Chapter XXII: Part 22

Even in the kingdoms where the Bull was legally received and published, its provisions in practice seem to have been held as directed almost exclusively against those who might be foolish enough to incur suspicion of heresy by asserting that they were not aware of their guilt. While the Holy Office stretched its power to convict and punish all the wretched heretics whom it could bring within its grasp, it was singularly tender of those whom successive popes denounced as the worst of offenders. In a learned work on the subject, the author, an official of the Portuguese Inquisition, urges the caution requisite in proceedings which affect the honor of ecclesiastics, bringing scandal and grief to the faithful and glory and joy to the heretic. As the accused had all presumptions in his favor, since he had been selected for the sacred functions of the confessional, and as women were by nature inconstant, corruptible, deceitful, mendacious, and given to perjury, he concludes that the evidence of a single witness is wholly inconclusive; two witnesses of good character may justify the seclusion of the accused, either in prison or in his own convent or house, but four were necessary to his conviction; he decides adversely the question whether deficiency of evidence can be supplemented by torture; and he cites Potiphar’s wife to caution his brethren against lending too hasty credence to accusations which may be only the revengeful promptings of a baffled tempter.[1504] Casuists were found to argue that the solicitation must occur during the act of confession itself to bring the accused within the words of the papal decrees, which were not applicable even if it took place in the confessional immediately before the woman commenced to confess, or immediately after she had received absolution.[1505] The accused who denied, might be shown the torture, but could not be exposed to it, and if punished, his punishment must be secret, so as not to give rise to popular disquiet.[1506] In Spain, when the local tribunal had agreed upon a sentence, it could not be executed without referring the case and all the evidence to the Conseyo de la Suprema;[1507] but the sentence which was thus so carefully to be considered, was not usually severe. Some instructions on the subject issued in 1577, after premising that there must be neither public penitence nor appearance in an auto de fé, and that the sentence, unlike that of heretics, must be made known only to the ecclesiastics of the place, proceed to state that the penalties to be imposed on the guilty are at the discretion of the Tribunal, except that he is obliged to abjure the implied heresy and is prohibited from hearing confessions in the future. Whether he is to be suspended from administering the other sacraments, or from preaching, and whether he is to be imprisoned or banished from the place of his crime, must depend upon the gravity of the offence. In grave cases, secular priests may be punished by seclusion, or deprivation of function or benefice, or pecuniary fines, with discipline, secret prayers and fasting; and monks may be visited with the discipline, removal from the scene of their misdeeds, suspension or privation of orders, of the privilege of voting in their convents, and relegation to the last place in the choir and refectory.[1508] All this manifests not only a provident care to prevent scandal among the faithful, but a singular tolerance of crime when compared with the severity which characterized the ordinary operations of the Inquisition, in lapses of faith however slight. A man who asserted that simple fornication was not a mortal sin was treated as a heretic and “relaxed” or “reconciled,” with all the tremendous consequent penalties upon him and his posterity; and it is significant in many ways to observe that a culprit guilty of prostituting the confessional to seduce his spiritual daughters was to be punished by being made to take the lowest seat in the choir. This misplaced lenity was more than carried out in practice. According to Llorente, the records of the Inquisition show that not ten per cent. of those accused were convicted; and even when convicted it was not unusual for the convict, through influences brought to bear on the Inquisitors General, to obtain a removal of the interdiction of hearing confessions.[1509] In one case of special atrocity which occurred under the eyes of Llorente himself, the culprit, in addition to the discipline, deprivation of vote, and degradation to the lowest seat in the choir (he had been Provincial of the Capuchins of New Grenada), was condemned to five years’ imprisonment in a convent of his own order—a most inadequate penalty for a man who had seduced thirteen nuns in a convent under his spiritual guardianship.[1510] In the horrible affair of Corella, which occurred in 1743, it is true that the Abbess, Doña Agueda de Luna, died under the torture; and her principal accomplice, Fray Juan de la Vega, after being tortured in his examination, was declared suspect in the highest degree and was confined in the desert convent of Duruelo till his death, but in this case the accused were Molinists, or Illuminati, which of itself rendered them worthy of the stake, and in addition, besides numerous infanticides, they had entered into a pact with Satan.[1511]

The nunneries, indeed, appear to have suffered especially from this cause, particularly when their spiritual directors were monks. This was a complaint of old standing, and the authors of the “Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia,” in 1538, proposed to put an end to the scandals thence arising by prohibiting members of the conventual orders from serving in that capacity, which was to be confided in the future to the Episcopal Ordinaries.[1512] A more partial cure was that suggested in 1627 by Urban VIII. when he granted a special Bull to Christobal de Lobera, Bishop of Cordova, depriving the mendicant orders of their right to papal jurisdiction, and subjecting them to the Ordinary of the diocese in order to put a stop, if possible, to crimes committed by them in the confessional.[1513] These monastic troubles were by no means confined to Spain. When, as we shall see hereafter, the Grand Duke, Leopold of Tuscany, undertook in 1774 to reform the nunneries of his dominions, they had for a century and a half been the scene of the worst disorders, committed by the regular clergy who were their spiritual directors, and Leopold found his principal opposition in the court of Rome itself.[1514] In Provence, the canons of Pignan made no secret of their domination over the bodies as well as over the souls of the nuns of the district, so that in a single year there were sixteen declarations of pregnancy officially made by the latter, who seemed to consider it as one of the duties of their profession. As Michelet remarks, this at least diminished the monastic crime of infanticide, for the children were openly put out to nurse and were generally adopted by their foster-mothers.[1515]

