Note 367 — Chapter XVI · 1773. ABOLITION OF THE ORDER.

In Italy, the monasteries of the orders called mendicant are the refuge of three peculiar classes of persons. The first class of those who repair thither are idle, unthinking fellows, who disdain to do any sort of work; the second are those who have but the convent to escape the prison; and the third, those youth who, feeling within themselves the power, the capacity, or the ambition of achieving some great deeds, and seeing no possibility of emerging from the crowd, have recourse to the cloister as the only way left them of arriving at eminence. Almost all the men of mark among the Italian clergy have been monks, born of poor and humble parentage; and many Popes were of the same. It is known that not a penny is requisite to enter into those monasteries, while, to become a secular priest, one requires to possess some little property.