Woman, Church & State

The doctrine that woman must remain covered when in the sacred church building shows itself in the United States.79 In many instances under Christianity, woman has been entirely excluded from religious houses and church buildings. When Pope Boniface80 founded the abbey of Fulda he prohibited the entrance of women into any of the buildings, even including the church. This rule remained unbroken during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and even when in 1131 the Emperor Lothair went to Fulda to celebrate Pentecost, his empress was not permitted to witness the ceremonies. When Frederick Barbarossa, 1135, proposed to spend his Easter there, he was not even allowed to enter the house because of having his wife with him. In 1138 Boniface IX, at the request of the abbot, John Merlow, relaxed the rule and permitted women to attend the services of the church. Shortly afterwards the building was destroyed by lightning, which was looked upon as evidence of the divine displeasure at the desecration. The monastery of Athos under the Greek church, situated upon an island, does not permit the entrance of a female animal upon its confines. Even in America woman has met similar experience.81

At certain periods during the middle ages, conversation with women was forbidden. During the Black Death, the Flaggellants, or Brotherhood of the Cross, were under such interdict.82 In this last decade of the XIX century, the Catholic church still imposes similar restrictions upon certain religious houses. Early in 1892 the queen-regent of Spain visited the monastery of Mirzaflores; its rules not allowing a monk to speak to a woman, the queen was received in silence. Her majesty immediately telegraphed to the pope asking indulgence, which was granted, and during four hours the monks were permitted the sin of speaking to a woman. It is curious to note that the first sentence uttered by one of the monks was a compliment upon the simplicity of her majesty’s attire. But the most impressive evidence of the contempt of the church towards all things feminine was shown in a remark by Tetzel the great middle-age dealer in indulgences. Offering one for sale he declared it would insure eternal salvation even if the purchaser had committed rape upon the mother of God.83

A knowledge of facts like these is necessary in order to a just understanding of our present civilization, especially as to the origin of restrictive legislation concerning woman. The civilization of today is built upon the religious theories of the middle ages supplemented by advancing freedom of thought. Lea, declares thus:

The Latin church is the great fact which dominates the history of modern civilization. All other agencies which molded the destinies of Europe were comparatively isolated or sporadic in their manifestations.

The influence of church teaching is most strikingly manifested in the thought of today. Without predetermined intention of wrong doing, man has been so molded by the Church doctrine of ages and the coordinate laws of State as to have become blind to the justice of woman’s demand for freedom such as he possesses. Nor is woman herself scarcely less bound, although now torn by the spirit of rebellion which burned in the hearts of her fore-mothers, so cruelly persecuted, so falsely judged, during past ages, when the most devout Christian woman possessed no rights in the church, the government or the family. The learning which had been hers in former periods, was then interdicted as an especial element of evil. Her property rights recognized in former periods then denied; as a being subordinate to man she was not allowed a separate estate or control over the earnings of her own hands. Her children were not her own but those of a master for whose interest or pleasure she had given them birth. Without freedom of thought or action, trained to consider herself secondary to a man, a being who came into the world not as part of the great original plan of creation but as an afterthought of her Creator, and this doctrine taught as one of the most sacred mysteries of religion which to doubt was to insure her eternal damnation, it is not strange that the great body of women are not now more outspoken in demanding equal religious and governmental rights with man. But another phase of heredity shows itself in the eagerness with which women enter all phases of public life which does not place them in open antagonism with Church or State. Education, industries, club life and even those great modern and religious organizations which bring them before the public, throwing active work and responsibility upon them, would be entirely unexplainable were it not for the tendency of inherited thought to ultimately manifest itself.

The long continued and powerfully repressing influence of church teaching in regard to the created inferiority of women, imposed upon millions of men and women a bondage of thought and action which even the growing civilization of the nineteenth century has not yet been able to cast off. To this doctrine we can trace all the irregularities which for many centuries filled the church with shame; practices more obscene than those of Babylon or Corinth dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in the most pagan countries – a darkness so intense that the most searching efforts of the historian but now and then cast a ray of light upon it; – a darkness so profound that in Europe from the seventh to the eleventh centuries no individual thought can be traced, no opinion was formed, no heresy arose. All Christendom was sunk in superstition. Lange84 says “The disappearance of ancient civilization in the early centuries of the Christian era is an event the serious problems of which are in great part still unexplained.” Had Lange not been influenced by the subtle current of heredity which unwittingly influenced nations and systems equally with individuals, he could easily have discovered the cause of this disappearance of olden civilization, to be in the degradation of the feminine element under Christianity. While this darkness of Christian Europe was so great that history knows less of it a thousand years since than it does of Egypt 5,000 years ago, one corner of that continent was kept luminous by the brilliance of Mohammedan learning. The Arabs alone had books from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries of the Christian era. The Moors of Spain kept that portion of Europe bright, while all else was sunk in darkness. Universities existed, learning was fostered and women authors were numerous. For many hundred years Rome possessed no books but missals and a few Bibles in the hands of priests. Men were bound by church dogmas looking only for aggrandisement through her. The arts ceased to flourish, science decayed, learning was looked upon as a disgrace to a warrior,85 the only occupation deemed worthy of the noble.

