XXIX. THE POST-TRIDENTINE CHURCH
The great council, on which so long had hung the hopes of the Christian world, had at last been held. The reformation of the church, postponed by the skilful policy of the popes, had been reached in the closing sessions, and had been hurriedly provided for. As we have seen, the regulations which concerned the morals of the clergy were sufficient for their purpose, if only they could be enforced, yet as they were but the hundredth repetition of an endeavor to conquer human nature, which had always previously failed, even those who enacted them could have felt little faith in their efficacy. August Baumgartner, the Bavarian ambassador, in his address to the council, June 27th, 1562, had alluded to the prevailing belief that any comprehensive effort to enforce the chastity required by the canons would result in driving the mass of the Catholic clergy over to Protestantism.[1412] Since continence was held by them to be impossible, it was thought that they would prefer to marry their concubines as Lutherans rather than give them up as Catholics. Possibly the fear of such untoward result may explain the slender effect which can be discerned from a scheme of reform so laboriously reached and so pompously heralded as the panacea for the woes which were destroying the church.
Although Catherine de Medicis and her sons refused to allow the council to be formally published in France, yet she permitted its decrees to be freely circulated, and her bishops were at liberty to adopt them as the code of discipline in their dioceses.[1413] The difficulties raised by the Emperor Maximilian on the score of priestly celibacy were met with a vigor on the part of Pius IV. which savored of the thirteenth rather than the sixteenth century. Philip II., after some hesitation, ordered the reception of the council in all his dominions, which extended from Naples to the North Sea;[1414] and Poland, despite some opposition from an ambitious prelate, submitted to it before the year 1564 was ended.[1415]
As an authoritative exposition of the law of the church of Christ, conceived and elaborated under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and commanded for implicit observance by the Vicegerent of God; as the expression of the needs and wants of the Catholic faith, wrought by the concentrated energy and wisdom of the leading doctors of Christendom, and transmitted for practical application through the wondrous machinery of the Catholic hierarchy, it should have had an immediate influence on the evils which it was intended to eradicate. Those evils had confessedly done much to create and foster the schism under which the church was reeling; their magnitude was admitted by all, and no one ventured to defend or to palliate them. Their removal was acknowledged to be a necessity of the gravest character, and every adherent of Catholicism was bound to lend his aid to the good work. What, then, was accomplished by the Council which had for so long a period labored ostensibly with the object of restoring Latin Christianity to its primitive purity?
Pius IV. rested satisfied with promulgating and confirming the decrees of the council, and waited to see them produce their destined effect. In 1566, however, he was succeeded by Pius V., whose experience as grand inquisitor had doubtless rendered him familiar with the prevailing neglect of ecclesiastical discipline, while his unbending temper made him rigorous in his determination to restore it. One of the earliest acts of his pontificate was the publication of a Bull commanding the ordinaries of all churches to put in force the Tridentine canons respecting concubinary priests, thus showing that already they were treated with contempt,[1416] while a special mandate on the subject, addressed to the Archbishop of Salzburg, describes the unchecked corruption of the German priesthood as threatening the speedy destruction of the Catholic religion there.[1417] Two years later he found it necessary to issue another Bull, directed against darker crimes, the deplorable prevalence of which can hardly be attributed to any additional and unaccustomed vigor in removing the female companions of the clergy,[1418] for the Archbishop of Salzburg, in reply to a fresh command to reform his church, had replied that he and his suffragans had never ceased to attempt it, but that all their efforts had been fruitless and that he despaired of success.[1419] Even a worse experience befell Bernardt Rasfeldt, Bishop of Munster, who, in his synod of 1566, published a papal brief commanding the dismissal of clerical concubines, for his action roused the fury of his canons to such a degree that they forced him to resign his bishopric and spend the rest of his days in obscurity. He was succeeded by Johann von Hoya, Bishop of Osnabruck and President of the Imperial Chamber, a man distinguished by his birth and learning, but who speedily wearied of the conflict and sought peace by imitating the example of his subordinates.[1420]
In 1571 Pius undertook another subject of reform. Notwithstanding the decree of the council that any action of clerical fathers for the benefit of their offspring should be considered as fraudulent, the transmission of ecclesiastical property to such illegitimate heirs continued almost unchecked, and Pius recognized the necessity of further legislation to diminish the abuse. His Bull on the subject is drawn up with a care and minuteness which show the magnitude of the evil and the extreme difficulty of preventing it.[1421] Nor was there only the need of preserving the possessions of the church; the scandal of sacerdotal families required repression, and all other means having apparently failed, in 1572 another decretal declared that such children were incapable of receiving even the private and patrimonial property of their fathers.[1422] These successive edicts are a full confession that the long-promised reformation was a failure, and that, while the council might regulate doctrine, it was utterly powerless to enforce discipline. The papal fulminations proved equally powerless, and Rome itself apparently winked at contraventions of the rule, which could be rendered profitable by the prerogative of issuing dispensations. In 1610 the Synod of Augsburg found it necessary to declare that it would enforce the Tridentine canons prohibiting the illegitimate sons of priests from holding preferment in their father’s benefices, notwithstanding what dispensations they might produce to the contrary.[1423]
Yet even these legislative labors of the pope are less instructive than the war which he commenced against the courtesans of Rome. If the new enactments could have been expected to command respect, the example should have been set in the Holy City itself, but Pius IV. had allowed the most public and scandalous immorality to flourish unchecked under his immediate supervision. In 1538 the “Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia” had animadverted upon the cynical licentiousness of the Roman clergy in terms which show that not much improvement had taken place since Petrarch’s description of the papal court,[1424] and the thirty years which had intervened had not served to purify it. Pius V. felt the disgrace keenly, and resolved on its suppression. He at first proposed to put an end to the nefarious trade, and to banish all the public women who would not give a pledge of reformation by an immediate marriage. Forced to relinquish this measure as impracticably harsh, he contented himself by restricting their residence to certain houses, and forbade their plying their vocation in the streets by day or night. Although he thus admitted the necessity of the evil, and endeavored to restrain only its public manifestation, even this moderate attempt at reform was deemed insufferable. The clergy were ashamed to offer opposition openly, but found no difficulty in urging the Senate to strenuous resistance. The remonstrance made by that body shows not only the frightful extent of the prevalent immorality, but also the settled conviction that immorality was inseparable from celibacy. It was represented that if the proposed rules were enforced, the prosperity of the city would be destroyed and the rents of houses be reduced to nothing; moreover, it was urged that, amid so vast a number of men condemned to celibacy, if any such restrictions were put in force, it would be impossible to preserve the virtue of the wives and daughters of the citizens. The contest was stubbornly continued until at length Pius was driven to declare that, if any further difficulty were interposed, he would abandon the city.[1425]
In spite of these well-meant but nugatory efforts of Pius, the immorality of the papal court itself and of its highest dignitaries was admitted by a Bull which Sixtus V. promulgated in 1586. In decreeing that no one who had children, even if they were legitimate, should be eligible to the cardinalate, he took care to let the world understand the cause of the restriction by declaring that in no other way could evidence be had of the observance of their vows.[1426]
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If Pius V. met with opposition in the task of purifying the Augean stable of Rome, St. Charles Borromeo, encouraged and stimulated by his example, found himself involved in a more dangerous quarrel when he attempted, in the equally demoralized city of Milan, to enforce respect for the decrees of Trent. In 1569 he undertook to reform the canons of S. Maria della Scala, whose licentious mode of life was a scandal to the faithful. So persistently did they deny their subjection to his archiepiscopal jurisdiction, that, after a long discussion, his only resource for vindicating his authority was excommunication. The contumacious canons were still indisposed to yield, and, assembling in their church, they maltreated his messenger. Thinking that his presence might bring them to reason, he ventured himself to expostulate with them, and found them drawn up in their cemetery, with arms in their hands, and supported by soldiers whom they had hired. On reaching the gate, he dismounted from his mule and advanced towards them with his cross, which he had snatched from his cross-bearer. Unabashed by this symbol at once of religion and authority, the mutinous canons rushed upon him with shouts of “Spagna,” “Spagna,” brandishing their weapons and discharging their fire-arms at the cross in his hands—fortunately without injuring him. Having thus driven him off, they continued for some time in open rebellion, until they were at length obliged to submit, when Pius V. and Philip II. united their power in support of St. Charles.[1427]
Still greater was the peril to which the saint was exposed in his quarrel with the Umiliati. They were a branch of the Benedictine order, founded in 1180 by the Milanese who escaped the destruction of their city by Frederic Barbarossa. Sharing in the general license of the age, the excesses of the Umiliati became so infamous that they surpassed in turpitude the worst exploits of the unbridled youth of the city. Supported by the decretals of Pius, in 1568 St. Charles undertook to reduce the order to the observance of monastic rule. The Umiliati resisted with so much energy and success that, after two years of contest, they were still defiant. Regarding St. Charles as the cause of all their troubles, Girolamo Lignana, Provost of S. Cristoforo di Vercelli, who assumed their leadership in 1570, engaged a monk of the order named Girolamo Donati to murder him. The blackness of the deed was not relieved by the circumstances under which it was attempted. While the holy archbishop was absorbed at midnight in his devotions, Donati stole into the oratory and discharged full upon him an arquebuss loaded with slugs. Some of the missiles struck St. Charles, but rebounded to the floor, leaving him unhurt, and the miraculous nature of his escape was proved by the depth to which others penetrated the walls. At this moment the policy of Philip the Catholic supported the disaffected and rebellious monks, and for some time yet they escaped the retribution due to their many crimes, but at length those concerned in the attempted murder were caught and executed, and the order of the Umiliati was broken up.[1428]
These examples sufficiently show how little the great body of ecclesiastics was disposed to submit to a curtailment of the license which had become traditional, and how little respect was paid either to the commands of the great Œcumenic Council, or to the general and local authorities. It is easy to imagine that few prelates were so disposed to court martyrdom as the saintly Charles, and that churches with less conscientious pastors easily found means to purchase or compel exemption from the laws which bound them to morality. In fact, President d’Espeisses, in his memorial presented to Henry III. in 1583, against the publication of the council in France, drew one of his arguments from the greater corruption of the Italian church, where, though the council was received without demur, yet none of its orders reforming the morals of the clergy received the least attention.[1429] That the Tridentine canons in this respect were wholly inefficacious throughout Italy, and that the officials, with rare exceptions, did not venture to enforce them, can indeed be seen in the series of provincial councils held during the remainder of the century, from Lombardy to Naples.