Some statistics, given by Llorente from the archives of the Inquisition, afford a curious commentary upon the influence of monasticism. Comparing the number of accusations brought for this offence with the total census of the secular and regular clergy, he found that one out of every ten thousand secular priests was charged with it, while among the monastic orders the proportion was much greater. The Benedictines, Bernardines, Jeronymites, Premonstratensians, Basilians, Agonizantes, Theatins, and Oratorians, and the canons regular of Calatrava, Santiago, Alcantara, Montesa, St. Juan, and of the Holy Sepulchre showed a proportion of one in every thousand. Among the Carmelites, Augustinians, Mathurins, the Order of La Merced, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Minims of St. Francis de Paul, there was one in every five hundred: one in four hundred among the barefooted orders of the Augustinians, Mathurins, and Fathers of La Merced; and one in two hundred among the barefooted Carmelites, the Alcantarians and the Capuchins.[1516] These results Llorente explains partly by the greater attention paid by some orders to the duties of the confessional, but chiefly by the differences in their rules of discipline. Those who, like the secular priests, had comparative wealth and freedom were able to gratify their passions without resorting to indulgence so dangerous, while those whose vows bound them to poverty and asceticism were most liable to be tempted by the opportunities of the confessional. It was precisely the orders that were most rigid which produced the greatest number of culprits. Another significant fact was that the greater portion of these accusations were brought by nuns, and from this Llorente seeks to explain the small proportion of cases in which the accused was found guilty. The inquiries necessary to confession often appeared to the simple-minded devotee a direct enticement to sin, and her excited imagination, in dwelling upon them, would lead her to imagine herself the object of her confessor’s impure desires—a defence of the system almost as damaging as the facts which it attempts to extenuate.[1517]

Whatever may be Llorente’s opinion as to the comparative innocence of the secular priesthood, it does not appear to have been shared by the church. The local ecclesiastical legislation of the seventeenth century is surcharged with innumerable minute directions as to the age of the confessor and the form and structure of confessionals; restricting female penitents, unless dangerously ill, from being heard except in church and by daylight, and prescribing the relative positions to be maintained by confessor and penitent.[1518] In the earlier, though scarce purer, period of the fifteenth century John Myrc contents himself with simpler rules—

But when a wommon cometh to the
Loke hyre face that thou ne se,
But teche hyre to knele downe the by,
And sum what thy face from hyre thou wry,
Stille as ston ther thou sitte,
And kepe the welle that thou ne spytte.
Koghe thow not thenne thy thonkes,
Ne wrynge thou not wyth thy schonkes—[1519]

and the attention which was now given to the minutest details of these matters shows how much men’s minds were excited by the subject, and how, as usual, the church sought palliatives for the evil to which she dared not apply a radical cure.

A natural result of the effort made to suppress the evil was a refinement of ingenuity on the part of the evil-doers to escape the result of their transgressions, and the subtlety of casuists was taxed to the utmost in defining with precision all the acts and motives which would render offenders liable to the penalties decreed in the Papal Bulls, thus giving rise to quite a literature specially devoted to the subject.[1520] In 1614, the Roman Inquisition, under Paul V., was obliged formally to declare that priests who used the confessional as a place of assignation were liable to the decrees, even though not engaged at the moment in administering the sacrament of penitence;[1521] and in 1665 Alexander VII. felt it necessary to condemn the proposition that a confessor, while hearing a confession, could give his penitent a love-letter without incurring the guilt of solicitation.[1522] The mode, however, which offered the surest escape was for the confessor to absolve his partner in sin, and thus release her from all obligation to denounce him,[1523] for such an absolution was good, according to St. Thomas Aquinas.[1524] This gave the church infinite trouble. It satisfied the conscience of the woman, for the council of Trent had taken care to declare that priests in mortal sin did not lose the power of absolution conferred on them by the Holy Ghost in their ordination,[1525] while so vile a prostitution of the sacrament could not but bring the whole system into contempt. Yet casuists were found to distinguish between the guilt of him who soothes the conscience of the woman whom he had seduced by absolving her after the act, in which case he is not exposed to the penalties of solicitation,[1526] and of him who promises absolution in advance as a temptation to sin, which brings him within the scope of the decrees.[1527]

