Popery The Foe of the Church and of the Republic

Chapter VII. Will—Worship.

WILL-WORSHIP, self-imposed restriction, producing excessive spiritual pride, but leaving the heart impure and the life unchanged, is evidently a noteworthy characteristic of Popery. In Paul’s portraiture of the fatal apostasy these words occur: “Commanding to abstain from meats.” This passage, restricted in its application to an organization once truly Christian, must of necessity refer to the Romish Church; no other has made abstinence from animal food a religious duty. Popery, however, has enacted, that “meats eaten during Lent, or on Friday, pollute the body and bring down eternal damnation on the soul.” And must we, then, believe, on the authority of a Church which evinces its much-vaunted infallibility by abrogating its own immutable laws, that something from without, beef-steak, defiles the man?* The proud occupant of Peter’s chair, by a single word, may reverse the teachings of the humble Nazarene!

* Formerly it was enacted: “No meat shall be eaten during Lent, on Fridays, or on Saturdays.” One of the Popes, however, by a new unalterable law suspending all previous immutable enactments, granted universal and perpetual indulgence on Saturdays. A Pope’s word makes the eating of animal food healthful or a damning sin!

Must the conscientious Protestant, his life an epistle of love, eternally bear the frown of an incensed God because, alike on all the days of the week, he temperately enjoyed the gifts of God’s bounty? Shall the Catholic, his heart unrenewed, his life a slander on the religion of the spotless Jesus, find, in the hour of death and the day of judgment, heaven’s favor richly bestowed simply because, by an act of will, he refused animal food on one day in seven?

Even mortal sins, it seems, can be committed with impunity if the Pope grants permission. The bull of Clement XI., in favor of those who should assist Philip V. in the holy war against the heretics, “grants to all who should take this bull, that during the year… . they may eat flesh in Lent and several other days in which it is prohibited. …. that they may eat eggs and things with milk.” His Infallibility makes known when and for what services his subjects may eat eggs without incurring eternal damnation. Important business! In the world’s midnight, Popery’s palmiest days, even heretics could purchase indulgence to commit the heinous sin of dining on roast chicken.

Paul, discerning the natural tendency of the human heart to place reliance in self-imposed outward requirements, and disregard inward piety, affirmed: “Bodily exercise profiteth little, but godliness is profitable unto all things.” The entire system of penance is here condemned. Popery, however, losing sight of the very kernel of the Gospel, that the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin, has ever taught that self-chosen torture, will-worship, is an efficient aid to piety—is in fact itself piety. Merit wrought by self-effort is by Rome considered as acceptable to God as it is pleasing to the carnal heart. Suffering sent of heaven may indeed if rightly received strengthen and deepen devotion, but self-imposed penances, engendering spiritual pride, produce a type of piety—if indeed it be piety—far more resembling heathen fanaticism than the self-denial of him who, in obedience to the will of the Father, offered himself to death that man might live. Between the sufferings of Christ and those of an anchorite, who does not see a world-wide difference? In what respect a senseless, useless, hermit life, like that of the sainted Simeon,* is is a copy of our Lord’s, most certainly infallibility alone can perceive. Are we, then, to believe that useless reverie and Pagan asceticism, with all their disgusting filth, ignorance, beggary, and superstition, are services more acceptable to God than feeding the hungry, clothing the’ naked, instructing the ignorant, reforming the vicious, and living, in the sphere in which God has placed us, a life of active obedience to the precepts of his Word?

* This monk, who lived for thirty-six years on a solitary pillar in the mountains of Syria, exposed to summer’s heat and winter’s cold, refusing to speak even with his mother, has ever been considered, by the Papal Church, a paragon (a model of excellence or perfection of a kind; a peerless example) of piety.

Another predicted characteristic of the fatal apostasy was this: “Forbidding to marry.” Among those bearing the Christian name, none, except the Papists, have ever denied to a certain class the inalienable right of matrimony. They alone have pronounced that unholy which God’s Word declares “honorable in all.” “A bishop,” says Paul, “must be blameless, the husband of one wife.” ‘This—even supposing it does not recommend marriage to the clergy—certainly at least accords them the privilege. Since the days of Gregory VII, however, whose profligate life would have disgraced even Pagan Rome, the marriage of a priest has been looked upon as a sin incomparably greater than adultery, or fornication, or even incest. A priest may associate with prostitutes and escape Church censure, but to marry a virtuous woman is, in the casuistry of Rome, one of the greatest of sins.*

* The Catholic World, July, 1870, p. 440, says : “It is against these (licentiousness and low views of marriage) that the Church opposes her laws of marriage, and the absolute supernatural chastity of her priests and religious.” Thereby she “provides herself with angels and ministers of grace to do her will, accomplish her work, perform her innumerable acts of spiritual and corporeal mercy, and be literally the god-fathers and god-mothers to the orphaned human race, while they obtain for themselves and others countless riches of merit.” Chastity supernatural! Riches of merit countless!

This enforced celibacy, there can be no doubt, has been exceedingly disastrous to the cause of morality. With no desire of dwelling upon facts the bare recital of which produce shuddering disgust, we refer our readers to the confession of a priest in Gavin’s “Master-Key to Popery,” p. 35; to those of a nun, p. 43; and to the “Confessions of a Catholic Priest,” translated by Samuel F. B. Morse. From revelations frequently made, as in the “Memoirs of Sipio De Ricci,” and of “ Lorette,” it would seem that in some instances at least monasteries and nunneries are dens of infamy in comparison with which the temples of ancient Babylon were pure.* Even the halls of the Holy Inquisition were not unfrequently converted into harems. (‘Master-Key to Popery,” pp. 169-188.) In South America and Spain priests are among the most regular frequenters of the “house of her whose feet take hold on hell.” Lest, however, we may be charged with slander, we close by quoting the language of St. Liguori, certainly good authority with Papists: “Among the priests who live in the world, IT IS RARE, VERY RARE, TO FIND ANY THAT ARE GOOD.”

As human nature is much the same everywhere, is it not fair to charge this wickedness—the extent of which is scarcely conceivable by those who have given the subject no examination +—upon the scarlet-colored Beast whose forehead bears this inscription, “ Mystery, Babylon the great, the Mother of harlots and Abominations of the earth?”

* A few months since a motion was made, and carried by a small majority in the British Parliament, to appoint a committee to “ Inquire into Conventual and Monastic Institutions.” It was found there were 69 monasteries and 233 nunneries in which Rome claimed the prerogative to detain men and women against their will, and even transport them to convents upon the continent. Rome is above law.

+ A few extracts—the least objectionable—from the confessions of a priest ( Master-Key to Popery”) we append: “I have served my parish sixteen years, I have in money 15,000 pistoles, and I have given away more than 6000, My money is unlawfully gotten. My thoughts have been impure ever since I began to hear confessions. My actions have been the most criminal of mankind. I have been the cause of many innocent deaths, 1 have procured, by remedies, sixty abortions. We, six priests, did consult and contrive all the ways to satisfy our passions, Everybody had a list of the handsomest women in the parish. I have sixty nepotes alive. But my principal care ought to be of those I had by the two young women I keep at home. Both are sisters, and I had, by the oldest, two boys; and by the youngest one, and one which I had by my own sister is dead.”