The papacy had succeeded in crushing the reformers who had responded in so many Italian cities to the uprising in Germany; it had then convoked and managed at its will the great Congress of Catholic Christendom which was to put an end at once and forever to all the evils which had led to the schism; it had every opportunity and every motive for vindicating itself from the aspersions of its enemies, and yet we see it at once recur to the old machinery of local councils enacting canons whose frequency and wordy severity are the inverse measure of their efficiency. Had the promises of reform so liberally made been possible in their fulfilment, there had been no need of further legislation. A convocation of the ecclesiastics of each province to receive and publish the decrees of Trent would have been all-sufficient. When, therefore, we see the endless iteration with which the guilty clergy were threatened with the Tridentine canons, and with other new or revivified penalties—as at the councils of Milan in 1565 and 1582,[1430] and at those of Manfredonia in 1567, of Ravenna in 1568, of Urbino in 1569, of Florence in 1573, of Naples in 1576, of Consenza in 1579, of Salerno in 1596, of S. Severino in 1597, and of Melfi in 1597[1431]—we can only conclude that the evil was irremediable, in spite of the well-meant efforts to suppress it, or to throw off the responsibility of its existence.
In fact, the manner in which the council of Trent was greeted by the clergy may be judged from its treatment in the archiepiscopate of Utrecht. Though Philip II. had authoritatively ordered its reception in 1565, we find the Duke of Alva in May, 1568, issuing his commands to the prelates of the five churches of Utrecht to offer no further opposition to it. Even so stern a ruler could not obtain immediate obedience, however, to so obnoxious a series of regulations, and they responded by pleading their ancient privileges. This availed them little, for in June he replied that his instructions were positive, and he proceeded to enforce them by sending royal commissioners to the province, empowered to carry them out. In July, therefore, the Archbishop assembled his clergy and in conjunction with the commissioners issued a series of regulations designed to give effective force to the canons of the council. Visiting nunneries and haunting taverns, joining in dances and hunting and indecent songs were forbidden. The clergy were ordered to shave their beards and to give up their concubines, whom they were not to retake or to replace. Even yet they did not yield, but while they were ashamed to claim the right to keep their female companions, they demurred as to the sacrifice of their beards, and the Archbishop was obliged to issue another peremptory command.[1432]
Throughout the whole extent of Central Europe the Tridentine canons met with a like slackness of obedience. Even the question of sacerdotal marriage, which had been raised by the council to the dignity of a point of faith, was stubbornly contested, and was not yielded until after a protracted struggle.
In 1569 we find the synod of the extensive and important province of Salzburg virtually dividing its clergy into two classes—those who haunt the taverns under pretext of getting their meals, but really for the purpose of indulging in drunken riots with their parishioners, and those who keep houses, with concubines under the guise of female servants, whom they secretly marry, and who are openly known by their husbands’ names. To meet this condition of affairs, the synod devised an elaborate system by which the richer clergy were directed to keep as domestics respectable middle-aged married women with their husbands, while the poorer ecclesiastics were to club together for the same purpose.[1433] This expedient proved as fruitless as its predecessors, for in 1572 Gregory XIII. complained to the archbishop that in many places priests who were known to be married were permitted by their bishops to celebrate Mass and to handle the sacred elements.[1434] In spite of all this the evil continued unabated, and in 1616 the Archbishop of Salzburg, in his instructions for a general visitation, ordered that all priests should remove their concubines to a distance of at least six miles, and should not allow their illegitimate children to live openly with them, except under special license from him.[1435]
In 1565, Anthony, Archbishop of Prague, promulgated the council of Trent in his provincial synod. He was a man of more than ordinary vigor; he had been the imperial orator at Trent, understood fully the views of the council, and was not likely to underrate either their importance or their authority. Armed with the Tridentine canons, he set actively to work and instituted a very thorough system of inquisitorial visitations, which ought to have succeeded if success were possible. Yet, after the lapse of thirteen years, in a special mandate issued by him in 1578, he deplores the obstinate blindness of many of his clergy, who still believed, with the heretics, that marriage was not incompatible with priesthood, while those who did not marry were guilty of the less dangerous error of maintaining concubines and children on the revenues of their benefices.[1436]
The same wilful ignorance apparently existed in the diocese of Wurzburg, for Bishop Julius, in 1584, found it necessary, in his episcopal statutes, to discountenance clerical matrimony and to prove its nullity by laboriously quoting innumerable canons and decretals; and he even condescended to remind his priesthood that in taking orders they had willingly and knowingly entered into an engagement of continence, by the consequences of which they must be prepared to abide.[1437]
A provincial synod of Gnesen, of which the date is uncertain, but which was probably held in 1577, deplored the insane audacity displayed by ecclesiastics in marrying, and threatened them with the Tridentine anathema.[1438] This warning appears to have been completely disregarded, for the Bishop of Breslau, a suffragan of the metropolis of Gnesen, in opening his diocesan synod in 1580, still complained that many of his clergy were guilty of this perversity, and he was at some pains to disavow any complicity with it, or any connivance at the licentiousness which was prevalent among the unmarried.[1439] In 1591 the synod of Olmutz asserted that many clerks in holy orders contracted pretended marriages, and were not ashamed of the families growing up publicly around them, while others indulged in scandalous concubinage with women, whom they styled house-keepers or cooks. In endeavoring to put an end to this state of affairs, the synod manifested its estimation of the morals of the priesthood by renewing the hideous suggestions which we have seen in the tenth and twelfth centuries, for pastors were allowed to have near them the female relatives authorized by the Nicene canons, but, in view of the assaults of the tempter, were prudently advised not to let them reside in their houses.[1440] The disregard of the Tridentine canon continued, and as late as 1628, at the synod of Osnabruck, the orator who opened the proceedings inveighed in the vilest terms against the female companions of the clergy, who not only occupied the position of wives, but were even dignified with the title.[1441]
Even in Spain, under Philip II., the new ideas had penetrated, and priestly marriages became sufficiently numerous to render it necessary for the Inquisition to add to its “Edict of Denunciations,” which was read during Lent in every church, a command to reveal to the authorities any case of marriage on the part of monks or of ecclesiastics in holy orders.[1442]
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We have seen above that the highest authorities in the church did not hesitate openly to attribute the origin and success of the Reformation to the scandalous corruption of the ecclesiastical body. The council of Trent had not resulted in removing the scandal, and clear-sighted prelates were not wanting who proclaimed that the same causes continued to operate and to produce the same effect. Anthony, Archbishop of Prague, in his synod of 1565, took occasion to declare that the misfortunes of the church were attributable to the dissoluteness of the clergy, and that the extirpation of heresy could best be effected by reforming the depraved morals and filthy lives of ecclesiastics.[1443] At the council of Salzburg, in 1569, Christopher Spandel, in the closing address, asked the assembled prelates what title was more contemptible or more odious than that of priest in consequence of the license in which the clergy as a body indulged.[1444] The clergy of France, assembled at Melun in July, 1579, when addressing Henry III. with a request for the publication of the council of Trent, assured him that the heresy which afflicted Christendom was caused by the corruption of the church, and that it could only be eradicated by a thorough reformation.[1445] Though the Inquisition took care that Spain should not be much troubled by heretics, yet the synod of Orihuella, in 1600, declared that the concubinage practised by ecclesiastics was the principal source of popular animosity and complaint against them.[1446] These complaints were general. In 1599, Cuyck, Bishop of Ruremonde, published a work aimed at concubinary priests, in which he assured them that they and their predecessors were the cause of the ruin and devastation of the Netherlands for the last thirty years, for their vices had led to the contempt felt for the clergy, and thus to the heresy which had caused the civil wars. Those who kept their vows he asserts to be as rare as the grapes that can be gleaned after the vintage or the olives left after gathering the crop; but the only remedy he can suggest is increased vigilance and severity on the part of the prelates.[1447] Evidently, the Tridentine canons had thus far been a failure. In 1609, at the synod of Constance, the Rev. Dr. Hamerer, in an official oration to the assembled prelates, deplored the continued spread of heresy, which he boldly told them was caused by the perpetually increasing immorality that pervaded all classes of the priesthood. The Reformation had begun, had derived its strength, and was still prospering through their weakness, which rendered them odious to the people, and made the Catholic religion a by-word and a shame.[1448] In 1610, the Bishop of Antwerp, in a synodal address, agreed with Bishop Cuyck in attributing the evils which had so grievously afflicted the church of Flanders for nearly half a century, to the same cause, and, while recounting the various successive efforts at internal reform made since the council of Trent, he pronounced each one to have been a failure in consequence of the incurable obstinacy of the clergy.[1449] Damhouder, a celebrated jurisconsult of Flanders, whose unquestioned piety and orthodoxy gained for him the confidence of Charles V. and Philip II., does not hesitate to speak of the clergy of his time as men who rarely lived up to their professions, and who as a general rule were scoundrels distinguished for their indulgence in all manner of evil.[1450] In a similar mood the Bishop of Bois-le-Duc, in opening his synod of 1612, declared that the scandalous lives of the ecclesiastics were a source of corruption to the laity and a direct encouragement of heresy.[1451] So, in 1625, the synod of Osnabruck gave as its reason for endeavoring to enforce the Tridentine canons that the true religion was despised on account of the depraved morals of its ministers, whose crimes were a sufficient explanation of the stubbornness of the heretics. So little concealment of their frailty was thought necessary that they openly enriched their children from the patrimony of the church, and decked their concubines with ornaments and vestments taken from the holy images, even as we have seen was the custom among the Anglo-Saxons of the tenth century.[1452]
The Thirty Years’ War proved a more effectual bar to the spread of heresy than these fruitless efforts to cure the incurable malady of the church. After the Peace of Westphalia, there was no further need to appeal to the dread of proselyting Lutheranism as a stimulus to virtue, but still the same process of reasoning appears in exhortations to regain the forfeited respect of the community. Thus, in 1652, the Bishop of Munster expressed his horror at the obstinacy with which, in spite of fines, edicts, and canons, his clergy persisted in retaining their concubines, and he declared that the discordance between the professions and the practice of the priesthood rendered them a stench in the nostrils of the people and destroyed the authority of religion itself;[1453] and in 1662 the synod of Cologne deplored that the notorious want of respect felt for the ministers of Christ was the direct result of their own immorality.[1454] A doctrine even sprang up to the effect that it was not requisite to force a concubinarian to eject his companion if she was useful to him in his housekeeping or if it would be difficult for him to obtain another servant; and this became sufficiently formidable to entitle it to a place among the errors of belief formally condemned by the Roman Inquisition in its decree of March, 1666.[1455]
