Woman, Church & State

60

Lowest in the scale of being are those invisible creatures called by Kabbalists the “elementary.”… The second class is composed of the invisible antitypes of the men to be born. Isis Unveiled, I, 310.

61

Who maintained that Adam did not think of celebrating his nuptials till he went out of Paradise.

62

It was the effect of God’s goodness to man that suffered him to sleep when Eve was formed, as Adam being endowed with a spirit of prophecy might foresee the evils which the production of Eve would cause to all mankind, so that God perhaps cast him into that sleep lest he should oppose the creation of his wife. Life of Adam by Loredano. Pub. at Amsterdam, 1696. See Bayle.

63

Lecky. —Hist. European Morals.

64

That marriage was evil was taught by Jerome.

65

So fully retaining it as to require the circumcision of Timothy, the Gentile, before sending him as a missionary to the Jews.

66

The Council of Tours (813) recommended bishops to read, and if possible retain by heart, the epistles of St. Paul.

67

Although Paul “led about” other “women” saluting “some with a holy kiss.”

68

964. Notion of uncleanliness attaching to sexual relations fostered by the church. Herbert Spencer. —Descriptive Sociology, England.

69

In the third century marriage was permitted to all orders and ranks of the clergy. Those, however, who continued in a state of celibacy, obtained by this abstinence a higher reputation of sanctity and virtue than others. This was owing to an almost general persuasion that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the influence of malignant demons. —Mosheim.

70

Old (Christian) theologians for a long time disputed upon the nature of females; a numerous party classed them among the brutes having neither soul nor reason. They called a council to arrest the progress of this heresy. It was contended that the women of Peru and other countries of America were without soul and reason. The first Christians made a distinction between men and women. Catholics would not permit them to sing in Church. Dictionnaire Feodal Paris, 1819.

71

By a decree of the Council of Auxerre (A.D. 578), women on account of their impurity were forbidden to receive the sacrament into their naked hands.

72

Catherine reproached the Protestants with this impious license as with a great crime. “Les femmes chantant aux orgies des huguenots, dit Georges l’apotre; apprenez donc, predicans, que saint Paul a dit; Mulieres in ecclesiaetaccant; et que dans le chapitre de l’apocolypse l’evoque de Thyathire est manace de la damnation pour avoir permis a une femme de parles a l’eglise. See Redavances Seigneur.

73

When part singing was first introduced into the United States, great objection was made to women taking the soprano or leading part, which by virtue of his superiority it was declared belonged to man. Therefore woman was relegated to the bass or tenor but nature proved too powerful, and man was eventually compelled to take bass or tenor as his part, while woman carried the soprano, says the History of Music.

74

Leviticus 12:15. Dr. Smith characterizes a sin-offering as a sacrifice made with the idea of propitiation and atonement; its central idea, that of expiation, representing a broken covenant between God and the offender; that while death was deserved, the substitute was accepted in lieu of the criminal. —Dictionary of the Bible.

75

The Talmud (Mishna), declared three cleansings were necessary for leprosy and three for children, thus placing the bringing of an immortal being into life upon the same plane of defilement with the most hideous plague of antiquity.

76

The mean term of life for these wretched girls under religious confinement in a nunnery was about ten years. From the fifteenth century a sickness was common, known as Disease of the Cloisters. It was described by Carmen. Jewish contempt of the feminine was not alone exhibited in prohibiting her entrance into the holy places of the temple, and in the ceremonies of her purification, but also in the especial holiness of male animals which alone were used for sacrifice. Under Jewish law the sons alone inherited, the elder receiving a double portion as the beginning of his father’s strength. See Deut. 21-15. If perchance the mother also possessed an inheritance that was also divided among the sons to the exclusion of daughters. The modern English law of primogeniture is traceable to Judaism. Even the commandments were made subservient to masculine ideas, the tenth classing a man’s wife with his cattle and slaves, while the penalties of the seventh were usually visited upon her alone.

77

The reign of Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation of Christianity from a religious into a political system. Draper. —Conflict of Religion and Science.

78

“The woman that cometh to give thanks must offer accustomed offering in this kingdom; it is the law of the kingdom in such cases.”

79

In the year 1867 the Right Rev. Bishop Coxe, of the Western Diocese of New York, refused the sacrament to those women patients of Dr. Foster’s Sanitarium at Clifton Springs, N.Y., whose heads were uncovered, although the rite was performed in the domestic chapel of that institution and under the same roof as the patient’s own rooms. During the famous See trial at Newark, N.J., 1876, the prosecutor, Rev. Dr. Craven, declared that every woman before him wore her head covered in token of her subordination.