The priesthood who alone possessed a knowledge of letters, prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility when not engaged against a common foe, spent their time battling against each other; the peasantry were by turns the sport and victim of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of all. Her person and her rights possessed no consideration except as she could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of priest, noble, father, husband; some man-god to whose lightest desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most pronounced doctrine of the church at this period was that through woman sin had entered the world; that woman’s whole tendency was towards evil, and had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her creation, man would then be dwelling in the paradisal innocence and happiness of Eden, with death entirely unknown. When the feminine was thus wholly proscribed, the night of moral and spiritual degradation reached its greatest depth, and that condition ensued which has alike been the wonder and the despair of the modern historians, whose greatest fault, as Buckle shows, has been the reading of history from a few isolated facts rather than building up its philosophy from an aggregation of events upon many different planes.

Under all restrictions woman did not fail to show her innate power even within the fold of the church. She founded devout orders,86 established and endowed religious institutions, and issued her commands to the pope himself, in more than one instance seating that holy personage in the papal chair.87 From St. Paulina, whose life was written by St. Jerome, to the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary by the Ecumenical Council under Pius IX, and the later canonization of Joan of Arc, woman has not failed to impress even the Christian world with a sense of her intellectual and spiritual power. Yet despite the very great influence exerted by so many women in the affairs of the church – notwithstanding the canonization of so many women, she has only been able to show her capacity at an immense expenditure of vital force against constant priestly opposition and the powerful decrees of councils. Subtle and complex as are the influences that mould thought and character, we cannot comprehend the great injustice of the church towards woman in its teaching of her mental and spiritual inferiority without a slight examination of the great religious institutions that have been under her charge. Of these none possess more remarkable history than the Abbey of Fontervault,88 founded in 1099, for both monks and nuns. It belonged in the general rank of Benedictines, and was known as the Order of Fontervault. It was ruled by an abbess under title of General of the Order, who was responsible to no authority but that of the pope himself. Forming a long succession of able women in thirty-two abbesses from the most eminent families of France, woman’s capacity for the management of both ecclesiastical and civil affairs was there shown for six hundred years. It was the abbess who alone decided the religious fitness of either monk or nun seeking admission to the order. It was the abbess who decreed all ecclesiastical and civil penalties; who selected the confessors for the different houses of the order throughout France and Spain; who managed and controlled the vast wealth belonging to this institution; it was the abbess who drew up the rules for the government of the order, and who also successfully defended these privileges when attacked. For neither the protection of the pope, the wealth of the order, or the family influence connected with it, prevented priestly attack,89 and no argument in favor of woman’s governing ability is stronger than the fact that its abbesses ever successfully resisted these priestly assaults upon the privileges of their order. The abbey of Fontervault, with its grounds of forty or fifty acres, was surrounded by high walls; its soil was tilled by the monks of the abbey, who received even their food as alms from the nuns, returning all fragments for distribution to the poor.90

The authority of women was supreme in all monasteries of the order. The ecclesiastical power maintained by these abbesses is the more remarkable, as it was in direct contravention of the dictates of the early councils, that of Aix-la-Chapelle, 816, forbidding abbesses to give the veil or take upon themselves any priestly function; the later council of Paris A.D. 824, bitterly complained that women served at the altar, and even gave to people the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Among the convents controlled by women, which have largely influenced religious thought, was that of the Paraclete in the 12th century under Heloise. Its teachings that belief was dependent upon knowledge, attacked the primal church tenet, that belief depends upon faith alone. The convent of Port Royal des Champs during the 17th century exerted much influence. Its abbess, the celebrated Mother Angelique Arnault, was inducted into this office in her eleventh year upon death of her abbess-aunt whose co-adjutrix she had been. This convent, both in person of the nuns as well as the monks connected with it, became a protest against the jesuitical doctrine of the seventeenth century, and like the Paraclete is intimately connected with reform questions in the Catholic Church. Notwithstanding such evidences of woman’s organizing mind and governing qualities under the most favorable conditions, as well as of piety so unquestioned as to have produced a long calendar of female saints, the real policy of the church remained unchanged; nor could it be otherwise from its basis of woman’s created inferiority and original sin. The denial to women of the right of private judgment and the control of her own actions, the constant teaching of her greater sinfulness and natural impurity, had a very depressing effect upon the majority of women whose lowly station in life was such as to deprive them of that independence of thought and action possible to women of rank and wealth. Then, as now, the church catered to the possessors of money and power; then, as now, seeking to unite their great forces with its own purpose of aggrandizement, and thus the church has ever obstructed the progress of humanity, delaying civilization and condemning the world to a moral barbarism from which there is no escape except through repudiation of its teaching. To the theory of “God the Father,” shorn of the divine attribute of motherhood, is the world beholden for its most degrading beliefs, its most infamous practices. Dependent upon the identified with lost motherhood is the “Lost Name” of ancient writers and occultists. When the femininity of the divine is once again acknowledged, the “Lost Name” will be discovered and the holiness (wholeness) of divinity be manifested.91