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In France the influence of the Tridentine canons had been equally unsatisfactory. At a royal council held in 1560, which resolved upon the assembly of the States at Orleans, Charles de Marillac, Bishop of Vienne, declared that ecclesiastical discipline was almost obsolete, and that no previous time had seen scandals so frequent or the life of the clergy so reprehensible.[1456] From the proceedings of the Huguenot Synod of Poitiers, in 1560, it is evident that priests not infrequently secretly married their concubines, and, when the woman was a Calvinist, her equivocal position became a matter of grave consideration with her church.[1457] The only result of the Colloquy of Poissy, in 1561, was that Catherine de Medicis prevailed upon the bishops to present a request to the king asking him to use his influence with the pope to concede the marriage of priests and the use of the cup by the laity. Means were found, as we have seen, to prevent the former of these demands from being made, while the latter, when presented, was peremptorily refused.[1458] In the existing condition of affairs, the council of Trent could not reasonably be expected to effect much, for, as the orthodox Claude d’Espence informs us, the French prelates, like the Germans, were in the habit of collecting the “cullagium” from all their priests and informing those who did not keep concubines that they might do so if they liked, but must pay the license-money, whether or no.[1459] In 1564, the Cardinal of Lorraine, not long after his return from the council, held a provincial synod at Rheims, where he contented himself with declaring that the ancient canons enjoining chastity should be enforced.[1460] The next year, 1565, a synod held at Cambray reduced the penalties to a minimum, and afforded every opportunity for purchasing immunity, by enacting that those who consorted with loose women, and who remained obdurate to warnings and reprehension, should be punished at the pleasure of the officials.[1461] In two years more the same council was fain to ask the aid of the secular arm to remove the concubines of its clergy[1462]—a course again suggested as late as 1631.[1463] The terms in which Claude, Bishop of Evreux, at his synod of 1576, announced his intention of taking steps to eject those who for the future should persist in their immorality show not only that such measures were even yet an innovation, but also indicate little probability of their being successful.[1464] The council of Rheims, in 1583, while proclaiming that the Tridentine canons shall be enforced on all concubinary priests, manifests a reasonable doubt as to the amount of respect which they will receive in threatening that those who are contumacious shall be subdued by the secular arm.[1465] The council of Tours, in the same year, deplores that the whole ecclesiastical body is regarded with aversion by the good and pious on account of the scandals perpetrated by a portion of them. To cure this evil, the residence of suspected women, even when connected by blood, is forbidden, as well as of the children acknowledged to be sprung from such unions, and various penalties are denounced against offenders.[1466] The council of Avignon, in 1594, declares that the numerous decrees relative to the morals and manners of the clergy are either forgotten or neglected, and then proceeds to forbid the residence of suspected women.[1467] That of Bordeaux, in 1624, earnestly warns the clergy of the province not to allow their sisters and nieces to live in their houses, and especially not to sleep in the same room with them;[1468] and various other synods held during the period repeated the well-known regulations on the subject, which are only of interest as showing how little they were respected.[1469]
No one, in fact, who is familiar with the popular literature of France during that period can avoid the conviction that the ecclesiastical body was hopelessly infected with the corruption which, emanating from the foulest court in Christendom, spread its contagion throughout the land. If Rabelais and Bonaventure des Periers reflect the depravity which was universal under Francis I., Brantôme, Beroalde de Verville and Noël du Fail continue the record of infamy under Catherine de Medicis and her children.[1470] The genealogy of sin is carried on by Tallemant des Réaux, Bussy-Rabutin, and the crowd of memoir writers who flourished in the Augustan age of French literature. Into these common sewers of iniquity it is not worth our while to penetrate; but, when the high places in the hierarchy were filled with men to whom the very name of virtue was a jest, we need not hesitate to conclude that the humbler members of the church were equally regardless of their obligations to God and man.
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It is evident from all this that the standard of ecclesiastical morals had not been raised by the efforts of the Tridentine fathers, and yet a study of the records of church discipline shows that with the increasing decency and refinement of society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the open and cynical manifestations of license among the clergy became gradually rarer. It may well be doubted, nevertheless, whether their lives were in reality much purer. A few spasmodic efforts were made to enforce the Nicene canon, prohibiting the residence of women, but they were utterly fruitless, and were so recognized by all parties; and the energies of the arch-priests and bishops were directed to regulating the character of the handmaidens, who were admitted to be a necessary evil. The devices employed for this purpose were varied, and repeated with a frequency which shows their insufficiency; and it would be scarce worth our while to do more than indicate some sources of reference for the curious student who may wish to follow up the reiteration which we have traced already through so many successive centuries.[1471] Among them, however, one new feature shows itself, which indicates the growing respect paid to the appearance of decency—complaints that concubines are kept under the guise of sisters and nieces.
That the monastic orders had profited more than the secular clergy by the Tridentine reformation may well be doubted. Laurent de Peyrinnis, one of the heads of the Order of Minims, in 1668, issued a code of regulations in which he showed that scandal was more dreaded than sin when he promulgated an exemption from excommunication in favor of those brethren who, when about to yield to the temptations of the flesh, or to commit theft, prudently laid aside the monastic habit.[1472] Another celebrated jurist of the same Order bears testimony to the demoralization of his brethren when he declares that if the severe punishments provided for unchastity by the statutes were enforced they would result in the destruction of all the religious congregations.[1473]
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In the New World the licentiousness of the priesthood, as might be expected, began to vex the infant church as soon as it was organized among the heathen. The earliest synods and councils which were held contain the customary denunciations of concubinage and prohibitions for ecclesiastics to keep their children in their houses, to celebrate their baptisms and nuptials, and to be assisted by them in the ministry of the altar. Many, as we are informed by the first council of Mexico, held in 1555, brought with them from Spain their concubines under the guise of relatives.[1474] For the most part, however, they formed connections with the natives.
In fact, the institution of slavery and the subject populations among whom its ministers were scattered gave rise to fresh problems, which the church sought perseveringly, but vainly, to solve. Thus, in New Grenada, before the conquest was fairly achieved, Bishop Barrios, of Santafé, held his first synod, in 1556, and there, after premising that the fruits of religion among the Indians depended upon the good example of their pastors, he proceeded to prohibit any priest stationed in an Indian town from having any Indian woman residing in his house; his food was to be cooked by men, or, if this was impossible, his female servant must be a married woman, residing with her husband under another roof[1475]—a provision repeated by the synod of Lima in 1585.[1476] A curious experiment in dealing with the troubles arising from slavery is seen in the Mexican canons, which directed that if an ecclesiastic had children by his slave, the ownership of the woman was to be transferred to the church and the children were to be set free. It will be remembered (p. 178) that in 1022 the church insisted upon the continued servitude of clerical bastards whose mothers were serfs of the church; and the contrast between this and the regulation which proclaimed the freedom of the children as a punishment inflicted upon the father is perhaps the sorriest exhibit that could be made of the character of those who were engaged in spreading the teachings of Christ among the heathen.[1477]
While there can be no doubt that much heroic self-devotion was shown in the efforts made to convert the new subjects of Spain, it is equally unquestionable that a majority of the ecclesiastics who sought the colonies were men of the worst description. The councils held in the several provinces deplore the evil example which they set to their newly converted flocks, and the regulations which were issued time and again against their excesses show the impossibility of keeping them under control. In Peru, for instance, when in 1581 St. Toribio commenced the quarter of a century of labor as Archbishop which worthily won for him the canonization accorded by Benedict XIII. in 1726, two councils had already been held in Lima, one in 1552 and the other in 1567, which had essayed a reformation of morals. He, in turn, lost no time in summoning a provincial council, which assembled in 1583, the decrees of which, in their denunciation of all manner of vices, show how ineffectual the previous efforts had been. The clergy were not disposed to submit tamely to the new restraints which Toribio sought to impose, and, while the active resistance which some of them raised was subdued, the underhand management of others was so far successful that the royal assent to the proceedings of the council was delayed till 1591.[1478] Notwithstanding the activity of Toribio, who, between 1583 and 1604, held three provincial councils and ten diocesan synods, who three times personally visited every portion of his vast archbishopric, and who repeatedly ordered his vicars to send secret reports of concubinary and dissolute priests, he was obliged, in the provincial council of 1601, to content himself with renewing the regulations of 1583, sorrowfully observing that they had received scant obedience, and that consequently the corruption and abuses prevalent among the clergy deprived them of usefulness among their Indian parishioners.[1479] We can thus readily understand the grief with which the honest Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta, a contemporary, after depicting the eager docility with which the natives at first welcomed Christianity, contrasts it with the hatred which sprang up for the very name of Christian when they realized the hopeless wretchedness of their position under their new taskmasters; and the Fray does not conceal the fact that this was partly owing to the character of some of the clergy, while the better ones were disheartened and discharged their trusts mechanically, without expectation of accomplishing good.[1480] This condition of morals did not improve with time. In his official report of 1736, the Marques del Castel-Fuerte, Viceroy of Peru, remarks that the greater portion of those of Spanish blood born in the colonies embraced an ecclesiastical life, as offering an easier and more assured career than any other. Surrounded by their Indian subjects, the pastors lived in luxury and license, which their superiors did little or nothing to check. In 1728 the civil power was ordered to make an investigation into the morals of the priesthood, and especially to designate those whose concubinage was open and notorious—an invasion of the sacred immunities of the church which provoked a storm against the secular authorities, although only an examination was proposed, and there was no attempt to be made of conviction or punishment.[1481]
That the monastic establishments shared in the general dissoluteness we may fairly conclude when we see the precautions which St. Toribio found necessary to preserve the purity of the spouses of Christ. Thus one regulation provides that no ecclesiastic shall visit a nun without a written permission, to be granted only by the Archbishop himself, or his Provisor; and so little confidence did he feel in the guardians whom he himself appointed, that he directs that the official visitors who inspected the nunneries should not enter them without some special and urgent reason.[1482]
A curious rule adopted by the first council of Mexico in 1555 shows how much more scandal was dreaded than sin. In order, as it says, to avert danger and infamy from the clerical order and from married women, it prohibits the Fiscal, or prosecuting officer, from taking cognizance of cases of adultery committed by ecclesiastics, unless the husband be a consenting party, or the adulterer makes public boast of it, or the fact is so notorious that it cannot be passed over in silence; and even when action thus is not to be avoided, in no case is the name of the woman to be mentioned in the proceedings. The Provisors, however, are not forbidden to take notice of such crimes, but are allowed to settle them, if they can, with all due discretion.[1483] As might be expected these regulations, by giving practical immunity, led to an increase in crime, and the third council of Mexico in 1585 tells us that many of the clergy indulged in it, in preference to ordinary concubinage, in the confidence that they would not be prosecuted; but the amended rule adopted by the Council to meet this trouble differs so little from its predecessors, that we may reasonably doubt whether it was followed by any diminution in the evil.[1484] And this, judging from Rivera’s notes to his edition of 1859, is the existing state of ecclesiastical law in Mexico,[1485] although the Tridentine canon specially orders the Episcopal Ordinaries to proceed ex officio in all such cases, even of laymen.[1486]
* * * * *
The church of the post-Tridentine period began to find a darker and more dangerous sin attract closer attention than of old, and call for more serious efforts to prevent its offending the awakened consciousness of the faithful. The power of the confessional, one of the most effective instrumentalities invented by the ingenuity of man for enslaving the human mind, was peculiarly liable to abuse in sexual relations. No one can be familiar with the hideous suggestiveness of the penitentials without recognizing how fearfully frequent must be the temptations arising between confessor and penitent, while their respective relations render seduction comparatively easy, and unspeakably atrocious.[1487] To deprive such relations of danger requires the confessor to be gifted with rare purity and holiness, and when these functions were confided to men such as those who composed the sacerdotal body, as we have seen it throughout the Middle Ages, the result was inevitable.
