé de détournement de mineurs pour cause de prosélytisme religieux a été condamné à six ans de reclusion”—where the skilful use of the masculine “mineurs” and the characterization of his offence as religious proselytism elevate the worst of criminals into a martyr for the faith.1631 It is quite within the bounds of probability that, as such a martyr, he may, since the expiration of his sentence, have been enjoying, in some cure of souls, the opportunity of repeating his missionary experiments.

It is evident from these various causes that the criminal records can give only the barest suggestion as to the extent of crimes thus committed in secret by a class shielded by influences so powerful. The records of the ministère de la justice, moreover, are not in France open to the public, and the only mode of obtaining even an approximate idea of the number of prosecutions in these cases is to gather them from the journals in which they chance to appear as items of news. An attempt to effect this has been made by Dr. Wahu, and though, from the nature of the case, necessarily imperfect, it affords some interesting and suggestive statistics. His list extends from the beginning of 1861 to April, 1879, and is thus tabulated:—

18613cases.

18622”

18631”

18641”

18662”

18673”

18683”

18693”

187210”

18736”

18755”

18761”

187716”

1878 35”

1879(Jan. to April)19”

In all 110 cases, of which nearly one-half were brethren connected with educational institutions, referred to above.

The earlier years of this list must be necessarily imperfect, and, indeed, M. Charles Sauvestre has given details of nine cases occurring in schools in 1861,1632 all which have escaped Dr. Wahu, but, even making allowance for the impossibility of hunting up all the fugitive records of the past, the increase during recent years is not to be regarded as indicating an increase of immorality. It rather proves how powerful were the forces protecting the church and repressing publicity under the Second Empire. The absence of cases in 1870-1 is probably attributable to the preoccupations of the Franco-Prussian War and its consequent troubles. While the presidency of M. Thiers, in 1872, yielded 10 cases, the reactionary government of Marshal MacMahon showed but 12 cases in four years. After the fall of MacMahon the number rapidly increases, the first four months of 1879 affording no less than 19 cases. Whether, since then, this rate of progression has been maintained I have no means of knowing, but it is to be hoped that the breaking up of the unauthorized orders, and the increased vigilance of the authorities, aided by an aroused public sentiment, have led to a decrease in the dismal record. One deplorable feature of many of these cases is the large number of victims frequently represented in a single prosecution, and that the perpetrator had often been afforded the opportunity of continuing his crimes in successive situations. Thus, in the affair of the Abbé Debra, at Liège, in 1877, there were 32 offences charged against him; and, of those occurring in the single year 1878, frère Marien was condemned for no less than 299, frère Mélisse, at Saint-Brice, for 50, frère Climène at Candé, Mazé, and Martigné-Ferchaud, for 25, and frère Adulphe at Guipry, Saint-Meloir-des-Ondes, and Pleurtuit, for 67.

It would be a libel on human nature to assert that this catalogue of sin does not represent more than an average of wickedness, and the responsibility for the existence of so shocking a condition of morality must, at least in part, be attributed to the rule of celibacy, for there is nothing in the status of the church in France to attract to it those who seek merely a career of sloth and self-indulgence. The income of the parish priest in France only averages about 1100 francs per annum, and his position, in a vast majority of cases, is wholly insecure, being dependent altogether upon the pleasure of his bishop, who can dismiss him at any moment and thus deprive him of all means of livelihood. In 1866, out of a total of 33,707 priests in service, only 3715 held preferment of which they could not be thus deprived at the whim of their superiors.1633 A profession so poorly rewarded, subjected to discipline nominally so severe, and held under such a tenure, can scarce be expected to draw to its ranks men of character and position; and in fact, the Bishop of Poitiers, in 1877, made in a pastoral letter the humiliating avowal that the better and more intelligent classes as a rule avoided the church, which was compelled to find its recruits among the children of peasants and laborers. This is confirmed by a work entitled “Le grand péril de l’église de France,” issued in 1879 by the Abbé Bougaud, Vicar-General of Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans, by which it appears that the districts which furnish the most recruits are those which are most ignorant, and that, as education increases, the willingness to enter the church diminishes. Moreover, not only is this the case, but even the numbers of the secular clergy, necessary for the ministrations of religion, are deficient. In his own diocese of Orléans there were 180 priests lacking, and in that of Troyes there were 100 parishes without curés; and though the want of qualified ministers was daily increasing, the pupils in the seminaries were diminishing, and it seemed impossible to fill the void.1634 While some allowance must of course be made for the character of the material thus pressed into service, this fact only increases the responsibility of those who persist in subjecting youths fitted neither by nature nor training to the tremendous strain of enforced celibacy in a career which surrounds them with the most dangerous temptations.

Irrespective of questions of morality, the rule of celibacy in modern society is harmful to the state in proportion as it contributes to the aggrandizement of those who enforce it. A sacerdotal caste, divested of the natural ties of family and of the world, with interests in many respects antagonistic to the communities in which its members reside, with aims which, from the nature of the case, must be for the temporal advancement of its class, is apt to prove a dangerous element in the body politic, and the true interests of religion, as well as of humanity, are almost as likely to receive injury as benefit at its hands, especially when it is armed with the measureless power of confession and absolution, and is held in strict subjection to a hierarchy. Such a caste would seem to be the inevitable consequence of compulsory celibacy in an ecclesiastical organization such as that of the Catholic church, and the hierarchy based upon it can scarce fail to become the enemy of human advancement, so long as the priest continues to share the imperfections of our common nature. How little the aims of that hierarchy have changed with the lapse of ages may be seen in the pretensions which it still advances, as of old, to subject the temporal sovereignty of princes and peoples to the absolute domination of the spiritual power. The temper of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII. is still the leading influence in its policy, and the opportunity alone is wanting for it to revive in the nineteenth century the all-pervading tyranny which it exercised in the thirteenth. Even the separation of church and state is condemned as a heresy, and as the state is denied the privilege of defining the limits of its own authority, and as the right of the church to use force is asserted, it would be difficult to set bounds to the empire which is its rightful heritage, and of which it is deprived by the irreligious tendencies of the age.1635

Yet, in spite of this antagonism to the spirit of modern society and civilization, it would be futile to anticipate the downfall of the church, or even any marked modification in its general organization or teaching. It arose out of a necessity in human development. With all its aberrations, it has been, perhaps, the most efficacious of agencies for the improvement and civilization of man, and it will not disappear or undergo any essential change until the necessity for its existence shall have passed away in the elevation of mankind. The human race is not yet prepared for independence in religious and moral thought, and the masses in many lands will long require to be controlled with the awful authority claimed for an infallible church, and will find inexpressible comfort in that implicit faith which throws upon another the burden of sin and the responsibility of salvation. The church thus is doing its work, and has its work to do. We may, indeed, look forward hopefully to the time when the diffusion of education and the growth of intelligence will enable man to throw off the trammels which still are requisite to his well-being and well-doing, and will seek and obey his Creator without an intermediary, but that time is yet far off, and until it comes Latin Christianity has a mission from which it cannot be spared.