The condemnation issued in 1665 by Alexander VII. of the proposition that absolution under such circumstances relieves the woman from the obligation of denunciation[1528] shows the extent of the evil and the boldness of the perpetrators, but did nothing to cure it. A more effective step had been taken in 1661 by the provincial synod of Cambray, which was the revival of the ancient rule that no confessor should have power in such cases to grant absolution to his paramour except _in articulo mortis_; a precedent which was followed in 1663 by the congregation of arch-priests of the province of Mechlin.[1529] This action seems to have aroused considerable opposition and no little discussion, for, at a convocation of bishops, held at Brussels in January, 1665, it was the first subject submitted for debate.[1530] The question, however, remained unsettled, for, although the power to grant such absolution was specially excepted in all commissions issued to confessors in the province, the evil continued, and again came up for discussion at the synod of Namur, in 1698, when the practice was peremptorily forbidden for the future.[1531] In the province of Besançon a canon of 1689 declares that although the abuse had been long prohibited, yet that it continued to flourish; and a formal enunciation was considered necessary, taking away the power of conferring absolution in such cases—a regulation which had to be repeated in 1707.[1532] In 1709 the Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, issued an order prohibiting it in his diocese, but as late as 1741 Pontas informs us that such absolutions were valid in all places where they had not been forbidden by episcopal authority.[1533] This extraordinary confession on such a subject was most discreditable to the church, and in 1741 Benedict XIV. signalized the commencement of his pontificate by converting these local regulations into a general law by his Bull, “Sacramentum Pœnitentiæ,” in which he not only endeavored to sweep away all the refinements by which casuists had so nearly nullified the decrees of his predecessors, but he devoted a special clause to the device by which the sacrilegious ministers of Satan rather than of God absolved their partners in guilt. This he absolutely prohibited for the future, except _in articulo mortis_ when no other priest could be had; he took away the power of administering the sacrament of penitence in such cases, pronounced absolution null and void when thus given, and punished the attempt to give it by _ipso facto_ excommunication removable by the papal court alone.[1534] Four years later, he relaxed somewhat the rigor of these regulations in a manner which shows how everpresent was the fear of attracting attention to the frailties of ecclesiastics, for he permitted absolution _in articulo mortis_ in all cases where another confessor could not be called in without attracting attention and causing suspicion and scandal, which was virtually to remove the prohibition.[1535] In the same year he also renewed the decree of 1633 requiring the Papal Bulls on the subject to be read at least once a year in the chapters of all the monastic orders,[1536] who seem to have been the principal offenders in these matters; doubtless for the reason which Llorente says was usually alleged as an excuse by culprits—because they had no other opportunity of sinning.[1537]

Energetic as was the legislation of Benedict, it by no means put an end to the trouble. The year after his Bull appeared, in 1742, the synod of Namur found it necessary to remind confessors that they could not absolve women whom they had seduced;[1538] and in 1768 the Bishop of Ypres was obliged to recall to the attention of his clergy the Bulls of Gregory and of Benedict, and to threaten their transgressors with excommunication.[1539] The abuse was by no means confined to Europe, but extended to the missionary stations of the church. In 1775 the Apostolic Vicar of Cochin China inquired of Pius VI. whether the Bull of Benedict XIV. applied to the Franciscan missionaries under his charge, and, if so, whether it could not be moderated, to which Pius replied affirmatively as to the first question and negatively as to the second. That the scandal continued is shown by a pastoral letter of the Apostolic Vicar of Suchuen in 1803.[1540] It is not surprising that St. François de Sales should have declared that a confessor was to be selected out of ten thousand, seeing that so few among them were fitted for the function.[1541]

* * * * *

In considering the slow progress of improvement in the character of the clergy, we must bear in mind not only the debased material which required to be reformed, and the prevailing low standard of sexual morality throughout Europe, but also the prevalence within the church of the casuistic spirit, which tended to obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong and to extenuate all offences against the Decalogue. This spirit received a powerful impulse from the rising influence of the Company of Jesus, which furnished the most distinguished casuists and fostered the habit of testing everything by an artificial standard. If scandal could be averted, if the immediate temporal interests of the Order or of the church could be subserved, it mattered little whether morality suffered; and the subtle dialectics of the schools could always invent a justification for any line of action which appeared expedient at the moment. We have already seen how the successive Bulls of reforming pontiffs directed against the abuses of the confessional were virtually nullified in this manner; and the same processes were employed to soften the harshness of the canons which sought to repress the other vices of the clergy.[1542] To one who examines the works of these skilful dialecticians, the only wonder is that a church which not only tolerated but exalted them could retain any respect for virtue or any reverence for law, human or divine.

When these resources failed, recourse could be had to other means to avert scandal, as in the case of Father Mena, a priest of the Company of Jesus, at Salamanca, who persuaded one of his female penitents that God required her to abandon herself to him. He kept her in a hermitage conveniently near to the College of Jesuits where he officiated, and several children were the result of the union, when the matter became so notorious that the Inquisition interfered and threw the culprit into its prison at Valladolid. The Company of Jesus undertook his defence, and on the strength of certificates of his illness obtained his transfer to their college, where he was to be watched by officials of the Inquisition. His apparent illness increased, until a report was spread of his death; an image with a mask resembling him was interred with all the ceremonies of religion, and he was secretly conveyed to Genoa, where he was intrusted with a mission to convert the Jews.[1543]