The scandals of the confessional were no new source of tribulation to the church and the people. No sooner had the early custom of public and lay confession tended to fall into the hands of the priesthood than it was found necessary to call attention to the dangers thence arising. The first council of Toledo, in 398, forbids any familiarity between the virgins dedicated to God and their confessors.[1488] About the year 500, Symmachus calls attention to the spiritual affinity contracted between the confessor and his penitent, rendering the latter his daughter; he alludes to Silvester as having denounced guilty relations between them, and proceeds to decree not only deposition in such cases, but life-long penitence.[1489] As sacerdotal confession gradually became customary, a decretal was forged—whether to give additional authority to the practice, or to impress upon the minds of confessors the necessity of prudence—by which the name of Celestin I. was used for a regulation confiscating all the possessions of the female delinquent and confining her in a monastery for life, while the seducer was warned that such sin with his spiritual daughter amounted to a grave case of adultery, for which he must be deposed and undergo penance for twelve years, provided, always, that the facts had become known to the people,[1490] thus indicating that scandal rather than sin was the danger most dreaded.
It was inevitable that this trouble should continue, as we have seen it do throughout the whole history of a celibate priesthood.[1491] That it was the subject of frequent and indignant reprehension on the part of those who sought to elevate and purify the church we may well believe. Calixtus II. freely assumes the perdition of the priest who thus betrays the sacred confidence reposed in him, denouncing him as a lion devouring sheep, as a bear attacking a traveller who has lost his way, as a fowler spreading lures for birds and attracting them with sweet sounds, while the woman he treats not as a partner in guilt, but as an unfortunate who finds destruction where she is seeking salvation.[1492] It is observable here that the fault is assumed to lie exclusively with the confessor, and such is likewise the case in the eloquent denunciations of Savonarola, who declares that the Italian cities are full of these wolves in sheep’s clothing, who are constantly seeking to entice the innocent into sin by all the arts for which their spiritual directorship affords so much scope.[1493] The extent to which the evil sometimes grew may be guessed from a case mentioned by Erasmus, in which a theologian of Louvain refused absolution to a pastor who confessed to having maintained illicit relations with no less than two hundred nuns confided to his spiritual charge.[1494]
The view which was taken of this crime during the progress of the Reformation is set forth in a work on the Criminal Canon Law printed in Venice in 1543, which intimates that improper relations between a confessor and his penitents are not much worse than ordinary concubinage, but that when they become publicly known they should be severely punished by deprivation and imprisonment, seeing that their notoriety tends to prevent men from allowing their wives and daughters to confess, and exposes the sacrament of penitence to the assaults of the heretics.[1495] It was probably this worldly wisdom which prevented the Council of Trent from alluding specifically to the matter and endeavoring to put an end to a crime so heinous, for assuredly it had not grown less in the ever increasing license of the age. It is rather curious that in Spain, the only kingdom where heresy was not allowed to get a foothold, the trouble seems to have been greatest and to have first called for special remedial measures. Already, in 1556, Paul IV. had addressed a brief to the Inquisitors of Grenada, calling their attention to the frequency of the crime and assuming that confessors who could so abuse their office must hold unorthodox views as to the sacrament of penitence, which rendered them suspect of heresy and thus brought them within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. He therefore instructed the Inquisitors to prosecute such offenders zealously, but it was deemed best not to attract public attention to a matter so delicate, lest the faithful should be deterred from frequenting the confessional. The investigations were accordingly prosecuted in secret, and the criminals were privately punished.[1496]
Enough was discovered to show that the trouble was general, and in 1564 Pius IV. issued a Bull addressed to the Inquisitor General, in which, assuming like his predecessor that the offence must be heretical, he authorized the Holy Office to prosecute it throughout the Spanish dominions, and revoked all immunities which the monastic orders might enjoy exempting them from local jurisdiction.[1497] This brought the subject formally within the scope of the Inquisition which thenceforth took charge of it in those countries blessed with that institution. In some portions of Spain the Inquisitors added the crime of “solicitation” to the list of offences published in their annual “Edict of Denunciation,” which required every one, under pain of excommunication, to denounce to the Holy Office all cases of which he might happen to be cognizant. Gonsalvo relates that in 1563 this was done in Seville, when it brought such a crowd of accusing women to the Inquisition that twenty secretaries were unable to take down the depositions, within the allotted time of thirty days, and the limit had to be extended until it reached the term of four months, causing finally so great a popular ferment and implicating so large a number of ecclesiastics that the attempt had to be abandoned.[1498]
Llorente considers this to be an exaggeration, as is probably the case, but he admits that the Conseyo de la Suprema was led to forbid the inclusion of the offence in the Edict of Denunciation, which greatly diminished the number of accusations, and this prohibition was repeated in 1571, in the hope that through the machinery of the episcopal courts the crime would be suppressed; but this expectation proving illusory, in 1576 the Conseyo ordered the crime to be reinstated in the Edict.[1499]
In 1608 Paul V. seems suddenly to have awakened to the necessity of extending to Portugal the means employed in Spain, and he issued to the Portuguese Inquisitor General a Bull similar in purport to those of his predecessors. Little was accomplished, even in these favored countries, and in 1622 Gregory XV. published a Bull extending to all Christendom the provisions of the previous ones, and granting to the episcopal courts full jurisdiction over all accused of “solicitation,” notwithstanding whatever immunities they might otherwise enjoy; a single witness was pronounced sufficient, when supported by circumstantial evidence, and the punishment of those convicted was left to the discretion of the judge, with the suggestion that it might extend to perpetual imprisonment or condemnation to the galleys for life, or even abandonment to the secular arm—that Inquisitorial euphuism for the faggot and the stake.[1500] Apparently these Bulls received slender attention, for in 1633 a special decree directs that they shall be read at least once a year and an emphatic warning be given in a chapter of each order, and sworn evidence of the fact be transmitted to the congregation of the Inquisition at Rome.[1501] Even this was but partially successful. Gregory’s Bull was not published in either France or Germany, and for a century or more its observance throughout those regions depended entirely upon such bishops, of whom there were but few, who might see fit to promulgate its regulations in their individual dioceses;[1502] although the established rule of the church protected the criminal by not permitting a woman who had been seduced in the confessional to name her seducer to another confessor.[1503]
Even in the kingdoms where the Bull was legally received and published, its provisions in practice seem to have been held as directed almost exclusively against those who might be foolish enough to incur suspicion of heresy by asserting that they were not aware of their guilt. While the Holy Office stretched its power to convict and punish all the wretched heretics whom it could bring within its grasp, it was singularly tender of those whom successive popes denounced as the worst of offenders. In a learned work on the subject, the author, an official of the Portuguese Inquisition, urges the caution requisite in proceedings which affect the honor of ecclesiastics, bringing scandal and grief to the faithful and glory and joy to the heretic. As the accused had all presumptions in his favor, since he had been selected for the sacred functions of the confessional, and as women were by nature inconstant, corruptible, deceitful, mendacious, and given to perjury, he concludes that the evidence of a single witness is wholly inconclusive; two witnesses of good character may justify the seclusion of the accused, either in prison or in his own convent or house, but four were necessary to his conviction; he decides adversely the question whether deficiency of evidence can be supplemented by torture; and he cites Potiphar’s wife to caution his brethren against lending too hasty credence to accusations which may be only the revengeful promptings of a baffled tempter.[1504] Casuists were found to argue that the solicitation must occur during the act of confession itself to bring the accused within the words of the papal decrees, which were not applicable even if it took place in the confessional immediately before the woman commenced to confess, or immediately after she had received absolution.[1505] The accused who denied, might be shown the torture, but could not be exposed to it, and if punished, his punishment must be secret, so as not to give rise to popular disquiet.[1506] In Spain, when the local tribunal had agreed upon a sentence, it could not be executed without referring the case and all the evidence to the Conseyo de la Suprema;[1507] but the sentence which was thus so carefully to be considered, was not usually severe. Some instructions on the subject issued in 1577, after premising that there must be neither public penitence nor appearance in an auto de fé, and that the sentence, unlike that of heretics, must be made known only to the ecclesiastics of the place, proceed to state that the penalties to be imposed on the guilty are at the discretion of the Tribunal, except that he is obliged to abjure the implied heresy and is prohibited from hearing confessions in the future. Whether he is to be suspended from administering the other sacraments, or from preaching, and whether he is to be imprisoned or banished from the place of his crime, must depend upon the gravity of the offence. In grave cases, secular priests may be punished by seclusion, or deprivation of function or benefice, or pecuniary fines, with discipline, secret prayers and fasting; and monks may be visited with the discipline, removal from the scene of their misdeeds, suspension or privation of orders, of the privilege of voting in their convents, and relegation to the last place in the choir and refectory.[1508] All this manifests not only a provident care to prevent scandal among the faithful, but a singular tolerance of crime when compared with the severity which characterized the ordinary operations of the Inquisition, in lapses of faith however slight. A man who asserted that simple fornication was not a mortal sin was treated as a heretic and “relaxed” or “reconciled,” with all the tremendous consequent penalties upon him and his posterity; and it is significant in many ways to observe that a culprit guilty of prostituting the confessional to seduce his spiritual daughters was to be punished by being made to take the lowest seat in the choir. This misplaced lenity was more than carried out in practice. According to Llorente, the records of the Inquisition show that not ten per cent. of those accused were convicted; and even when convicted it was not unusual for the convict, through influences brought to bear on the Inquisitors General, to obtain a removal of the interdiction of hearing confessions.[1509] In one case of special atrocity which occurred under the eyes of Llorente himself, the culprit, in addition to the discipline, deprivation of vote, and degradation to the lowest seat in the choir (he had been Provincial of the Capuchins of New Grenada), was condemned to five years’ imprisonment in a convent of his own order—a most inadequate penalty for a man who had seduced thirteen nuns in a convent under his spiritual guardianship.[1510] In the horrible affair of Corella, which occurred in 1743, it is true that the Abbess, Doña Agueda de Luna, died under the torture; and her principal accomplice, Fray Juan de la Vega, after being tortured in his examination, was declared suspect in the highest degree and was confined in the desert convent of Duruelo till his death, but in this case the accused were Molinists, or Illuminati, which of itself rendered them worthy of the stake, and in addition, besides numerous infanticides, they had entered into a pact with Satan.[1511]