As the theory of woman’s wickedness gathered force, her representative place in the church lessened. From century to century restrictive canons multiplied, and the clergy constantly grew more corrupt, although bearing bad reputation at an early date.92 Tertullian, whose heavy diatribes are to be found in large libraries, was bitter in his opposition to marriage.93 While it took many hundreds of years for the total exclusion of woman from the christian priesthood, the celibacy of the clergy during this period was the constant effort of the Church. Even during the ages that priestly marriage was permitted, celibates obtained a higher reputation for sanctity and virtue than married priests, who infinitely more than celibates were believed subject to infestation by demons.94

The restriction upon clerical marriages proceeded gradually. First the superior holiness of the unmarried was taught together with their greater freedom from infestation by demons. A single marriage only was next allowed, and that with a woman who had never before entered the relation.95 The Council of A.D. 347, consisting of twenty-one bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice married or whose wife had been a widow.96 A council of A.D. 395 ruled that a bishop who had children after ordination should be excluded from the major orders. The Council of A.D. 444, deposed Chelidonius, bishop of Besancon, for having married a widow. The Council of Orleans, A.D. 511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that monks who married should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order. The Church was termed the spouse of the priest. It was declared that Peter possessed a wife before his conversion, but that he forsook her and all worldly things after he became Christ’s, who established chastity; priests were termed holy in proportion as they opposed marriage.97 The unmarried among the laity who had never entered that relation, and the married who forsook it, were regarded as saintly. So great was the opposition to marriage that a layman who married a second time was refused benediction and penance imposed.98 A wife was termed “An Unhallowed Thing.”

So far from celibacy producing chastity or purity of life, church restrictions upon marriage led to the most debasing crimes, the most revolting vices, the grossest immorality. As early as the fourth century (370) the state attempted purification through a statute enacted by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian, prohibiting ecclesiastics and monks from entering the houses of widows, single women living alone, or girls who had lost their parents.99 The nearest ties of relationship proved ineffectual in protecting woman from priestly assault, and incest became so common it was found necessary to prohibit the residence of a priest’s mother or sister in his house.100 This restriction was renewed at various times through the ages. The condemnation of the Council of Rome, Easter, 1051, under the pontificate of Pope Leo IX, was not directed against married priests, but against those who held incestuous relations. Yet although the Church thus externally set her seal of disapprobation upon this vice, her general teaching sustained it. Gregory, bishop of Venelli, convicted of this crime by the Council of Rome, was punished by excommunication, but in a short time was restored to his former important position. The highest legates were equally guilty with the inferior priests. Cardinal John of Cremona, the pope’s legate to the Council of Westminister 1125, sent by Pope Honorius for the express purpose of enforcing celibacy, became publicly notorious and disgraced, and was obliged to hastily leave England in consequence of his teaching and his practice being diametrically opposed.101

Through this clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions of celibacy and virginity were regarded as of the highest virtue. Jerome respected marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins to the church, while Augustine in acknowledging that marriage perpetuated the species, also contended that it also perpetuated original sin.

These diverse views in regard to marriage created the most opposite teaching from the church. By one class the demand to increase and multiply was constantly brought up, and women were taught that the rearing of children was their highest duty. The strangest sermons were sometimes preached toward the enforcement of this command. Others taught an entirely different duty for both men and women, and a large celibate class was created under especial authority of the church. Women, especially those of wealth, were constantly urged to take upon themselves the vow of virginity, their property passing into possession of the church, thus helping to build up priestly power. Another class held the touch of a woman to be a contamination, and to avoid it holy men secluded themselves in caves and forests.102 Through numerous decretals confirmation was given to the theory that woman was defiled through the physical peculiarities of her being. Even her beauty was counted as an especial snare and temptation of the devil for which in shame she ought to do continual penance.103 St. Chrysostom, whose prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning service of the Episcopal church, described women as a “necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.” But to escape her influence was impossible and celibacy led to the most direful results. Monks and hermits acknowledged themselves tormented in their solitary lives by visions of beautiful women. Monasteries were visited by an illness to which celibacy imparted a name,104 and impurity of body and soul spread throughout Christendom. The general tone of the church in regard to marriage; its creation of a double code of morality; its teaching of woman’s greater sinfulness, together with that of her absolute subordination to man, subverted the moral character of the Christian world within whose borders the vilest systems of immorality arose which the world has ever known; its extent being a subject of historical record.105

