CHAPTER II. CELIBACY AND CONFESSIONAL.

Why this rank, rampant immorality among the Roman Catholic Hierarchy? Priestly Celibacy and Auricular Confession, I assert, are chiefly responsible. Priestly celibacy and auricular confession ever have been, and are now, prolific sources of crime and licentiousness. Pope Gregory VII., in the eleventh century, imposed the unnatural law of priestly celibacy, notwithstanding the vehement protests of the priests, the vast majority of whom had wives and legitimate children. This decree, making priestly marriage a wrong and priestly celibacy a virtue, has honeycombed the Roman Catholic Church with corruption. The advantage to the Vatican system of having all ecclesiastics wholly separated from all legitimate connections with their native soil and natural interests, and the fixture in every kingdom of large bodies of men wholly devoted to the objects of the papacy, overpowered the voices alike of nature and of God.

Pope Gregory VII., and his infallible successors, in imposing priestly celibacy, were actuated by political rather than virtuous motives. This was generally admitted. Pope Pius II., himself the father of several children (see pp. 315, 316), once wrote these words: “Marriage has been forbidden to priests for good reasons, but there are better ones for permitting it to them.” Pope Leo XIII. was the father of several children, one of them being the eminent Cardinal Satolli, a man of conspicuous immorality. Bishop O’Connell, of Richmond, Virginia, is considered a reliable authority on the pontifical paternity of Cardinal Satolli.

In 1907 three thousand French priests signed and sent a petition to Pope Pius X., praying for the abolition of priestly celibacy. All of these priests were past the marrying age themselves, but were speaking from the weight of responsibility thrust upon them by confessions. This appeal was consigned to the papal wastebasket.

Dr. Robert E. Speer, the noted secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions, recently wrote:

“The celibacy of the priesthood had seemed to me a monstrous and wicked theory, but I had believed that men who took that vow were true to it, and that, while the Church lost by it irreparably and infinitely more than she gained, she did gain, nevertheless, a pure and devoted, even if a narrow and impoverished, service. But the deadly evidence spread out all over South America, confronting one in every district to which he goes; evidence legally convincing, morally sickening, proves to him that, whatever may be the case in other lands, in South America the stream of the Church is polluted at its fountains.”

Rome is ever and everywhere the same. She prefers priestly celibacy with concubinage to priestly marriage. However, the day is near when the enlightenment of the people through the Public School and the advancement of womanhood, will sound the death-knell of priestly celibacy and auricular confession. Papal intriguing and Hierarchical plotting against the Public School and Woman’s Suffrage are not riddles to those who understand the power of liberal education and emancipated womanhood.

Auricular confession as an absolute essential for eternal salvation is inculcated in the minds of the pupils of the Roman Catholic schools. This doctrine actually increases crime and debauchery by freeing the mind of remorse and by substituting absolution for repentance. It was established, as a portion of the acknowledged system of Rome, scarcely before the thirteenth century; and history attests the fact that it originated in the licentiousness of the Roman clergy in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, and assumed the form of canon law at the Fourth Council of Lateran under Pope Innocent III., A. D. 1215, being confirmed by the Council of Trent, Session XIV.

Moral Theology of the Roman Catholic Church, printed in Latin, a dead language, containing instructions for auricular confession, is so viciously obscene that it could not be transmitted through the mails were it printed in a living language; neither would priests and bishops dare to propound said obscene matter in the form of questions to female penitents if their fathers, husbands and brothers were cognizant of the Satanic evils lurking therein; in fact, they would cause the suppression of auricular confession by penal enactments.

The Supreme Court of Leipzig, Germany, has recently condemned as immoral the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church regarding auricular confession as taught in the writings of St. Alphonsus De Liguori; and the civil authorities of the city of Sienna, Italy, lately forbade within its jurisdiction the sale of his vile writings on the same subject.

The governments of the most Catholic countries are compelled to curb that license which the Court of Rome allows, and to put down those atrocities which have received the patronage and blessing of the most celebrated Pontiffs.