The nunneries, indeed, appear to have suffered especially from this cause, particularly when their spiritual directors were monks. This was a complaint of old standing, and the authors of the “Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia,” in 1538, proposed to put an end to the scandals thence arising by prohibiting members of the conventual orders from serving in that capacity, which was to be confided in the future to the Episcopal Ordinaries.[1512] A more partial cure was that suggested in 1627 by Urban VIII. when he granted a special Bull to Christobal de Lobera, Bishop of Cordova, depriving the mendicant orders of their right to papal jurisdiction, and subjecting them to the Ordinary of the diocese in order to put a stop, if possible, to crimes committed by them in the confessional.[1513] These monastic troubles were by no means confined to Spain. When, as we shall see hereafter, the Grand Duke, Leopold of Tuscany, undertook in 1774 to reform the nunneries of his dominions, they had for a century and a half been the scene of the worst disorders, committed by the regular clergy who were their spiritual directors, and Leopold found his principal opposition in the court of Rome itself.[1514] In Provence, the canons of Pignan made no secret of their domination over the bodies as well as over the souls of the nuns of the district, so that in a single year there were sixteen declarations of pregnancy officially made by the latter, who seemed to consider it as one of the duties of their profession. As Michelet remarks, this at least diminished the monastic crime of infanticide, for the children were openly put out to nurse and were generally adopted by their foster-mothers.[1515]
Some statistics, given by Llorente from the archives of the Inquisition, afford a curious commentary upon the influence of monasticism. Comparing the number of accusations brought for this offence with the total census of the secular and regular clergy, he found that one out of every ten thousand secular priests was charged with it, while among the monastic orders the proportion was much greater. The Benedictines, Bernardines, Jeronymites, Premonstratensians, Basilians, Agonizantes, Theatins, and Oratorians, and the canons regular of Calatrava, Santiago, Alcantara, Montesa, St. Juan, and of the Holy Sepulchre showed a proportion of one in every thousand. Among the Carmelites, Augustinians, Mathurins, the Order of La Merced, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Minims of St. Francis de Paul, there was one in every five hundred: one in four hundred among the barefooted orders of the Augustinians, Mathurins, and Fathers of La Merced; and one in two hundred among the barefooted Carmelites, the Alcantarians and the Capuchins.[1516] These results Llorente explains partly by the greater attention paid by some orders to the duties of the confessional, but chiefly by the differences in their rules of discipline. Those who, like the secular priests, had comparative wealth and freedom were able to gratify their passions without resorting to indulgence so dangerous, while those whose vows bound them to poverty and asceticism were most liable to be tempted by the opportunities of the confessional. It was precisely the orders that were most rigid which produced the greatest number of culprits. Another significant fact was that the greater portion of these accusations were brought by nuns, and from this Llorente seeks to explain the small proportion of cases in which the accused was found guilty. The inquiries necessary to confession often appeared to the simple-minded devotee a direct enticement to sin, and her excited imagination, in dwelling upon them, would lead her to imagine herself the object of her confessor’s impure desires—a defence of the system almost as damaging as the facts which it attempts to extenuate.[1517]
Whatever may be Llorente’s opinion as to the comparative innocence of the secular priesthood, it does not appear to have been shared by the church. The local ecclesiastical legislation of the seventeenth century is surcharged with innumerable minute directions as to the age of the confessor and the form and structure of confessionals; restricting female penitents, unless dangerously ill, from being heard except in church and by daylight, and prescribing the relative positions to be maintained by confessor and penitent.[1518] In the earlier, though scarce purer, period of the fifteenth century John Myrc contents himself with simpler rules—
But when a wommon cometh to the Loke hyre face that thou ne se, But teche hyre to knele downe the by, And sum what thy face from hyre thou wry, Stille as ston ther thou sitte, And kepe the welle that thou ne spytte. Koghe thow not thenne thy thonkes, Ne wrynge thou not wyth thy schonkes—[1519]
and the attention which was now given to the minutest details of these matters shows how much men’s minds were excited by the subject, and how, as usual, the church sought palliatives for the evil to which she dared not apply a radical cure.
A natural result of the effort made to suppress the evil was a refinement of ingenuity on the part of the evil-doers to escape the result of their transgressions, and the subtlety of casuists was taxed to the utmost in defining with precision all the acts and motives which would render offenders liable to the penalties decreed in the Papal Bulls, thus giving rise to quite a literature specially devoted to the subject.[1520] In 1614, the Roman Inquisition, under Paul V., was obliged formally to declare that priests who used the confessional as a place of assignation were liable to the decrees, even though not engaged at the moment in administering the sacrament of penitence;[1521] and in 1665 Alexander VII. felt it necessary to condemn the proposition that a confessor, while hearing a confession, could give his penitent a love-letter without incurring the guilt of solicitation.[1522] The mode, however, which offered the surest escape was for the confessor to absolve his partner in sin, and thus release her from all obligation to denounce him,[1523] for such an absolution was good, according to St. Thomas Aquinas.[1524] This gave the church infinite trouble. It satisfied the conscience of the woman, for the council of Trent had taken care to declare that priests in mortal sin did not lose the power of absolution conferred on them by the Holy Ghost in their ordination,[1525] while so vile a prostitution of the sacrament could not but bring the whole system into contempt. Yet casuists were found to distinguish between the guilt of him who soothes the conscience of the woman whom he had seduced by absolving her after the act, in which case he is not exposed to the penalties of solicitation,[1526] and of him who promises absolution in advance as a temptation to sin, which brings him within the scope of the decrees.[1527]
The condemnation issued in 1665 by Alexander VII. of the proposition that absolution under such circumstances relieves the woman from the obligation of denunciation[1528] shows the extent of the evil and the boldness of the perpetrators, but did nothing to cure it. A more effective step had been taken in 1661 by the provincial synod of Cambray, which was the revival of the ancient rule that no confessor should have power in such cases to grant absolution to his paramour except in articulo mortis; a precedent which was followed in 1663 by the congregation of arch-priests of the province of Mechlin.[1529] This action seems to have aroused considerable opposition and no little discussion, for, at a convocation of bishops, held at Brussels in January, 1665, it was the first subject submitted for debate.[1530] The question, however, remained unsettled, for, although the power to grant such absolution was specially excepted in all commissions issued to confessors in the province, the evil continued, and again came up for discussion at the synod of Namur, in 1698, when the practice was peremptorily forbidden for the future.[1531] In the province of Besançon a canon of 1689 declares that although the abuse had been long prohibited, yet that it continued to flourish; and a formal enunciation was considered necessary, taking away the power of conferring absolution in such cases—a regulation which had to be repeated in 1707.[1532] In 1709 the Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, issued an order prohibiting it in his diocese, but as late as 1741 Pontas informs us that such absolutions were valid in all places where they had not been forbidden by episcopal authority.[1533] This extraordinary confession on such a subject was most discreditable to the church, and in 1741 Benedict XIV. signalized the commencement of his pontificate by converting these local regulations into a general law by his Bull, “Sacramentum Pœnitentiæ,” in which he not only endeavored to sweep away all the refinements by which casuists had so nearly nullified the decrees of his predecessors, but he devoted a special clause to the device by which the sacrilegious ministers of Satan rather than of God absolved their partners in guilt. This he absolutely prohibited for the future, except in articulo mortis when no other priest could be had; he took away the power of administering the sacrament of penitence in such cases, pronounced absolution null and void when thus given, and punished the attempt to give it by ipso facto excommunication removable by the papal court alone.[1534] Four years later, he relaxed somewhat the rigor of these regulations in a manner which shows how everpresent was the fear of attracting attention to the frailties of ecclesiastics, for he permitted absolution in articulo mortis in all cases where another confessor could not be called in without attracting attention and causing suspicion and scandal, which was virtually to remove the prohibition.[1535] In the same year he also renewed the decree of 1633 requiring the Papal Bulls on the subject to be read at least once a year in the chapters of all the monastic orders,[1536] who seem to have been the principal offenders in these matters; doubtless for the reason which Llorente says was usually alleged as an excuse by culprits—because they had no other opportunity of sinning.[1537]
Energetic as was the legislation of Benedict, it by no means put an end to the trouble. The year after his Bull appeared, in 1742, the synod of Namur found it necessary to remind confessors that they could not absolve women whom they had seduced;[1538] and in 1768 the Bishop of Ypres was obliged to recall to the attention of his clergy the Bulls of Gregory and of Benedict, and to threaten their transgressors with excommunication.[1539] The abuse was by no means confined to Europe, but extended to the missionary stations of the church. In 1775 the Apostolic Vicar of Cochin China inquired of Pius VI. whether the Bull of Benedict XIV. applied to the Franciscan missionaries under his charge, and, if so, whether it could not be moderated, to which Pius replied affirmatively as to the first question and negatively as to the second. That the scandal continued is shown by a pastoral letter of the Apostolic Vicar of Suchuen in 1803.[1540] It is not surprising that St. François de Sales should have declared that a confessor was to be selected out of ten thousand, seeing that so few among them were fitted for the function.[1541]
* * * * *
In considering the slow progress of improvement in the character of the clergy, we must bear in mind not only the debased material which required to be reformed, and the prevailing low standard of sexual morality throughout Europe, but also the prevalence within the church of the casuistic spirit, which tended to obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong and to extenuate all offences against the Decalogue. This spirit received a powerful impulse from the rising influence of the Company of Jesus, which furnished the most distinguished casuists and fostered the habit of testing everything by an artificial standard. If scandal could be averted, if the immediate temporal interests of the Order or of the church could be subserved, it mattered little whether morality suffered; and the subtle dialectics of the schools could always invent a justification for any line of action which appeared expedient at the moment. We have already seen how the successive Bulls of reforming pontiffs directed against the abuses of the confessional were virtually nullified in this manner; and the same processes were employed to soften the harshness of the canons which sought to repress the other vices of the clergy.[1542] To one who examines the works of these skilful dialecticians, the only wonder is that a church which not only tolerated but exalted them could retain any respect for virtue or any reverence for law, human or divine.
