Auricular Confession and Popish Nunneries. William Hogan
has seen this for the last twenty years, and has made her preparations accordingly. While this new country was busy in forming her alliances abroad, regulating her commerce, and making her treaties with foreign powers; while she was dividing her states, settling her domestic territorial disputes, regulating their laws, and defining their boundaries; Rome was awake—her spies were amongst you. They walked carefully round the citadel of your freedom; they saw that it was not sufficiently manned, that it was accessible from many points, and accordingly, they poured into it platoon after platoon, regiment after regiment, of the Pope's troops, until they had sufficient force to take possession whenever they deemed it necessary and they now tell Americans that the Pope is their legitimate sovereign, and that Americans are but the "cowardly sons of cowardly pirates." They even go further; they perpetrate the grossest outrages upon every law, moral and civil, in utter defiance of American jurisprudence. They keep their nunneries, or rather seraglios, in the very midst of them, surround them with ramparts, and not only deny to their civil magistrates the right of entrance, but defy them to do so. This every American citizen knows to be a fact; at least, it is known in the city of Boston, where I now write. No one was admitted within the walls of the Ursuline convent, which an indignant populace reduced to ashes, without special permission from the mother abbess—allowing the nuns within to assume the appearance of decency and propriety before they showed themselves, however flagrant their conduct might have been. Time was given to them and to the priests to assume their usual sanctimoni-appearance; but then all the cells were never seen at the same time. Many were reserved for hidden and criminal purposes, and when some of those nuns were apparently cheerful and happy, leaving on the visitor's mind an impression that nothing but happiness reigned throughout the whole nunnery, there were probably some of them, unseen and unheard by strangers, writhing in the agonies of childbirth. This is no fancy sketch. Read Llorenti's History of the Inquisition, and you will find that the picture I give is far short of the reality. Such was the profligacy of friars and nuns, as Llorenti informs us, in the fifteenth century, that the Pope, from very shame, had to take notice of it. He had to invest the inquisition with special power to take cognizance of the matter. The inquisitors, in obedience to orders from their sovereign Pope, entered immediately upon the discharge of their duties. They issued, through their immediate superior, a general order, commanding all women, nuns and lay sisters, married women and single women, without regard to age, station in life, or any other circumstance, to appear before them and give information, if any they had, against all priests, Jesuits, monks, friars and confessors.
The Pope was not fully aware of what he did, when he granted the aforesaid power to the inquisition. He supposed that the licentiousness of his priests did not extend beyond women of ill fame; but in this his holiness was mistaken, as he subsequently discovered. All were obliged to obey the summons of the inquisition. Disobedience was heresy—it was death. The number who made their appearance, to lodge information against the priests and confessors, in the single city of Seville, in Spain, was so great that the taking of depositions occupied twenty notaries for thirty days. The inquisitors, worn out with fatigue, determined on taking a recess, and having done so, they reassembled and devoted thirty days more to the same purpose; but the depositions continued to increase so fast, that they saw no use in continuing them, and they finally resolved to adjourn and quash the inquiry. The city of Seville was found to be one vast area of pollution. But Americans will still say, this occurred in the fifteenth century; no such thing can take place now. The whole social system is different now from what it was then. I tell you again, Americans, that you are mistaken in your inference. Priests, nuns and confessors are the same now that they were then, all over the world. Many of you have visited Paris, and do you not there see, at the present day, a lying-in hospital attached to every nunnery in the city? The same is to be seen in Madrid, and the principal cities of Spain. I have seen them myself in Mexico, and in the city of Dublin, Ireland. And what is the object of those hospitals? It is chiefly to provide for the illicit offspring of priests and nuns, and such other unmarried females as the priests can seduce through the confessional. But it will be said, there are no lying-in hospitals attached to nunneries in this country. True, there are not; but I say, of my own knowledge and from my own experience through the confessional, that it would be well if there were; there would be fewer abortions, there would be fewer infants strangled and murdered. It is not generally known to Americans, that the crime of procuring abortion—a crime which our laws pronounce to be felony—is a common every-day crime in Popish nunneries. It is not known to Americans—but let it henceforward be known to them—that strangling and putting to death infants, is common in nunneries throughout this country. It is not known that this is done systematically and methodically, according to Popish instructions. The modus operandi is this. The infallible church teaches that without baptism even infants cannot go to heaven. The holy church, not caring much now the aforesaid infants may come into this world, but anxious that they should go from it according to the ritual of the church, insists that the infant shall be baptized. This being done, and its soul being thus fitted for heaven, the mother abbess gently takes between her holy fingers the nostrils of the infant, and in the name of the infallible church consigns it to the care of the Almighty; and I beg here to state, from my own knowledge through the confessional, that the father is, in nearly all cases, the individual who baptizes it; thus literally verifying what Erasmus has said in sheer irony—"Patres vacantur et Sepe sunt." I desire to assert nothing, of a character so frightful and disgusting as this, on my own unsupported authority. I could give numberless instances of the truth of my assertions, but let one suffice.
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