This is from Charles Chiniquy’s book, The God of Rome Eaten by a Rat . If you think persecution of non-Catholics by the Catholic Church is a thing of the past, please read this and think again.

Father Chiniquy. To Mgr. Lynch Archbishop Of Toronto.

St. Anne, Kankakee County, Illinois
June 22, 1884.

To His Lordship Lynch, Archbishop Of Toronto:

My Lord: — The 12th inst., I promised to answer your letter of the 11th, addressed to the Rev. Moderator and to the Ministers of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. I come today, to fullfil my promise, with the help of God.

I had accused your church to believe and say that she had received from God the power to kill us poor heretics. I said that if you did not slaughter us, today, in Canada and elsewhere, it is only because you are not strong enough to do it. I said also, that where the Roman Catholics feel strong enough they do not think it a sin to beat, stone, or kill us when they can do it without any danger to their own precious lives.

I said that your best theologians teach that heretics do not deserve to live, and that your great St. Thomas Aquinas, whom your church has lately put among “the Holy Fathers,” positively declares that one of the most sacred rights and duties of your church is to deliver the heretics into the hands of the secular powers to be exterminated.

As I expected, you have bravely denied what I said on that subject. In your reply you complain that the quotations I made of St. Thomas, on that subject, are not correct.

Here is my answer to your denegations. I have the works of St. Thomas just now on my table. I will copy word for word what he says in Latin and translate it into plain English, respectfully asking your lordship to tell the Canadian people whether or not my translation is correct:

At the page 91, he says:

Your lordship has the just reputation to be an expert man. You then know that in such solemn questions as are discussed just now, the testimony of only one witness does not suffice — I will then give you another testimony to prove the unpalatable truths which I proclaimed in the presence of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, viz: That we poor heretics are condemned to death, and are declared unworthy to live side by side with our Roman Catholic neighbors. That testimony will, no doubt, be accepted as good and sufficient by the people of Canada, if not by you, since it is the testimony of your own infallible church, speaking through the Council of the Lateran, held in 1215:

I could give you thousands of other infallible documents to show the exactness of what I said of the savage, anti-social, anti-Christian, and bloody laws of your Church, in all ages, against the heretics, but the short limits of a letter make it impossible. Those proofs are fully given in my book, “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome,” which is now published. I suppose you will answer me, “Have not heretics passed such bloody laws?” Yes, they have passed such cruel laws; but they have borrowed them from you.

When those nations came out from the dark dungeons of Popery, they could not see the light, at first, in its fulness and in all its beauty. It took some time before they could cure themselves from the putrid leprosy which centuries of life inside the walls of the modern Babylon had engendered everywhere. But you know as well as I do that these remnants of Popery have been repudiated more than a century ago by all the Christian churches. Every year since it has been my privilege to be a Presbyterian, I have heard a constant and unanimous protest against those laws of blood and persecutions. They are kept in our records only as a memorandum of the bottomless abyss into which the people were living when submitted to the Pope. But you know, well, my lord, that all those laws of blood and death have been sanctioned in your last Council of the Vatican in your Church. It was declared, then, that you are forever damned if you have any doubts about the rights and duty of your Church to punish the heretics by bodily punishment.

But, my lord, let us forget, for a moment, the numberless and undeniable proofs which I might bring to the remembrance of your lordship, to make you blush for having denied what I said about the un-manly, un-Christian principles which regulate the Roman Catholic Church towards the Protestants, when you have your opportunity. The providence of God has just put me in possession of a fact too public to be ignored even by you.

You know how the Roman Catholics of Quebec have given the lie, with a vengeance to your denials. You know how more than 2,000 good Roman Catholics came with sticks and stones to kill me, the 11th of this month, because I had preached in a Presbyterian Church on the text, “What must I do to have eternal life?” More than one hundred stones struck me, and if I had not providentially had two heavy cloth overcoats, one to protect my shoulders and the other put around my head to weaken the force and weight of those stones, I would surely have been killed on the spot. But though I was protected by those overcoats, my head and shoulders are still as a jelly and cause me great suffering. A kind friend, Mr. Zotique Lefebvre, B.C.I., who heroically put himself between my would-be-murderers and me, to protect my life at the risk of his own, came out from the broken carriage with six bleeding wounds on his face.

The city of Quebec is known to be the most Roman Catholic city in America, and perhaps in the whole world, without excepting Rome itself. Its population has the well earned reputation to be moral, peaceful, respectable, and religious, as they understand those words among the Roman Catholics. The people who stoned me were not a gathering of a low- bred mob; it was composed of well-dressed men, many with gold spectacles: it was not composed of drunkards; there was not a single drunken man seen by me there; they were not of course, what is called “liberal Catholics,” for those “liberal Catholics,” though born in the Church of Rome, have a supreme contempt for the dogmas, practices, and teachings of the priests. Those “liberal Catholics” who, thanks be to God, are fast increasing, are only nominally Catholics — they remain there because their fathers and mothers were so; because also, they want to attract the people to their stores, sell their pills, or desire to be elected to such and such offices by the influence of the priests. They laugh at your miter for they know that it is nothing but the old bonnets of the priests of Bacchus, representing the head of a fish. Those liberal Catholics are disgusted with the bloody laws and practices of the Church of Rome; they would not for anything, molest, insult, or maltreat a heretic. Those liberal Catholics are in favor of liberty and conscience. But the clergy hate and fear them. Had this class of liberal Catholics been numerous in Quebec, I would not have had any trouble. But Quebec is, with a very few exceptions, composed of true, real, sincere, devoted Catholics. They believe sincerely, with your grand St. Thomas, and with your Roman Catholic Church, that heretics like Chiniquy have no right to live; that it is a good work to kill them.