When these resources failed, recourse could be had to other means to avert scandal, as in the case of Father Mena, a priest of the Company of Jesus, at Salamanca, who persuaded one of his female penitents that God required her to abandon herself to him. He kept her in a hermitage conveniently near to the College of Jesuits where he officiated, and several children were the result of the union, when the matter became so notorious that the Inquisition interfered and threw the culprit into its prison at Valladolid. The Company of Jesus undertook his defence, and on the strength of certificates of his illness obtained his transfer to their college, where he was to be watched by officials of the Inquisition. His apparent illness increased, until a report was spread of his death; an image with a mask resembling him was interred with all the ceremonies of religion, and he was secretly conveyed to Genoa, where he was intrusted with a mission to convert the Jews.[1543]
More strenuous exertion, however, was required in the struggle over the case of Father Girard and la Cadière, which, in 1730 and 1731, convulsed society in Provence. Girard was a Jesuit of high reputation, who came to Toulon in 1728, where he soon obtained the spiritual direction of a number of women, among whom he selected seven to minister to his lusts. One of them, Catharine Cadière, a girl of 19, was especially distinguished for her exaltation of religious sensibility, which rendered her eminently fitted for the dangerous extravagances of Quietism. Under his guidance she speedily had ecstatic visions of heaven and hell, and was marked as the favorite of Divine Love by the stigmata which appeared on hands, feet, forehead, and side. While enjoying the popular veneration as a saint, it was not difficult for her spiritual guide to persuade her that God required her submission to him. This continued for some months, until, convinced that Girard had led her into sin, in place of the state of perfection to which she aspired, she changed her confessor, when the matter leaked out, and she brought a formal accusation against her seducer. At once the Company of Jesus took up the quarrel, and, as it suited the policy of Cardinal Fleury, the all-powerful minister, to gratify them, the unfortunate girl had no chance. The Episcopal courts, in which the case was first brought, sided with the guilty, and even the secular tribunals, to which the matter was transferred, were bitterly hostile to her. The accuser became the accused. She was persecuted, imprisoned, and threatened with torture, and in the Parlement of Aix, before which the case was finally brought, two members actually proposed that she should be burnt alive, but agreed, in order to secure the support of others, to accept the milder sentence of strangling after due infliction of torture, and this verdict was brought before the Parlement for debate. Despite the social influence of the Jesuits, this atrocity aroused public opinion throughout Provence and excited tumults which frightened the friends of Girard, so that when the final vote was taken only half the members of the Parlement pronounced him innocent, the other half voting for his condemnation, and he was saved by the casting vote of the President, Lebret. So strong was the popular feeling against him that he had to be conveyed away secretly to escape the vengeance of the mob, and died two years afterwards in the odor of sanctity, fully upheld by the Company of Jesus. As for la Cadière, she disappeared from sight, and the fate of the unfortunate girl is unknown.[1544]
XXX. THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION
If the council of Trent had thus failed utterly in its efforts to create that which had never existed—purity of morals under the rule of celibacy—it had at length succeeded in its more important task of putting an end to the aspirations of the clergy for marriage. With the anathema for heresy confronting them, few could be found so bold as openly to dispute the propriety of a law which had been incorporated into the articles of faith; and the ingenious sophistries and far-fetched logic of Bellarmine were reverently received and accepted as incontrovertible. Urbain Grandier might endeavor to quiet the conscience of his morganatic spouse by writing a treatise to prove the lawfulness of priestly wedlock, but he took care to keep the manuscript carefully locked in his desk.[1545] A man of bold and independent spirit, fortified by unfathomable learning, like Louis Ellies Du Pin, might secretly favor marriage, and perhaps might contract matrimony.[1546] Du Pin’s great antagonist, Bossuet, might incur a similar imputation, and be ready to partially yield the point if thereby he might secure the reconciliation of the hostile churches.[1547] All this, however, could have no influence on the doctrines and practice of Catholicism at large, and the principle remained unaltered and unalterable.
* * * * *
Yet it was impossible that the critical spirit of inquiry which marked the eighteenth century, its boldness of unbelief, and its utter want of faith in God and man, could leave unassailed this monument of primæval asceticism, while it was so busy in undermining everything to which the reverence of its predecessors had clung. Accordingly, the latter half of the century witnessed an active controversy on the subject. In 1758, a canon of Estampes, named Desforges, who had been forced to take orders by his family, published a work in two volumes in which he attempted to prove that marriage was necessary for all ranks of ecclesiastics. The book attracted attention, and by order of the Parlement it was burnt, September 30, 1758, by the hangman, and the unlucky author was thrown into the Bastile. These proceedings were well calculated to give publicity to the work; it was reprinted at Douay in 1772; a German translation was published in 1782 at Göttingen and Munster, and an Italian one, with some omissions, had already appeared in 1770, without an acknowledged place of publication. The Abbé Villiers undertook to answer Desforges in a weak little volume, the “Apologie du Célibat Chretien,” published in 1762, which consists principally of long extracts from the Fathers in praise of virginity. Even Italy felt the movement, and an anonymous work, entitled “Pregiudizi del Celibato,” appeared in Naples in 1765, and was reprinted in Venice in 1766. Some more competent champion was necessary to answer these repeated attacks, and the learned Abate Zaccaria brought his fertile pen and his inexhaustible erudition to the rescue in his “Storia Polemica del Celibato Sacro,” which saw the light in 1774, and which not long afterwards was translated into German. In 1781 appeared a new aspirant for matrimonial liberty in the Abbé Gaudin, who issued at Geneva (Lyons) his work entitled “Les inconveniens du célibat des prêtres,” a treatise of considerable learning and no little bitterness against the whole structure of sacerdotalism and Roman supremacy. This was followed, in 1782, by Andreas Forster, in his “De Cœlibatu Clericorum Dissertatio,” published at Dillingen, and dedicated to Pius VI., for the purpose of replying to the attacks of the innovating Catholics.
The latter, indeed, had some hope for the approaching realization of their demands. The reforms which illustrated the minority of Ferdinand IV. of Naples excited the priests of Southern Italy to petition him for the right of marriage, and Serrao, the Jansenist Bishop of Potenza, does not hesitate to say that the request would have been granted if the unfriendly relations between the courts of Rome and Naples had continued much longer.[1548] The Emperor Joseph II., amid his many fruitless schemes for philosophical reform, inclined seriously to the notion of permitting marriage to the priesthood of his dominions. In an edict of 1783 he asserted, incidentally, that the matter was subject to his control,[1549] and the advocates of clerical marriage confidently expected that in a very short period they would see the ancient restrictions swept away by the imperial power. A mass of controversial essays and dissertations made their appearance throughout Germany, and the well-known Protestant theologian Henke took the opportunity of bringing out, in 1783, a new edition of the learned work of Calixtus, “De Conjugio Clericorum,” as the most efficient aid to the good cause. It is a striking illustration of the temper of the times to observe that this work, so bitterly opposed to the orthodox doctrines and practice, is dedicated by Henke to Archdeacon Anthony Ganoczy, canon of the cathedral church of Gross-Wardein and apostolic prothonotary. The hope of success brought out other writers, and the movement made sufficient progress to cause some hesitation in Rome as to the propriety of yielding to the pressure.[1550]
Zaccaria again entered the lists, and produced, in 1785, his “Nuova Giustificazione del Celibato Sacro,” in answer to the Abbé Gaudin and to an anonymous German writer whose work had produced considerable sensation. To this he was principally moved by a report that he had himself been converted by the facts and arguments advanced by the German, an imputation which he indignantly refuted in three hundred quarto pages.
The half-formed resolutions of Joseph II. led to no result, and the subject slumbered for a few years until the outbreak of the French Revolution. At an early period in that great movement, the adversaries of sacerdotal asceticism bestirred themselves in bringing to public attention the evils and cruelty of the system. Already, in 1789, a mass of pamphlets appeared urging the abrogation of celibacy. In 1790 the work of the Abbé Gaudin was reprinted, and was promptly answered by the prolific Maultrot. Even in Germany the same spirit again awoke, and an Hungarian priest named Katz published at Vienna, in 1791, a “Tractatus de conjugio et cœlibatu clericorum,” in which he argued strongly for a change. In Poland these doctrines made considerable progress, for in 1801 we find a little tract issued at Warsaw vehemently arguing against those who imperil their souls by violating their vows and the laws of the church.[1551] In England, a Catholic priest distinguished for talents and learning, Dr. Geddes, published, in 1800, a work in which he denied the Apostolic origin of celibacy and urged that, at most, it should only be punished by degradation from the priesthood, without entailing disgrace. Indeed, he argued that the rule caused more proselytes to Protestantism than any other cause.[1552]
* * * * *
During this period it can hardly be supposed that the defiant immorality which characterized the eighteenth century had been favorable to the purity of a celibate priesthood. That the church, indeed, had made but scanty improvement in the character of its ministers is visible throughout the literature of the age, and I need only allude to a few instances where efforts at reform revealed the prevailing corruption.