80

The Catholic Congress of July, 1892, telegraphing the pope it would strive to obtain for the Holy See the recovery of its inalienable prerogative and territorial independence, was convened at Fulda.

81

“In the old days, no woman was allowed to put her foot within the walls of the monastery at San Augustin, Mexico. A noble lady of Spain, wife of the reigning Viceroy, was bent on visiting it. Nothing could stop her, and in she came. But she found only empty cloisters, for each virtuous monk locked himself securely in his cell, and afterward every stone in the floor which her sacrilegious feet had touched was carefully replaced by a new one fresh from the mountain top. Times are sadly changed. The house has now been turned into a hotel.”

82

Sacerdotal Celibacy.– Lea.

83

Studies in Church History.– Lea.

84

History of Materialism.

85

Seals upon legal papers owe their origin to the custom of the uneducated noble warrior stamping the imprint of his clenched or mailed hand upon wax as his signature.

86

St. Theresa founded the Barefoot Carmelites, and it is but a few years since thousands of its members assembled to do honor to her name.

87

The annals of the Church of Rome give us the history of that celebrated prostitute Marozia of the tenth century, who lived in public concubinage with Pope Sergius III., whom she had raised to the papal throne. Afterwards she and her sister Theodosia placed another of their lovers, under name of Anastatius III., and after him John X., in the same position. Still later this same powerful Marozia placed the tiara upon the head of her son by Pope Sergius under name of John XI., and this before he was sixteen years of age. The celebrated Countess Matilda exerted no less power over popedom, while within this century the maid of Kent has issued orders to the pope himself.

88

The first abbess, Petrouville, becoming involved in a dispute with the powerful bishop of Angers, summoned him before the council of Chateraroux and Poicters, where she pleaded the cause of her order and won her case. In 1349 the abbess Theophegenie denied the right of the seneschal of Poitou to judge the monks of Fontervault, and gained it for herself. In 1500, Mary of Brittany, in concert with the pope’s deputies, drew up with an unfaltering hand the new statutes of the order. Legouve. —Moral History of Women.

89

No community was richer or more influential, yet during six hundred years and under thirty-two abbesses, every one of its privileges were attacked by masculine pride or violence, and every one maintained by the vigor of the women. —Sketches of Fontervault.

90

What is more remarkable the monks of this convent were under control of the abbess and nuns, receiving their food as alms. —Ibid.

91

“The Lord’s Prayer,” taught his disciples by Jesus, recognizes the loss, and demands restoration of the feminine in “Hallowed (whole) be Thy Name.”

92

Woman should always be clothed in mourning and rags, that the eye may perceive in her only a penitent, drowned to tears, and so doing for the sin of having ruined the whole human race. Woman is the gateway of satan, who broke the seal of the forbidden tree and who first violated the divine law.

93

Gildas, in the first half of the sixth century, declared the clergy were utterly corrupt. Lea. —Studies in Church History.

94

In the third century marriage was permitted to all ranks and orders of the clergy. Those, however, who continued in a state of celibacy, obtained by this abstinence a higher reputation of sanctity and virtue than others. This was owing to the almost general persuasion that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the influence of malignant demons. —Mosheim. As early as the third century, says Bayle, were several maidens who resolved never to marry.

95

The priests of the Greek Church are still forbidden a second marriage. In the beginning of the reign of Edward I, when men in orders were prohibited from marriage in England, a statute was framed under which lay felons were deprived of the clergy in case they had committed bigamy in addition to their other offenses; bigamy in the clerical sense meaning marriage with a widow or with two maidens in succession.

96

Pelagius II., sixty-fifth pope in censuring those priests, who after the death of their wives have become fathers by their servants, recommended that the culpable females should be immured in convents to perform perpetual penance for the fault of the priest. Cormenin. —History of the Popes, p. 84.

97

A priest’s wife is nothing but a snare of the devil, and he who is ensnared thereby on to his end will be seized fast by the devil, and he must afterwards pass into the hands of fiends and totally perish. —Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical, pp. 438-42. Canons of Aelfric and Aelfric’s Pastoral Epistles, p. 458.

98

Momumenta Ecclesiastica. Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical.

99

In order to understand the morals of the clergy of this period, it is important that we should make mention of a law which was passed by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian toward the end of the year 370. It prohibited ecclesiastics and monks from entering the houses of widows and single women living alone or who had lost their parents. Dr. Cormenin. —History of the Popes, p. 62.