Why, then, do the governments of non-Catholic countries permit the wholesale transmission through the mails of the immoral theology of St. Liguori, Dens, Kenrick, and others, to be retailed by bachelor priests and prelates in live languages to young girls and women in lecherous whispers in the Confessional? By so doing these governments co-operate in the moral assassination of females from the time they prepare to make their first confession (which, according to a recent decree of Pope Pius X., “is about the seventh year, more or less”) till they enter the gates of Purgatory that inexhaustible Klondike of the Roman Catholic clergy.

Confessors search the secrets of the home, and so are worshiped there, and feared for what they know.

If it is the purpose of a state or government to prevent crime and eradicate its causes, the whole of this diabolical system called the Confessional, which is known to worm out the secrets of families, the weaknesses of public men, and thereby get them under control to either silence them or make them active agents in the Roman Catholic cause above all, the debauching of maids and matrons by means of vile interrogatories prescribed by Liguori, and sanctioned by the Church should be abrogated by a national law in every civilized country on the globe.

At the request of a score of prominent priests, associated with me in the crusade, I presented the facts and proofs against a prominent Muldoonite, “Rev. No. 12, A Wolf in Priest’s Clothing,” to the State’s Attorney of Illinois. He looked into some law-books and stated that said crime was a capital offense in the Carolinas, and in other States it was punishable by several years’ imprisonment. He spoke of the great political influence of the Catholic Church, and refused to prosecute, fearing, I presume, that the influence of the Jesuitical Hierarchy would interfere with his political prospects. Soon thereafter he became Governor of his State. Though this Jesuitical influence in politics protects thousands of guilty priests and prelates in America and other non-Catholic countries, yet some of them, through fear of bodily harm, are compelled to flee their dioceses, and resume elsewhere their “sacred labors,” or travel incognito on pension from the pope. Among those who have been compelled to flee to escape chastisement, or perhaps death, from outraged husbands, fathers, brothers, or lynching by the community at large, are:

The Most Rev. Bertram Orth, lately Archbishop of Victoria, British Columbia.
The Right Rev. Thomas F. Brennan, formerly Bishop of Dallas, Texas.
The Right Rev. Timothy O’Mahony, late Auxiliary Bishop of Toronto, Canada, formerly of Australia,
and Cork, Ireland.
The Right Rev. Monsignor Capel, formerly of England.
The Right Rev. Monsignor Fowler, formerly of Sioux City, Iowa, and Philippine Islands.
Rev. W. R. Thompson, formerly of Portland, Oregon.
Rev. Lawrence Erhardt, formerly of Chicago.
Rev. F. J. Knipper, formerly of Troy, Ohio.
Rev. Levis T. McGinn, formerly of Brooklyn, New York.

Some of these were guilty of the crime of sodomy a crime, alas! to which monks, priests, prelates, and even popes, the “Vicars of Christ,” are not strangers.

The number of similar offenders is legion, and no wonder! The vast majority of priests, prelates and other members of the Hierarchy are driven into immorality by priestly celibacy and auricular confession. This wholesale demoralization was one of the principal motives for instituting celibacy and auricular confession. The result accomplished is just what the Vatican machine wanted. This demoralization compels wicked priests, prelates and other members of the Hierarchy, of both sexes, to stand by each other and for the Vatican system, their axiom being “Standum est pro auctoritate per fas out nefas” (Stand by authority, right or wrong). It is the same principle as is found among corrupt politicians, who, for their own protection, are compelled to stand by each other and for their political machine.

Rome, thoroughly aware of its diabolical crimes, for its own protection promotes the shrewdest of her demoralized ecclesiastics to the very highest offices, as will be seen in Part II. She appoints them as members of her Boards of Education, and makes them Superintendents, Principals, Assistant Principals and Teachers of her schools. The nun teachers in the Roman Catholic schools are grossly incompetent, to say the least.

An honest, patriotic editor of a prominent Roman Catholic weekly paper in this country, recently exclaimed:

“Oh, for another Luther, another Savonarola! The time was never so ripe as the present for such an one. If only the true condition of affairs were known, he would not be long in coming to the front. The Roman Catholic school is a curse to the nation, and it is pitiable to think that the education of so many thousands of our boys and girls is in the hands of ignorant, bigoted, superstitious monks and nuns, the vast majority of whom are foreigners many of them driven from their own countries.”

Is it any wonder that Romanism is a menace to the nation?

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