In France the attacks upon the vow of celibacy, to which allusion has already been made, seem to have given rise to a spasmodic attempt to regulate the church. In 1760 an arrêt of the Parlement of Paris prohibited the organization of religious congregations without express royal permission, verified by that body. The assembly of the clergy in Paris in 1766 produced no notable improvement, nor was greater success obtained when the temporal power intervened in the Edicts of 1766 and 1767. Further effort apparently was requisite, and in the Edict of March, 1768, Louis XV. undertook to diminish in some degree the causes of the more flagrant disorders among the regular clergy. Men were not to be allowed to take the vows under the age of 22, nor women under 19; and as the smaller religious houses were especially notorious for laxness of discipline, all were suppressed which could not number at least fifteen professed monks or nuns, except those attached to larger congregations. The ecclesiastical authorities, moreover, were emphatically commanded to make a thorough visitation, and to compel the observance of the rules of discipline of the several orders.[1553] The enforcement of this edict created no little excitement, and several of the smaller orders narrowly escaped destruction in their endeavors to evade its provisions. That these efforts did not succeed in accomplishing their object we may well believe, even without the testimony of an eye-witness.[1554] As for the secular clergy, when Louis XV. amused himself by ordering the arrest of all ecclesiastics caught frequenting brothels, the number of victims in a short time amounted to 296, of whom no less than 100 were priests actively engaged in the service of the altar.[1555]
When the Grand-Duke Leopold of Tuscany undertook to reform the monasteries of his dominions and to put an end, if possible, to the abuse of the confessional, it led to a long diplomatic correspondence with the papal curia as to the jurisdiction over such cases. A public document of the year 1763 had already stated that the special crime in question had become less frequent, and attributed this improvement to the exceeding laxity of morals everywhere prevalent, for few confessors could be so foolish as to attempt seduction in the confessional when there was so little risk in doing the same thing elsewhere.[1556] Specious as this reasoning might seem, the facts on which it was based were hardly borne out by the investigations of Leopold shortly after into the morals of the monastic establishments. Nothing more scandalous is to be found in the visitations of the religious houses of England under Morton and Cromwell. The spiritual directors of the nunneries had converted them virtually into harems, and such of the sisters as were proof against seduction armed with the powers of confession and absolution suffered every species of persecution. It was rare for them to venture on complaint, but when they did so they received no attention from their ecclesiastical superiors, and only the protection of the grand-ducal authority at length emboldened them to reveal the truth. The prioress of S. Caterina di Pistoia declared that, with three or four exceptions, all the monks and confessors with whom she had met in her long career were alike; that they treated the nuns as wives, and taught them that God had made man for woman and woman for man; and that the visitations of the bishops amounted to naught, even though they were aware of what occurred, for the mouths of the victims were sealed by the dread of excommunication threatened by their spiritual directors.[1557] When it is considered that the convents thus converted into dens of prostitution were the favorite schools to which the girls of the higher classes were sent for training and education, it can readily be imagined what were the moral influences thence radiating throughout society at large, and we can appreciate the argument above referred to, as to the ease with which the clergy could procure sexual indulgence without recourse to the confessional. Leopold’s chief assistant in this struggle was Scipione de’ Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, whose experiences in the investigation caused him to induce the council of Pistoia, in 1786, to declare the duties of the confessional wholly incompatible with the monastic state, and, in view of the improbability of any permanent reform, to propose the abolition of the monastic orders by restricting vows to the duration of a twelvemonth[1558]—propositions which were not approved by the congregation of Tuscan prelates held at Florence in 1787, and which were scornfully condemned by Rome.[1559] Leopold, however, sought to palliate the evil by raising to the age of 24 the minimum limit for taking the vows, which the council of Trent had fixed at 16, but the benefit of this salutary measure was neutralized by the ease with which parents desiring to get rid of their children could place them in the institutions of the neighboring states, such as Lucca and Modena.[1560]
Rome itself was no better than its dependent provinces, despite the high personal character of some of the pontiffs. When the too early death of Clement XIV., in 1774, cut short the hopes which had been excited by his enlightened rule, St. Alphonso Liguori addressed to the conclave assembled for the election of his successor a letter urging them to make such a choice as would afford reasonable prospect of accomplishing the much-needed reform. The saint did not hesitate to characterize the discipline of the secular clergy as most grievously lax, and to proclaim that a general reform of the ecclesiastical body was the only way to remove the fearful corruption of the morals of the laity.[1561] When we hear, about this time, of two Carmelite convents at Rome, one male and the other female, which had to be pulled down because underground passages had been established between them, by means of which the monks and nuns lived in indiscriminate licentiousness, and when we read the scandalous stories which were current in Roman society about prelates high in the church, we can readily appreciate the denunciations of St. Alphonso.[1562] A curious glimpse at the interior of conventual life is furnished by a manual for Inquisitors, written about this period by an official of the Holy Office of Rome. In a chapter on nuns he describes the scandals which often cause them to fall within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and prescribes the course to be pursued with regard to the several offences. Among those who were forced to take the veil, despair frequently led to the denial of God, of heaven, and of hell; feminine enmity caused accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, which threw not only the nunneries, but whole cities, into confusion; vain-glory of sanctity suggested pretended revelations and visions; and these latter were also not infrequently caused by licentiousness, for in these utterances were sometimes taught doctrines utterly subversive of morality, of which Godless confessors took advantage to teach their spiritual daughters that there was no sin in sexual intercourse. As in Spain, it was the practice of the Roman Inquisition to treat the offenders mildly, partly in consideration of the temptations to which they were exposed, and partly to avoid scandal.[1563] The contaminating influence on society at large, emanating from a church so incurably corrupted, was vastly heightened by the overgrown numbers of the clerical body. In 1775, for example, a census of the terra-firma provinces of Venice showed in that narrow territory no less than 45,773 priests, or one to every fifty inhabitants, while in the kingdom of Naples, exclusive of Sicily, there were, in 1769, one to every seventy-six.[1564] Such overcrowding as this was not only in itself an efficient cause of disorder, but intensified incalculably the power of infection.
The virtues of the clergy, therefore, could offer but a feeble barrier to the spirit of innovation when the passions of the French Revolution were brought to bear upon the immunities and distinctive laws of the church. The attack commenced on that which had been the strength, but which was now the weakness, of the ecclesiastical establishment. As early as the 10th of August, 1789, preliminary steps were taken in the National Assembly to appropriate the property of the church to meet the fearful deficit which had been the efficient cause of calling together the high council of the nation. This property was estimated as covering one-fifth of the surface of France, yielding with the tithes an annual revenue of three hundred millions of francs. So vast an amount of wealth, perverted for the most part from its legitimate purposes, offered an irresistible temptation to desperate financiers, and yet it was a prelate who made the first direct attack upon it. On the 10th of October, 1789, Talleyrand, then Bishop of Autun, introduced a motion to the effect that it should be devoted to the national wants, subject to the proper and necessary expenses for public worship; and on the 2d of November the measure was adopted by a vote of 568 to 346. This settled the principle, though the details of a transaction of such magnitude were only perfected by successive acts during the two following years. One of the earliest results was the secularization of those ecclesiastics whose labors did not entitle them to support, a preliminary necessary to the intended appropriation of their princely revenues. This was accomplished by an act of February 13th, 1790, by which the religious orders were suppressed, monastic vows were declared void, and a moderate annuity accorded to the unfortunates thus turned adrift upon the world.
The great body of the parochial clergy, patriotic in their aspirations, and suffering from the abuses of power, had hailed the advent of the Revolution with joy; and their assistance had been invaluable in rendering the Tiers-État supreme in the National Assembly. These measures, however, assailing their dearest interests and privileges, aroused them to a sense of the true tendency of the movement to which they had contributed so powerfully. A breach was inevitable between them and the partisans of progress. Every forward step embittered the quarrel. It was impossible for the one party to stay its course, or for the other to assent to acts which daily became more menacing and revolutionary. Forced, therefore, into the position of reactionaries, the clergy ere long became objects of suspicion and soon after of persecution. The progressives devised a test-oath, obligatory on all ecclesiastics, which should divide those who were loyal to the Revolution from the contumacious, and lists were kept of both classes.[1565] Harmless as the oath was in appearance, when it was tendered, in December, 1790, five-sixths of the clergy throughout the kingdom refused it. Those who yielded to the pressure were termed assermentés, the recusants insermentés or réfractaires, and the latter, of course, at once became the determined opponents of the new régime, the more dangerous because they were the only influential partisans of reaction belonging to the people. To their efforts were attributed the insurrections which in La Vendée and elsewhere threatened the most fearful dangers. They were accordingly exposed to severe legislation. A decree of November 29, 1791, deprived them of their stipends and suspended their functions; another of May 27, 1792, authorized the local authorities to exile them on the simple denunciation of twenty citizens. Under the Terror their persons were exposed to flagrant cruelties, and a prêtre réfractaire was generally regarded, ipso facto, as an enemy to the Republic.
Under these circumstances, sacerdotal marriage came to be looked upon as a powerful lever to disarm or overthrow the hostility of the church, and also as a test of loyalty or disloyalty. Yet the steps by which this conclusion was reached were very gradual. In the early stages of the Revolution, while it was still fondly deemed that the existing institutions of France could be purified and preserved, the National Assembly was assailed with petitions asking that the privilege of marriage should be extended to the clergy.[1566] These met with no response, even after the suppression of the monastic orders. As late as September, 1790, when the Abbé Professor Cournand, of the Collège de France, made a motion in favor of sacerdotal marriage in the assembly of the district of St. Etienne du Mont in Paris, the question, after considerable debate, was laid aside as beyond the competence of that body. It was not until September 3d, 1791, that Mirabeau introduced into the Assembly a decree providing that no profession or vocation should debar a citizen from marriage or be considered as incompatible with marriage, and forbidding the public officials and notaries from refusing to ratify any marriage contract on such pretext. Though no allusion was made in this to ecclesiastics, its object was evident, and was so admitted in the eloquent speech with which he urged its adoption—a speech which contained a very telling résumé of the arguments in favor of priestly marriage, but which, in its glowing anticipations of the benefits to be expected from the measure, affords a somewhat lamentable contrast to the meagreness of the realization.[1567] The principle, when once established, was considered of sufficient importance to deserve recognition in the Constitution of September, 1791, a section in the preamble of which declares that the law does not recognize religious vows or any engagements contrary to the rights of nature or to the constitution,[1568] and this was followed, as Mirabeau had proposed, by a decree of September 20, 1791, which, in enumerating the obstacles to marriage, does not allude to monastic vows or holy orders.
Professor Cournand was probably the first man of position and character to take advantage of the privilege thus permitted, and his example was followed by many ecclesiastics who had won an honorable place in the church, in literature, and in science. Among them may be mentioned the Abbé Gaudin of the Oratoire, the author of a work already alluded to on the evils of celibacy, who in 1792 represented La Vendée in the Legislative Assembly, and who in 1805 did not hesitate to publish a little volume entitled “Avis à mon fils, âgé de sept ans”—although, in the preface to his work in 1781, he had described himself as long past the age of the passions. Even bishops yielded to the temptation. Loménie, coadjutor of his uncle the Archbishop of Sens, Torné Bishop of Bourges, Massieu of Beauvais, and Lindet of Evreux were publicly married. Many nuptials of this kind were celebrated with an air of defiance. Pastors announced their approaching weddings to their flocks in florid rhetoric, as though assured of finding sympathy for the assertion of the triumph of nature over the tyranny of man. Others presented themselves with their brides at the bar of the National Convention, as though to demonstrate that they were good citizens, who had thrown off all reverence for the obsolete traditions of the past.