More strenuous exertion, however, was required in the struggle over the case of Father Girard and la Cadière, which, in 1730 and 1731, convulsed society in Provence. Girard was a Jesuit of high reputation, who came to Toulon in 1728, where he soon obtained the spiritual direction of a number of women, among whom he selected seven to minister to his lusts. One of them, Catharine Cadière, a girl of 19, was especially distinguished for her exaltation of religious sensibility, which rendered her eminently fitted for the dangerous extravagances of Quietism. Under his guidance she speedily had ecstatic visions of heaven and hell, and was marked as the favorite of Divine Love by the stigmata which appeared on hands, feet, forehead, and side. While enjoying the popular veneration as a saint, it was not difficult for her spiritual guide to persuade her that God required her submission to him. This continued for some months, until, convinced that Girard had led her into sin, in place of the state of perfection to which she aspired, she changed her confessor, when the matter leaked out, and she brought a formal accusation against her seducer. At once the Company of Jesus took up the quarrel, and, as it suited the policy of Cardinal Fleury, the all-powerful minister, to gratify them, the unfortunate girl had no chance. The Episcopal courts, in which the case was first brought, sided with the guilty, and even the secular tribunals, to which the matter was transferred, were bitterly hostile to her. The accuser became the accused. She was persecuted, imprisoned, and threatened with torture, and in the Parlement of Aix, before which the case was finally brought, two members actually proposed that she should be burnt alive, but agreed, in order to secure the support of others, to accept the milder sentence of strangling after due infliction of torture, and this verdict was brought before the Parlement for debate. Despite the social influence of the Jesuits, this atrocity aroused public opinion throughout Provence and excited tumults which frightened the friends of Girard, so that when the final vote was taken only half the members of the Parlement pronounced him innocent, the other half voting for his condemnation, and he was saved by the casting vote of the President, Lebret. So strong was the popular feeling against him that he had to be conveyed away secretly to escape the vengeance of the mob, and died two years afterwards in the odor of sanctity, fully upheld by the Company of Jesus. As for la Cadière, she disappeared from sight, and the fate of the unfortunate girl is unknown.[1544]

XXX.

THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION.

If the council of Trent had thus failed utterly in its efforts to create that which had never existed—purity of morals under the rule of celibacy—it had at length succeeded in its more important task of putting an end to the aspirations of the clergy for marriage. With the anathema for heresy confronting them, few could be found so bold as openly to dispute the propriety of a law which had been incorporated into the articles of faith; and the ingenious sophistries and far-fetched logic of Bellarmine were reverently received and accepted as incontrovertible. Urbain Grandier might endeavor to quiet the conscience of his morganatic spouse by writing a treatise to prove the lawfulness of priestly wedlock, but he took care to keep the manuscript carefully locked in his desk.[1545] A man of bold and independent spirit, fortified by unfathomable learning, like Louis Ellies Du Pin, might secretly favor marriage, and perhaps might contract matrimony.[1546] Du Pin’s great antagonist, Bossuet, might incur a similar imputation, and be ready to partially yield the point if thereby he might secure the reconciliation of the hostile churches.[1547] All this, however, could have no influence on the doctrines and practice of Catholicism at large, and the principle remained unaltered and unalterable.

* * * * *

Yet it was impossible that the critical spirit of inquiry which marked the eighteenth century, its boldness of unbelief, and its utter want of faith in God and man, could leave unassailed this monument of primæval asceticism, while it was so busy in undermining everything to which the reverence of its predecessors had clung. Accordingly, the latter half of the century witnessed an active controversy on the subject. In 1758, a canon of Estampes, named Desforges, who had been forced to take orders by his family, published a work in two volumes in which he attempted to prove that marriage was necessary for all ranks of ecclesiastics. The book attracted attention, and by order of the Parlement it was burnt, September 30, 1758, by the hangman, and the unlucky author was thrown into the Bastile. These proceedings were well calculated to give publicity to the work; it was reprinted at Douay in 1772; a German translation was published in 1782 at Göttingen and Munster, and an Italian one, with some omissions, had already appeared in 1770, without an acknowledged place of publication. The Abbé Villiers undertook to answer Desforges in a weak little volume, the “Apologie du Célibat Chretien,” published in 1762, which consists principally of long extracts from the Fathers in praise of virginity. Even Italy felt the movement, and an anonymous work, entitled “Pregiudizi del Celibato,” appeared in Naples in 1765, and was reprinted in Venice in 1766. Some more competent champion was necessary to answer these repeated attacks, and the learned Abate Zaccaria brought his fertile pen and his inexhaustible erudition to the rescue in his “Storia Polemica del Celibato Sacro,” which saw the light in 1774, and which not long afterwards was translated into German. In 1781 appeared a new aspirant for matrimonial liberty in the Abbé Gaudin, who issued at Geneva (Lyons) his work entitled “Les inconveniens du célibat des prêtres,” a treatise of considerable learning and no little bitterness against the whole structure of sacerdotalism and Roman supremacy. This was followed, in 1782, by Andreas Forster, in his “De Cœlibatu Clericorum Dissertatio,” published at Dillingen, and dedicated to Pius VI., for the purpose of replying to the attacks of the innovating Catholics.

The latter, indeed, had some hope for the approaching realization of their demands. The reforms which illustrated the minority of Ferdinand IV. of Naples excited the priests of Southern Italy to petition him for the right of marriage, and Serrao, the Jansenist Bishop of Potenza, does not hesitate to say that the request would have been granted if the unfriendly relations between the courts of Rome and Naples had continued much longer.[1548] The Emperor Joseph II., amid his many fruitless schemes for philosophical reform, inclined seriously to the notion of permitting marriage to the priesthood of his dominions. In an edict of 1783 he asserted, incidentally, that the matter was subject to his control,[1549] and the advocates of clerical marriage confidently expected that in a very short period they would see the ancient restrictions swept away by the imperial power. A mass of controversial essays and dissertations made their appearance throughout Germany, and the well-known Protestant theologian Henke took the opportunity of bringing out, in 1783, a new edition of the learned work of Calixtus, “De Conjugio Clericorum,” as the most efficient aid to the good cause. It is a striking illustration of the temper of the times to observe that this work, so bitterly opposed to the orthodox doctrines and practice, is dedicated by Henke to Archdeacon Anthony Ganoczy, canon of the cathedral church of Gross-Wardein and apostolic prothonotary. The hope of success brought out other writers, and the movement made sufficient progress to cause some hesitation in Rome as to the propriety of yielding to the pressure.[1550]

Zaccaria again entered the lists, and produced, in 1785, his “Nuova Giustificazione del Celibato Sacro,” in answer to the Abbé Gaudin and to an anonymous German writer whose work had produced considerable sensation. To this he was principally moved by a report that he had himself been converted by the facts and arguments advanced by the German, an imputation which he indignantly refuted in three hundred quarto pages.

