Woman, Church & State. Gage Matilda Joslyn

119

For years in Germany the word Pufferkind signified “priest’s bastard.” Montesquieu declared celibacy to be libertinism.

120

Amelot (Abraham Nicholas), born in Orleans 1134, declared the celibacy of the clergy to have been established a law in order to prevent the alienation of the church estate.

121

Pope Pelagius was unwilling to establish the Bishop of Sagola in his see because he had a wife and family, and only upon condition that wife and children should inherit nothing at his death except what he then possessed, was he finally confirmed. All else was to go into the coffers of the church.

122

Cardinal Otto decreed that wives and children of priests should have no benefit from the estate of the husband and father; such estates should be vested in the church.

123

In 1396 Charles VI forbade that the testimony of women should be received in any of the courts of his kingdom.

124

The council of Tivoli, in the Soisonnais, 909, in which twelve bishops took part, promulgated a Canon requiring the oath of seven witnesses to convict a priest with having lived with a woman; if these failed of clearing him he could do so by his own oath.

125

Though the clergy now and then made use both of the Justinian and Theodosian Codes, the former body of law, as such, was notwithstanding from the reign of the Emperor Justinian, or about the year of our Lord 560, till the beginning of the 12th century, or the year of Christ, 1230 or thereabouts, of no force in the west in matter of government. Seldon. —Dissertation on Fleta, p. 112.

126

The codification of the laws under Justinian were largely due to his wife the Empress Theodosia, who having risen from the lowest condition in the empire, that of a circus performer, to the throne of the East, proved herself capable in every way of adorning that high position.

127

By the Code Napoleon, all research into paternity is forbidden. The Christian Church was swamped by hysteria from the third to the sixteenth century. Canon Charles Kingsley. —Life and Letters.

128

Although under law the entire property of the wife became that of the husband upon marriage.

129

A treatise on Chastity, attributed to Pope Sixtus III., barely admits that married people can secure eternal life, though stating that the glory of heaven is not for them.

130

The Romish religion teaches that if you omit to name anything in confession, however repugnant or revolting to purity which you even doubt having committed, your subsequent confessions are thus rendered null and sacrilegious. Chiniquy. —The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, p. 202. Study the pages of the past history of England, France, Italy, Spain, etc., and you will see that the gravest and most reliable historians have everywhere found instances of iniquity in the confessional box which their order refused to trace. Ibid, p. 175. It is a public fact which no learned Roman Catholic has ever denied that auricular confession became a dogma and obligatory practice of the church only at the Lateran Council, in the year 1215, under Pope Innocent III. Not a single trace of auricular confession as a dogma can be found before that year. Ibid, p. 239. Auricular confession originated with the early heretics, especially with Marcius. Bellarmin speaks of it as something to be practiced. But let us hear what the contemporary writers have to say on this question: “Certain women were in the habit of going to the heretic Marcius to confess their sins to him. But as he was smitten with their beauty, and they loved him also, they abandoned themselves to sin with him.” —Ibid, p. 234.

131

Disraeli, who is most excellent authority, declared the early English edition of the Bible contained 6,000 errors, which were constantly introduced and passages interpolated for sectarian purposes or to sustain new creeds; sometimes, indeed, they were added for the purpose of destroying all scriptural authority by the use of texts.

The revisors of the New Testament found 150,000 errors, interpolations, additions and false translations in the King James or common version.

132

Cardinal Wolsey complained to the Pope that both the secular and regular priests were in the habit of committing actions for which if not in orders, they would have been promptly executed.

The claim of direct inspiration from God exists equally among Protestants as among Catholics, and even among the Unitarians, who deny Christ’s divinity. A notable instance of this kind, both because of the high scientific and moral character of the clergyman, took place in the pulpit of the May Memorial Church, Syracuse, N.Y., December 4th, 1887, as reported in the Morning Standard of the 5th.

Luther declared that priests believed themselves to be as superior to the laity in general as males were held superior to females.

133

The legal wife of a priest was termed “An Unhallowed Thing,” while mistresses and concubines were known as “The Hallowed Ones,” “The Honored Ones.” In parts of France, especially in Paris, the latter epithet was common as applied to a priest’s mistress. —Michelet.

134

Heloise sacrificed herself on account of the impediments the church threw in the way of the married clergy’s career of advancement. As his wife he would lose the ascending ladder of ecclesiastical honors, priory, abbacy, bishopric, metropolitane, cardinalate, and even that which was above and beyond all. Milman. —Latin Christianity.

135

In 1558 one Walter Mill was indicted, one article of his accusation being his assertion of the lawfulness of sacerdotal marriage. He was condemned to the stake and burned. Taine. —English Literature.

136

An old doctrine which often turns up again in the middle ages. In the seventeenth century it prevailed among the convents of France and Spain. Michelet. —La Sorcerie, p. 258.

137

They made the vilest use of the doctrine that Christ was born of a Virgin, using this as an example for woman to be followed. —Ibid, p. 259.

138

They must kill sin by being more humble and lost to all sense of pride through sin. This was the Quietist doctrine introduced by a Spanish priest, Molinos, who claimed it as the result of an inner light or illumination. He declared that “Only by dint of sinning can sin be quelled.”

139

“Let not this surprise you,” replied the abbot, “My sanctity is not the less on this account because that abides in the soul, and what I now ask of you is only a sin of the body. Do not refuse the grace heaven sends you.” Boccaccio. —Decameron.

140

Taine —Eng. Lit. I, 363.

141

The unmarried state of the clergy was in itself one of the chief causes of sexual excess. The enormously numerous clergy became a perilous plague for female morality in town and village. The peasants endeavored to preserve their wives and daughters from clerical seduction by accepting no pastor who did not bind himself to take a concubine. In all towns there were brothels belonging to the municipality, to the sovereign, to the church, the proceeds of which flowed into the treasury of proprietors.

142

Draper. —Intellectual Development of Europe, 498.

143

Men in orders are sometimes deceived by the devil that they marry unrighteously and foredo themselves by the adulteries in which they continue. Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical, 437.

There is ground for the assumption that the Canon which bound all the active members of the church to perpetual celibacy, and thus created an impenetrable barrier between them and the outer world, was one of the efficient methods in creating and sustaining both the temporal and spiritual power on the Romish Church. Taine. —English Literature.

144

All steps are necessary to make up the ladder. The vices of men become steps in the ladder one by one as they