A nation maddened and torn by the extremes of hope, of rage, and of terror, which met the triumphal march of three hundred and fifty thousand hostile bayonets with the heads of its king and queen, which blazoned forth to Europe its irrevocable breach with the past by instituting festivals in honor of a new Supreme Being and parading a courtesan through the streets of Paris as the Goddess of Reason, was not likely to employ much tenderness in coercing its internal enemies; and chief among these it finally numbered the ministers of religion. To them it soon applied the marriage test. To marry was to acknowledge the supremacy of the civil authority, and to sunder allegiance to foreign domination; celibacy was at the least a tacit adherence to the enemy, and a mute protest against the new régime. Matrimony, therefore, rose into importance as at once a test and a pledge, and every effort was made to encourage it. Among the records of the revolutionary tribunal is the trial of Mahue, Curé of S. Sulpice, Aug. 13, 1793, accused of having written a pamphlet against priestly marriage, and he was only acquitted on the ground that his crime had been committed prior to the adoption of the law of July 19, 1793.[1569] A decree of November 19, 1793, relieved from exile or imprisonment all priests who could show that their banns had been published, and when, soon afterwards, at the height of the popular frenzy, the Convention sent its deputies throughout France with instructions to crush out every vestige of the dreaded reaction, those emissaries made celibacy the object of their especial attacks. Thus, in the Department of the Meuse, deputy De la Croix announced that all priests who were not married should be placed under surveillance; while in Savoy the harsh measures taken against the clergy were modified in favor of those who married by permitting them to remain under surveillance. One zealous deputy ordered a pastor to be imprisoned until he could find a wife, and another released a canon from jail on his pledging himself to marry. Many of those thus forced into matrimony were decrepit with years, and chose brides whose age secured them from all suspicions of yielding to the temptations of the flesh. Such was the venerable Martin of Marseilles, who, after seeing his bishop and two priests, his intimate friends, led to the scaffold, took, at the age of 76, a wife nearly 60 years old. As an unfortunate ecclesiastic, who had thus succeeded in weathering the storm, fairly expressed it, in defending himself against the reproaches of a returned emigré bishop, he took a wife to serve as a lightning rod. These unwilling bridegrooms not infrequently deposited with a notary or a trusty friend a protest against the violence to which they had yielded, and a declaration that their relations with their wives should be merely those of brother and sister.
Yet in this curious persecution the officials only obeyed the voice of the excited people. The press, the stage, all the organs of public opinion, were unanimous in warring with celibacy, ridiculing it as a fanatical remnant of superstition, and denouncing it as a crime against the state. The popular societies were especially vehement in promulgating these ideas. The Congrès fraternel of Ausch, in September, 1793, ordered the local clubs to enlighten the benighted minds of the populace on the subject, and to exclude from membership all priests who should not marry within six months. A petition to the National Assembly from the republicans of Auxerre demanded that all ecclesiastics who persisted in remaining single should be banished; while a more truculent address from Condom urged imperiously that celibacy should be declared a capital crime, and that the death-penalty should be enforced with relentless severity. In times so terrible, when suspicion was conviction and conviction death, and when such were the views of those who swayed public affairs, it is not to be wondered at if many pious churchmen, unambitious of the crown of martyrdom, thought matrimony preferable to the guillotine or the noyade.
Indeed, the only source of surprise is that so few were found to betray their convictions. In the vast body of the Gallican church it is estimated that only about 2000 marriages of men in orders took place, after the reign of terror had rendered it a measure of safety. In addition to this, about 500 nuns were also married; and though this proportion is larger, it is still singularly small when we consider that these poor creatures, utterly unfitted by habit or education to take care of themselves, were suddenly ejected from their peaceful retreats, and cast upon a world which was raging in convulsions so terrible.[1570]
This is doubtless attributable to the steadfast resistance which the better part of the clergy made to the innovation, in spite of the danger of withstanding the popular frenzy, and in disregard of the laws which denounced such opposition. Even the assermentés, who had pledged themselves to the Revolution by taking the oath of allegiance, were mostly unfavorable to the abrogation of celibacy, and the position thus maintained by the clergy gave tone to such of the people as retained enough of devout feeling still to frequent the churches and partake of the mysteries of religion. The existence of an active and determined opposition is revealed by an act of August 16th, 1792, guaranteeing the salaries of all married priests, thus showing that, in some places at least, their stipends had been withheld. Many pastors, indeed, were driven from their parishes by their congregations, in consequence of marriage, to put an end to which a decree of September 17th, 1793, ordered the communes to continue payment of salaries in all such cases of ejection.
There were not wanting courageous ecclesiastics who opposed the innovation by every means in their power. Although Gobel, Bishop of Paris, a creature of the Revolution, favored the marriages of his clergy, a portion of his curates openly and vigorously denounced them, and Gratien, Archbishop of Rouen, addressed to him a severe reproach for his criminal weakness. The same Gratien excommunicated one of his priests for marrying, and published, July 24th, 1792, an instruction directed especially against such unions. For this he was thrown into prison, where he was long confined. Fauchet, of Bayeux, for the same offence, was reported to the Convention, but was fortunate enough to elude the consequences. Philibert, of Sedan, issued, January 20th, 1793, a pastoral in which he more cautiously argued against the practice, and, after a long persecution, he was lucky to escape with a decree of costs against him. Pastorals to the same effect were also promulgated by Clément of Versailles, Héraudin of Châteauroux, Sanadon of Oléron, Suzor of Tours, and others.
The Convention was not disposed to tolerate proceedings such as these. To put a stop to them, it adopted, July 19th, 1793, a law punishing with deprivation and exile all bishops who interfered in any way with the marriage of their clergy. For a while this appears to have put a stop to open opposition, but when the reign of terror was past, and the Catholics saw a prospect of reorganizing the distracted church, one of their earliest efforts was directed to the restoration of celibacy. On the 15th of March, 1795, some assermentés bishops, members of the Convention, issued from Paris an encyclical letter to the faithful, in which they denounced sacerdotal marriage in the strongest terms. Those who entered into such unions were declared unworthy of confidence; the fearful constraint under which they had sought refuge in matrimony was pronounced to be no justification, and even renunciation of their wives was not admitted as entitling them to absolution for the one unpardonable sin.[1571] In a second letter, issued December 15th of the same year, this denunciation was repeated in even stronger terms.
In these manifestoes the bishops did not speak by authority. They could not threaten or command, for they were acting beyond or in opposition to the law. With the progress of reaction they became bolder. In 1797 the church ventured to hold a national council, in which it forbade the nuptial benediction to those who were in orders or were bound by monastic vows, thus reducing their marriages to the mere civil contract, and depriving them of all the sanction of religion. The local synods which, encouraged by the fall of the Directory, were held in 1800, adopted these principles as a matter of course, and took measures to enforce them. That of Bourges even prohibited the churching of women who were wives of ecclesiastics.
This condemnation of the married clergy carried despair and desolation into the households of those who had offended, and upon whom the door of reconciliation was so sternly closed. Grégoire of Blois, a leading actor in all these scenes, records the innumerable appeals received from the unfortunates, who, torn by remorse and thus repudiated by the church, begged in vain for the mercy which was incompatible with the respect due to the ancient and inviolable canons.
All this, however, was merely local action. The Gallican church had not yet been reunited to Rome. In reconstructing a system of social order, Napoleon speedily recognized the necessity of religion in the state, and, despite the opposition of those who still believed in the Republic, the Concordat of 1801 restored France to its place in the hierarchy of Latin Christianity. There is nothing in the Concordat interfering with the right of the priest, as a citizen, to contract marriage; but as, in all affairs purely ecclesiastical, the internal regulation and discipline of the church were necessarily left to itself, the rights of the priest, as a priest, became of course subject to the received rules of the church, which could thus refuse the nuptial benediction, and suspend the functions of any one contravening its canons. In consequence of the power thus restored, when the question soon after arose as to the legality of sacerdotal marriages contracted during the troubles, the Cardinal-legate Caprara issued rescripts to those whose unions were anterior to the Concordat, depriving them of their priestly character, reducing them to the rank of laymen, and empowering the proper officials to absolve them and remarry them to the wives whom they had so irregularly wedded. This created a strong feeling of indignation among the prelates who had carried the tabernacle through the wilderness, and who, while opposing such marriages most strenuously, regarded this intervention of papal authority as a direct assault upon the liberties of the Gallican church. Their time was past, however, and their denunciations of this duplication of the sacrament were of no avail. Yet the legality of such marriages, and the unimpaired right of priests to contract them, were asserted and proved by Portalis, in his masterly speech of April 15th, 1802, before the Corps Législatif, advocating the adoption of the Concordat as a law, although he admitted that the duties of the priesthood and the feeling of the people rendered sacerdotal celibacy desirable.[1572]
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Notwithstanding the authority thus restored to the church, and the certainty of ecclesiastical penalties following such infraction of the Tridentine articles of faith, the practice which had been introduced could not be immediately eradicated. Priests were constantly contracting marriage, and the question gave considerable trouble to the government, which hesitated for some time as to the policy to be pursued. Portalis, in 1802, as we have seen, declared the full legality of such marriages, and the unimpaired right of ecclesiastics to contract them; and the provisions of the code respecting marriage, adopted in 1803, make no allusions to vows or religious engagements as causing incapacity.[1573] Yet in 1805, when Daviaux, Archbishop of Bordeaux, opposed the application of a priest named Boisset to the civil authorities for a marriage contract, Portalis, then minister of religious affairs, on being appealed to, replied that the government would not allow its officers to register such contracts. The local administrations sometimes assented to such applications and sometimes referred them to the central authority, until at length, in 1807, a definite conclusion was promulgated. This was to the effect that although the civil law was silent as regards such marriages, yet they were condemned by public opinion. The government considered them fraught with danger to the peace of families, as the powerful influence of the pastor could be perverted to evil purposes, and, if seduction could be followed by marriage, that influence would be liable to great abuse. The emperor therefore declared that he could not tolerate marriage on the part of those who had exercised priestly functions since the date of the Concordat. As for those who had abandoned the ministry previous to that period and had not since resumed it, he left them to their own consciences. Thus, in practice, although marriage was regarded as purely a civil institution, a limitation was introduced which was not authorized by the code, which rested solely upon the authority of the emperor, and which, far from indicating respect to the church, was a flagrant insult. As Napoleon withdrew himself more and more from the principles of the new order of things, we find him disposed to take even stronger ground in opposition to the civil privileges accorded to the priesthood by the Concordat. The question of sacerdotal marriage continued to present itself under perplexing shapes, and at length the emperor, on the eve of his downfall, perhaps with a view to propitiate the sacerdotal power, proposed to apply to married priests the penalty imposed by the law on bigamy.[1574] It was too late, however; the empire was rapidly vanishing, and these suggestions were soon forgotten in the hurrying march of events.[1575]