The half-formed resolutions of Joseph II. led to no result, and the subject slumbered for a few years until the outbreak of the French Revolution. At an early period in that great movement, the adversaries of sacerdotal asceticism bestirred themselves in bringing to public attention the evils and cruelty of the system. Already, in 1789, a mass of pamphlets appeared urging the abrogation of celibacy. In 1790 the work of the Abbé Gaudin was reprinted, and was promptly answered by the prolific Maultrot. Even in Germany the same spirit again awoke, and an Hungarian priest named Katz published at Vienna, in 1791, a “Tractatus de conjugio et cœlibatu clericorum,” in which he argued strongly for a change. In Poland these doctrines made considerable progress, for in 1801 we find a little tract issued at Warsaw vehemently arguing against those who imperil their souls by violating their vows and the laws of the church.[1551] In England, a Catholic priest distinguished for talents and learning, Dr. Geddes, published, in 1800, a work in which he denied the Apostolic origin of celibacy and urged that, at most, it should only be punished by degradation from the priesthood, without entailing disgrace. Indeed, he argued that the rule caused more proselytes to Protestantism than any other cause.[1552]

* * * * *

During this period it can hardly be supposed that the defiant immorality which characterized the eighteenth century had been favorable to the purity of a celibate priesthood. That the church, indeed, had made but scanty improvement in the character of its ministers is visible throughout the literature of the age, and I need only allude to a few instances where efforts at reform revealed the prevailing corruption.

In France the attacks upon the vow of celibacy, to which allusion has already been made, seem to have given rise to a spasmodic attempt to regulate the church. In 1760 an arrêt of the Parlement of Paris prohibited the organization of religious congregations without express royal permission, verified by that body. The assembly of the clergy in Paris in 1766 produced no notable improvement, nor was greater success obtained when the temporal power intervened in the Edicts of 1766 and 1767. Further effort apparently was requisite, and in the Edict of March, 1768, Louis XV. undertook to diminish in some degree the causes of the more flagrant disorders among the regular clergy. Men were not to be allowed to take the vows under the age of 22, nor women under 19; and as the smaller religious houses were especially notorious for laxness of discipline, all were suppressed which could not number at least fifteen professed monks or nuns, except those attached to larger congregations. The ecclesiastical authorities, moreover, were emphatically commanded to make a thorough visitation, and to compel the observance of the rules of discipline of the several orders.[1553] The enforcement of this edict created no little excitement, and several of the smaller orders narrowly escaped destruction in their endeavors to evade its provisions. That these efforts did not succeed in accomplishing their object we may well believe, even without the testimony of an eye-witness.[1554] As for the secular clergy, when Louis XV. amused himself by ordering the arrest of all ecclesiastics caught frequenting brothels, the number of victims in a short time amounted to 296, of whom no less than 100 were priests actively engaged in the service of the altar.[1555]

When the Grand-Duke Leopold of Tuscany undertook to reform the monasteries of his dominions and to put an end, if possible, to the abuse of the confessional, it led to a long diplomatic correspondence with the papal curia as to the jurisdiction over such cases. A public document of the year 1763 had already stated that the special crime in question had become less frequent, and attributed this improvement to the exceeding laxity of morals everywhere prevalent, for few confessors could be so foolish as to attempt seduction in the confessional when there was so little risk in doing the same thing elsewhere.[1556] Specious as this reasoning might seem, the facts on which it was based were hardly borne out by the investigations of Leopold shortly after into the morals of the monastic establishments. Nothing more scandalous is to be found in the visitations of the religious houses of England under Morton and Cromwell. The spiritual directors of the nunneries had converted them virtually into harems, and such of the sisters as were proof against seduction armed with the powers of confession and absolution suffered every species of persecution. It was rare for them to venture on complaint, but when they did so they received no attention from their ecclesiastical superiors, and only the protection of the grand-ducal authority at length emboldened them to reveal the truth. The prioress of S. Caterina di Pistoia declared that, with three or four exceptions, all the monks and confessors with whom she had met in her long career were alike; that they treated the nuns as wives, and taught them that God had made man for woman and woman for man; and that the visitations of the bishops amounted to naught, even though they were aware of what occurred, for the mouths of the victims were sealed by the dread of excommunication threatened by their spiritual directors.[1557] When it is considered that the convents thus converted into dens of prostitution were the favorite schools to which the girls of the higher classes were sent for training and education, it can readily be imagined what were the moral influences thence radiating throughout society at large, and we can appreciate the argument above referred to, as to the ease with which the clergy could procure sexual indulgence without recourse to the confessional. Leopold’s chief assistant in this struggle was Scipione de’ Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, whose experiences in the investigation caused him to induce the council of Pistoia, in 1786, to declare the duties of the confessional wholly incompatible with the monastic state, and, in view of the improbability of any permanent reform, to propose the abolition of the monastic orders by restricting vows to the duration of a twelvemonth[1558]—propositions which were not approved by the congregation of Tuscan prelates held at Florence in 1787, and which were scornfully condemned by Rome.[1559] Leopold, however, sought to palliate the evil by raising to the age of 24 the minimum limit for taking the vows, which the council of Trent had fixed at 16, but the benefit of this salutary measure was neutralized by the ease with which parents desiring to get rid of their children could place them in the institutions of the neighboring states, such as Lucca and Modena.[1560]