100

Lecky finds evidence of the most hideous immorality in these restrictions, which forbade the presence even of a mother or sister in a priest’s house. Lea says it is somewhat significant that when in France the rule of celibacy was completely enforced churchmen should find it necessary to revive this hideously suggestive restriction which denied the priest the society of his mother and sister. —Sacerdotal Celibacy, p. 344.

101

He declared it to be the highest degree of wickedness to rise from a woman’s side to make the body of Christ. He was discovered the same night with a woman to the great indignation of the people, and obliged to flee the country to escape condign punishment.

102

It is not difficult to conceive the order of ideas that produced that passionate horror of the fair sex which is such a striking characteristic of old Catholic theology. Celibacy was universally conceded as the highest form of virtue, and in order to make it acceptable theologians exhausted all the resources of their eloquence in describing the iniquity of those whose charm had rendered it so rare. Hence the long and fiery disquisitions on the unparalleled malignity, the unconceivable subtlety, the frivolity, the unfaithfulness, the unconquerable evil propensities of woman. Lecky. —Hist. European Morals.

103

The Fathers of the Church for the most part, vie with each other in their depreciation of woman and denouncing her with every vile epithet, held it a degradation for a saint to touch even his aged mother with his hand in order to sustain her feeble steps… For it declared woman unworthy through inherent impurity even to set foot within the sanctuaries of its temples; suffered her to exercise the function of wife and mother only under the spell of a triple exorcism, and denied her when dead burial within its more sacred precincts even though she was an abbess of undoubted sanctity. Anna Kingsford. —The Perfect Way, p. 286.

104

Disease of the Cloisters.

105

When the sailors of Columbus returned from the new world they brought with them a disease of an unknown character, which speedily found its way into every part of Europe. None were exempt; the king on his throne, the beggar in his hovel, noble and peasant, priest and layman alike succumbed to the dire influence which made Christendom one vast charnel house. Of it, Montesquieu said: “It is now two centuries since a disease unknown to our ancestors was first transplanted from the new world to ours, and came to attack human nature in the very source of life and pleasure. Most of the powerful families of the South of Europe were seen to perish by a distemper that was grown too common to be ignominious, and was considered in no other light than that of being fatal. Works, I, 265.

106

St. Ambrose and others believed not that they (women) were human creatures like other people. Luther. —Familiar Discourses, p. 383.

107

When a woman is born it is a deficit of nature and contrary to her intentions, as is the case when a person is born blind or lame or with any natural defect, and as we frequently see happens in fruit trees which never ripen. In like manner a woman may be called a fortuitous animal and produced by accident.

108

Cajetan, living from 1496 to 1534, became General of the Dominican Order and afterwards Cardinal.

109

“The Father alone is creator.”

110

By decree of the Council of Lyons, 1042, barons were allowed to enslave the children of married clergy. —Younge.

111

In 1108 priests were again ordered to put away their wives. Such as kept them and presumptuously celebrated mass were to be excommunicated. Even the company of their wives was to be avoided. Monks and priests who for love of their wives left their orders suffering excommunication, were again admitted after forty days penance if afterwards forsaking them.

112

Dulaure. —Histoire de Paris, I, 387, note.

113

The abbot elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, in 1171, was found on investigation to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village. An abbot of St. Pelayo, in Spain, in 1130, was proved to have kept no less than seventy mistresses. —Hist. European Morals, p. 350.

114

A tax called “cullagium,” which was a license to clergymen to keep concubines, was during several years systematically levied by princes. —Ibid 2, 349.

115

Supplement to Lumires, 50th question, Art, III.

116

St. Anselm, although very strict in the enforcement of the canons favoring celibacy, found recalcitrant priests in his own diocese whose course he characterized as “bestial insanity.”

117

So says Bayle, author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary, a magnificent work in many volumes. Bayle was a man of whom it has justly been said his “profound and varied knowledge not only did much to enlighten the age in which he lived by pointing out the errors and supplying the deficiencies of contemporaneous writers of the seventeenth century, but down to the present time his work has preserved a repository of facts from which scholars continually draw.”

118

Those who support celibacy would perhaps choose rather to allow crimes than marriage, because they derive considerable revenue by giving license to keep concubines. A certain prelate boasted openly at his table that he had in his diocese 1,000 priests who kept concubines, and who paid him, each of them, a crown a year for their license. —Cornelius Aggrippa.

119

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

120

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

121

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

122

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

123

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

124

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

125

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

126

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

127

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

128

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

129

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

130

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

131

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

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

132

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

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

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

133

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

134

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

135

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

136

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

137

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