According to the teaching of men who for many hundreds of years were molders of human thought, priests, philosophers and physicians alike, nature never designed to procreate woman, her intention being always to produce men. These authorities asserted that nature never formed the feminine except when she lost her true function and so produced the female sex by chance or accident. Aristotle106 whose philosophy was accepted by the church and all teaching of a contrary character declared heretical, maintained that nature did not form woman except when by reason of imperfection of matter she could not obtain the sex which is perfect.107 Cajetan enunciated the same doctrine many hundred years later.108 Aristotle also denied creative power to the mother.109 While throughout its history the course of the Christian Church against marriage is constantly seen, no less noticeable are the grossly immoral practices resulting from celibacy. Scarcely a crime or a vice to which it did not give birth. Celibacy was fostered in the interests of power, and in order to its more strict enforcement barons were permitted to enslave the wives and children of married priests.110 Those of Rome were bestowed upon the Cathedral church of the Lateran, and bishops throughout Christendom were ordered to enforce this law in their own dioceses and to seize the wives of priests for the benefit of their churches. At no point of history do we more clearly note the influence of the Church upon the State than in the union of the temporal power with the ecclesiastical for purposes of constraining priestly celibacy.

Under reign of Philip I of France, a council was held at Troyes which condemned the marriage of priests.111 In 1108, the following year, King Henry I of England112 summoned a council to assemble in London for purpose of upholding priestly celibacy, urging its enforcement upon the bishops, and pledging his kingly honor in aid. A new series of canons was promulgated, strengthened by severe penalties and the co-operation of the king. Finding it impossible either through spiritual or temporal power to compel absolute celibacy113 the king for the benefit of his exchequer established a license for concubinage upon the payment of a tax known as cullagium.114

Notwithstanding all the powerful enginery of the church, priestly celibacy, so contrary to nature, was not rendered absolutely imperative until the thirteenth century. The Fourth Lateran Council (Twelfth Ecumenical), 1215, under pope Innocent III, is especially famous because of its final settlement of the policy of the church in regard to priestly marriage. This was a large council, 1300 prelates taking part in the adjudication of this question. While with St. Augustine acknowledging that marriage was requisite for the preservation of the race, it strictly confined this relation to the laity.

The subject of celibacy as we see had agitated the church from its foundation. A more renowned council even than the Twelfth Ecumenical, namely, the First Nicene or Second Ecumenical, having seriously discussed it, although after prolonged debate pronouncing against celibacy and in favor of priestly marriage. St. Paphinutius, the martyr bishop of Thebes, although himself a celibate advocated marriage which he declared to be true chastity, the council adopting his opinion. Although the tendency of the church for so many hundred years had been towards celibacy yet when adopted as a dogma, a belief in its propriety or its scriptural authority was by no means universal even among the most eminent members, but in no instance has the control of the church over the consciences and will of its adherents been more forcibly illustrated. Many illustrious and learned theologians as Gratian the Canonist, St. Thomas Aquinas and Giraldus Cambrensis, Arch-Deacon of St. Davids, while thereafter sustaining celibacy as a law of the church declared it had neither scriptural nor apostolic warrant; St. Thomas affirming it to be merely a law of human ecclesiastical origin.115

Absolute celibacy of the priesthood proved very difficult of enforcement. At the great council of London, 1237, twenty-three years afterwards, Cardinal Otto deplored the fact that married men still received holy orders and held office in the church, and in 1268 only fifty-three years after the great council confirming celibacy as a doctrine of the church, another great council was convened in London, when Cardinal Legate Ottoborn, the direct representative of the Pope, demanded the establishment of concubinage for priests. The institutions of Otto and Ottoborn long remained the law of the English church. Yet to their honor be it remembered that despite council and cardinal, pope and church, there were priests who still persistently refused either to part from their wives or to relinquish their priestly functions, and who when excommunicated for contumacy, laughed at the sentence and continued their priestly offices.116 Others sufficiently conformed to the edicts to lock up their churches and suspend their priestly administrations, yet refusing to part with their wives. The relatives of wives also exerted their influence against the action of the church.