Rome itself was no better than its dependent provinces, despite the high personal character of some of the pontiffs. When the too early death of Clement XIV., in 1774, cut short the hopes which had been excited by his enlightened rule, St. Alphonso Liguori addressed to the conclave assembled for the election of his successor a letter urging them to make such a choice as would afford reasonable prospect of accomplishing the much-needed reform. The saint did not hesitate to characterize the discipline of the secular clergy as most grievously lax, and to proclaim that a general reform of the ecclesiastical body was the only way to remove the fearful corruption of the morals of the laity.[1561] When we hear, about this time, of two Carmelite convents at Rome, one male and the other female, which had to be pulled down because underground passages had been established between them, by means of which the monks and nuns lived in indiscriminate licentiousness, and when we read the scandalous stories which were current in Roman society about prelates high in the church, we can readily appreciate the denunciations of St. Alphonso.[1562] A curious glimpse at the interior of conventual life is furnished by a manual for Inquisitors, written about this period by an official of the Holy Office of Rome. In a chapter on nuns he describes the scandals which often cause them to fall within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and prescribes the course to be pursued with regard to the several offences. Among those who were forced to take the veil, despair frequently led to the denial of God, of heaven, and of hell; feminine enmity caused accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, which threw not only the nunneries, but whole cities, into confusion; vain-glory of sanctity suggested pretended revelations and visions; and these latter were also not infrequently caused by licentiousness, for in these utterances were sometimes taught doctrines utterly subversive of morality, of which Godless confessors took advantage to teach their spiritual daughters that there was no sin in sexual intercourse. As in Spain, it was the practice of the Roman Inquisition to treat the offenders mildly, partly in consideration of the temptations to which they were exposed, and partly to avoid scandal.[1563] The contaminating influence on society at large, emanating from a church so incurably corrupted, was vastly heightened by the overgrown numbers of the clerical body. In 1775, for example, a census of the _terra-firma_ provinces of Venice showed in that narrow territory no less than 45,773 priests, or one to every fifty inhabitants, while in the kingdom of Naples, exclusive of Sicily, there were, in 1769, one to every seventy-six.[1564] Such overcrowding as this was not only in itself an efficient cause of disorder, but intensified incalculably the power of infection.

The virtues of the clergy, therefore, could offer but a feeble barrier to the spirit of innovation when the passions of the French Revolution were brought to bear upon the immunities and distinctive laws of the church. The attack commenced on that which had been the strength, but which was now the weakness, of the ecclesiastical establishment. As early as the 10th of August, 1789, preliminary steps were taken in the National Assembly to appropriate the property of the church to meet the fearful deficit which had been the efficient cause of calling together the high council of the nation. This property was estimated as covering one-fifth of the surface of France, yielding with the tithes an annual revenue of three hundred millions of francs. So vast an amount of wealth, perverted for the most part from its legitimate purposes, offered an irresistible temptation to desperate financiers, and yet it was a prelate who made the first direct attack upon it. On the 10th of October, 1789, Talleyrand, then Bishop of Autun, introduced a motion to the effect that it should be devoted to the national wants, subject to the proper and necessary expenses for public worship; and on the 2d of November the measure was adopted by a vote of 568 to 346. This settled the principle, though the details of a transaction of such magnitude were only perfected by successive acts during the two following years. One of the earliest results was the secularization of those ecclesiastics whose labors did not entitle them to support, a preliminary necessary to the intended appropriation of their princely revenues. This was accomplished by an act of February 13th, 1790, by which the religious orders were suppressed, monastic vows were declared void, and a moderate annuity accorded to the unfortunates thus turned adrift upon the world.

The great body of the parochial clergy, patriotic in their aspirations, and suffering from the abuses of power, had hailed the advent of the Revolution with joy; and their assistance had been invaluable in rendering the Tiers-État supreme in the National Assembly. These measures, however, assailing their dearest interests and privileges, aroused them to a sense of the true tendency of the movement to which they had contributed so powerfully. A breach was inevitable between them and the partisans of progress. Every forward step embittered the quarrel. It was impossible for the one party to stay its course, or for the other to assent to acts which daily became more menacing and revolutionary. Forced, therefore, into the position of reactionaries, the clergy ere long became objects of suspicion and soon after of persecution. The progressives devised a test-oath, obligatory on all ecclesiastics, which should divide those who were loyal to the Revolution from the contumacious, and lists were kept of both classes.[1565] Harmless as the oath was in appearance, when it was tendered, in December, 1790, five-sixths of the clergy throughout the kingdom refused it. Those who yielded to the pressure were termed _assermentés_, the recusants _insermentés_ or _réfractaires_, and the latter, of course, at once became the determined opponents of the new régime, the more dangerous because they were the only influential partisans of reaction belonging to the people. To their efforts were attributed the insurrections which in La Vendée and elsewhere threatened the most fearful dangers. They were accordingly exposed to severe legislation. A decree of November 29, 1791, deprived them of their stipends and suspended their functions; another of May 27, 1792, authorized the local authorities to exile them on the simple denunciation of twenty citizens. Under the Terror their persons were exposed to flagrant cruelties, and a _prêtre réfractaire_ was generally regarded, _ipso facto_, as an enemy to the Republic.