This riot of Quebec, seen with the light of the teachings of St. Thomas, the Councils of Lateran, Constance and the Vatican, show that your letter to the General Assembly of our Presbyterian Church is one of the greatest blunders that your lordship has ever made. The dust that you wanted to throw in the eyes of my Presbyterian brethren is all on your face, today, as dark, hideous spots. Your friends sincerely feel for your misfortune.

For, my lord, there is a voice in the stones thrown at me; there is a voice in the bruises that cover my shoulders and my head, there is a voice also in the blood shed by the friend who saved my life at the peril of his own, which speaks louder and more eloquently than you, to say that you have failed in your attempt to defend your church against what I said at the General Assembly.

That you may better understand this, and that you may be a little more modest hereafter on that subject, I send you by the hands of the Venerable Secretary of our General Assembly, the Reverend Mr. Reid, D.D., one of the hundreds of stones which wounded me, with a part of the handkerchief reddened with the blood of Mr. Zotique Lefebrve, B.C.I., who received six wounds on his face, when heroically standing by me in that hour of supreme danger for my life. Please look at that stone, look at that blood also; they will teach you a lesson which it is quite time for you and all the priests to learn. They will tell you that your Church of Rome is the same today as she was when she slaughtered the hundreds of thousands of Piedmontese with the sword of France; that stone and that blood will tell you what every one knows, among the disciples of the Gospel, that your church of today is the very same church which planned the massacres of St. Bartholomew, the gunpowder plot, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the deaths of more than half a million of French Huguenots on their way to exile. That stone and that blood will tell you that your church today, is the same as she was when she lighted the five thousand auto-da-fes, where ten million martyrs lost their lives in all the great cities of Europe, before God raised the German giant who gave it the deadly blow you know.

Please, my lord, put that stone and that blood in one of the most conspicuous places of your palace, that you may look at them when the devil will come again to throw you into some ignominious and inextricable slough, as the one into which you fell in your courageous but vain attempt to refute me. When that father of lies will try again to make use of your pen to deny the bloody deeds of your church, you will tell him, “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written in’ our most approved book of theology, St. Thomas, that ‘we must exterminate all the heretics.’ Get thee hence, Satan; for you will not any more to induce me to call old Chiniquy insane, for saying that our church is bloody as ever; for it is written in the Council of Lateran that those who arm themselves for the extermination of heretics are as blessed by God as those who went formerly to the rescue of the Holy Land.”

Yes, my lord; keep that stone and that blood before your eyes, and when I or somebody else will again warn the disciples of the Gospel against the dangers ahead from Rome you will not compromise yourself any more by writing things which are not only against all the records of history, but against the public teachings of all your popes, your councils and your theologians.

With that blood before your eyes, the devil will lose much of his power over you and be forced to give up his old tactics of making you deny, deny, deny, the most evident facts, and the most unimpeachable records of history.

My dear Bishop Lynch, before taking leave of you this day, allow me to ask a favor from your lordship. If you grant it, I will retract what I have said of the anti-social and anti-Christian laws and practices of your Church.

Let your lordship say anathemas to the Councils of Constance and Lateran for the decrees of banishment and death they passed over all those who differed in religion from them. Tell us in plain and good English, that you condemn those Councils for the burning of John Huss, and the blood they caused to be shed all over Europe, under the pretext of religion; tell us that those Councils were the greatest enemies of the Gospel, that instead of being guided by the spirit of God, they were guided by the spirit of Satan, when they caused so many millions of men, women, and children to be slaughtered for refusing to obey the Pope.

And when you will have condemned the action of the depraved men who composed those Councils, you will honestly and bravely declare that your Thomas Aquinas, instead of being a saint, was a bloody monster, when he wrote that the Church of Christ is to deliver the heretics to the secular powers to be exterminated.

Tell us also, that the present Pope Leo XIII. ought to be the object of the execration of the whole world for having lately ordered that the bloody monster’s theology should be taught in all the colleges, academies, seminaries, and universities of the Church of Rome, all over the world, as the best, truest, and most reliable exponent of the doctrines of the Church of Christ.

If you grant me the favor I ask, we will believe that your lordship was honest when you denied what I said of the savage, cruel and diabolical laws and practices of the Church of Rome towards the heretics. But if you refuse to grant my request, we will believe that you are still, in heart and will, submitted to those laws and practices, and that you tried to deceive, after having deceived yourself, when you presented your bloodthirsty church with the rose colors we find in your letter to the General Assembly.

In my next, I will give you the proofs of what I said about the idolatry of your church; and with the help of God, I will refute what you said to defend her practices.

Truly yours,

C. Chiniquy.

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