Under these circumstances, sacerdotal marriage came to be looked upon as a powerful lever to disarm or overthrow the hostility of the church, and also as a test of loyalty or disloyalty. Yet the steps by which this conclusion was reached were very gradual. In the early stages of the Revolution, while it was still fondly deemed that the existing institutions of France could be purified and preserved, the National Assembly was assailed with petitions asking that the privilege of marriage should be extended to the clergy.[1566] These met with no response, even after the suppression of the monastic orders. As late as September, 1790, when the Abbé Professor Cournand, of the Collège de France, made a motion in favor of sacerdotal marriage in the assembly of the district of St. Etienne du Mont in Paris, the question, after considerable debate, was laid aside as beyond the competence of that body. It was not until September 3d, 1791, that Mirabeau introduced into the Assembly a decree providing that no profession or vocation should debar a citizen from marriage or be considered as incompatible with marriage, and forbidding the public officials and notaries from refusing to ratify any marriage contract on such pretext. Though no allusion was made in this to ecclesiastics, its object was evident, and was so admitted in the eloquent speech with which he urged its adoption—a speech which contained a very telling résumé of the arguments in favor of priestly marriage, but which, in its glowing anticipations of the benefits to be expected from the measure, affords a somewhat lamentable contrast to the meagreness of the realization.[1567] The principle, when once established, was considered of sufficient importance to deserve recognition in the Constitution of September, 1791, a section in the preamble of which declares that the law does not recognize religious vows or any engagements contrary to the rights of nature or to the constitution,[1568] and this was followed, as Mirabeau had proposed, by a decree of September 20, 1791, which, in enumerating the obstacles to marriage, does not allude to monastic vows or holy orders.

Professor Cournand was probably the first man of position and character to take advantage of the privilege thus permitted, and his example was followed by many ecclesiastics who had won an honorable place in the church, in literature, and in science. Among them may be mentioned the Abbé Gaudin of the Oratoire, the author of a work already alluded to on the evils of celibacy, who in 1792 represented La Vendée in the Legislative Assembly, and who in 1805 did not hesitate to publish a little volume entitled “Avis à mon fils, âgé de sept ans”—although, in the preface to his work in 1781, he had described himself as long past the age of the passions. Even bishops yielded to the temptation. Loménie, coadjutor of his uncle the Archbishop of Sens, Torné Bishop of Bourges, Massieu of Beauvais, and Lindet of Evreux were publicly married. Many nuptials of this kind were celebrated with an air of defiance. Pastors announced their approaching weddings to their flocks in florid rhetoric, as though assured of finding sympathy for the assertion of the triumph of nature over the tyranny of man. Others presented themselves with their brides at the bar of the National Convention, as though to demonstrate that they were good citizens, who had thrown off all reverence for the obsolete traditions of the past.

A nation maddened and torn by the extremes of hope, of rage, and of terror, which met the triumphal march of three hundred and fifty thousand hostile bayonets with the heads of its king and queen, which blazoned forth to Europe its irrevocable breach with the past by instituting festivals in honor of a new Supreme Being and parading a courtesan through the streets of Paris as the Goddess of Reason, was not likely to employ much tenderness in coercing its internal enemies; and chief among these it finally numbered the ministers of religion. To them it soon applied the marriage test. To marry was to acknowledge the supremacy of the civil authority, and to sunder allegiance to foreign domination; celibacy was at the least a tacit adherence to the enemy, and a mute protest against the new régime. Matrimony, therefore, rose into importance as at once a test and a pledge, and every effort was made to encourage it. Among the records of the revolutionary tribunal is the trial of Mahue, Curé of S. Sulpice, Aug. 13, 1793, accused of having written a pamphlet against priestly marriage, and he was only acquitted on the ground that his crime had been committed prior to the adoption of the law of July 19, 1793.[1569] A decree of November 19, 1793, relieved from exile or imprisonment all priests who could show that their banns had been published, and when, soon afterwards, at the height of the popular frenzy, the Convention sent its deputies throughout France with instructions to crush out every vestige of the dreaded reaction, those emissaries made celibacy the object of their especial attacks. Thus, in the Department of the Meuse, deputy De la Croix announced that all priests who were not married should be placed under surveillance; while in Savoy the harsh measures taken against the clergy were modified in favor of those who married by permitting them to remain under surveillance. One zealous deputy ordered a pastor to be imprisoned until he could find a wife, and another released a canon from jail on his pledging himself to marry. Many of those thus forced into matrimony were decrepit with years, and chose brides whose age secured them from all suspicions of yielding to the temptations of the flesh. Such was the venerable Martin of Marseilles, who, after seeing his bishop and two priests, his intimate friends, led to the scaffold, took, at the age of 76, a wife nearly 60 years old. As an unfortunate ecclesiastic, who had thus succeeded in weathering the storm, fairly expressed it, in defending himself against the reproaches of a returned emigré bishop, he took a wife to serve as a lightning rod. These unwilling bridegrooms not infrequently deposited with a notary or a trusty friend a protest against the violence to which they had yielded, and a declaration that their relations with their wives should be merely those of brother and sister.

Yet in this curious persecution the officials only obeyed the voice of the excited people. The press, the stage, all the organs of public opinion, were unanimous in warring with celibacy, ridiculing it as a fanatical remnant of superstition, and denouncing it as a crime against the state. The popular societies were especially vehement in promulgating these ideas. The _Congrès fraternel_ of Ausch, in September, 1793, ordered the local clubs to enlighten the benighted minds of the populace on the subject, and to exclude from membership all priests who should not marry within six months. A petition to the National Assembly from the republicans of Auxerre demanded that all ecclesiastics who persisted in remaining single should be banished; while a more truculent address from Condom urged imperiously that celibacy should be declared a capital crime, and that the death-penalty should be enforced with relentless severity. In times so terrible, when suspicion was conviction and conviction death, and when such were the views of those who swayed public affairs, it is not to be wondered at if many pious churchmen, unambitious of the crown of martyrdom, thought matrimony preferable to the guillotine or the noyade.

Indeed, the only source of surprise is that so few were found to betray their convictions. In the vast body of the Gallican church it is estimated that only about 2000 marriages of men in orders took place, after the reign of terror had rendered it a measure of safety. In addition to this, about 500 nuns were also married; and though this proportion is larger, it is still singularly small when we consider that these poor creatures, utterly unfitted by habit or education to take care of themselves, were suddenly ejected from their peaceful retreats, and cast upon a world which was raging in convulsions so terrible.[1570]

This is doubtless attributable to the steadfast resistance which the better part of the clergy made to the innovation, in spite of the danger of withstanding the popular frenzy, and in disregard of the laws which denounced such opposition. Even the _assermentés_, who had pledged themselves to the Revolution by taking the oath of allegiance, were mostly unfavorable to the abrogation of celibacy, and the position thus maintained by the clergy gave tone to such of the people as retained enough of devout feeling still to frequent the churches and partake of the mysteries of religion. The existence of an active and determined opposition is revealed by an act of August 16th, 1792, guaranteeing the salaries of all married priests, thus showing that, in some places at least, their stipends had been withheld. Many pastors, indeed, were driven from their parishes by their congregations, in consequence of marriage, to put an end to which a decree of September 17th, 1793, ordered the communes to continue payment of salaries in all such cases of ejection.

There were not wanting courageous ecclesiastics who opposed the innovation by every means in their power. Although Gobel, Bishop of Paris, a creature of the Revolution, favored the marriages of his clergy, a portion of his curates openly and vigorously denounced them, and Gratien, Archbishop of Rouen, addressed to him a severe reproach for his criminal weakness. The same Gratien excommunicated one of his priests for marrying, and published, July 24th, 1792, an instruction directed especially against such unions. For this he was thrown into prison, where he was long confined. Fauchet, of Bayeux, for the same offence, was reported to the Convention, but was fortunate enough to elude the consequences. Philibert, of Sedan, issued, January 20th, 1793, a pastoral in which he more cautiously argued against the practice, and, after a long persecution, he was lucky to escape with a decree of costs against him. Pastorals to the same effect were also promulgated by Clément of Versailles, Héraudin of Châteauroux, Sanadon of Oléron, Suzor of Tours, and others.

The Convention was not disposed to tolerate proceedings such as these. To put a stop to them, it adopted, July 19th, 1793, a law punishing with deprivation and exile all bishops who interfered in any way with the marriage of their clergy. For a while this appears to have put a stop to open opposition, but when the reign of terror was past, and the Catholics saw a prospect of reorganizing the distracted church, one of their earliest efforts was directed to the restoration of celibacy. On the 15th of March, 1795, some _assermentés_ bishops, members of the Convention, issued from Paris an encyclical letter to the faithful, in which they denounced sacerdotal marriage in the strongest terms. Those who entered into such unions were declared unworthy of confidence; the fearful constraint under which they had sought refuge in matrimony was pronounced to be no justification, and even renunciation of their wives was not admitted as entitling them to absolution for the one unpardonable sin.[1571] In a second letter, issued December 15th of the same year, this denunciation was repeated in even stronger terms.

In these manifestoes the bishops did not speak by authority. They could not threaten or command, for they were acting beyond or in opposition to the law. With the progress of reaction they became bolder. In 1797 the church ventured to hold a national council, in which it forbade the nuptial benediction to those who were in orders or were bound by monastic vows, thus reducing their marriages to the mere civil contract, and depriving them of all the sanction of religion. The local synods which, encouraged by the fall of the Directory, were held in 1800, adopted these principles as a matter of course, and took measures to enforce them. That of Bourges even prohibited the churching of women who were wives of ecclesiastics.

This condemnation of the married clergy carried despair and desolation into the households of those who had offended, and upon whom the door of reconciliation was so sternly closed. Grégoire of Blois, a leading actor in all these scenes, records the innumerable appeals received from the unfortunates, who, torn by remorse and thus repudiated by the church, begged in vain for the mercy which was incompatible with the respect due to the ancient and inviolable canons.