Lectures of Lola Montez/Chapter 8

I know not that history has anything more wonderful to show than the part which the Catholic Church has borne in the various civilizations of the world.

What a marvellous structure it is, with its hierarchy ranging through long centuries, almost from apostolic days to our own; living side by side with forms of civilization and uncivilization, the most diverse and the most contradictory through all the fifteen hundred years and more of its existence; asserting an effective control over opinions and institutions; with its pontificate (as is claimed) dating from the fisherman of Galilee, and still reigning there in the city that heard Saint Peter preach, and whom it ​saw martyred; impiously pretending to sit in his chair and to bear his keys; shaken, exiled, broken again and again by schism, by Lutheran revolts and French revolutions; yet always righting itself, and reasserting a vitality that neither force nor opinion has yet been able to extinguish. Once with its foot on the neck of kings, and having the fate of empires in its hands, and even yet superintending the grandest ecclesiastical mechanism that man ever saw; ordering fast days and feast days, and regulating with Omnipotent fiat the very diet of millions of people; having countless bands of religious soldiery trained, organized, and officered as such a soldiery never was before nor since; and backed by an infallibility that defies reason, an inquisition to bend or break the will, and a confessional to unlock all hearts and master the profoundest secrets of all consciences. Such has been the mighty Church of Rome, and there it is still, cast down, to be sure, from what it once was, but not yet destroyed; perplexed by the variousness and freedom of an intellectual civilization which it hates and ​vainly tries to crush; laboriously trying to adapt itself to the Europe of the nineteenth century, as it once did to the Europe of the twelfth; lengthening its cords and strengthening its stakes, enlarging the place of its tent, and stretching forth the curtains of its habitations even to this Republic of the New World.

Such is the tremendous fabric of Rome, standing out on the foreground of the world's history, and bearing upon its scarred bosom the marks of the various civilizations and barbarisms through which it has passed.

Regarded in the light of a merely human institution, it is worthy of the profoundest study of man; but the moment it puts in a claim of divine origin and appointment, it sinks beneath the contempt of human reason. If it comes before us in its sacerdotal robes and bids us bow our faith to its monstrous profanities, we shake it from us and cast it off with disgust and horror; but in its human aspects, in its moral and political career, we will look fairly at it ​and inquire, how it came to pass that an institution so loaded with the crimes and groans of ages, and stained with the blood of martyrs, and fraught with such shocking absurdities, could hold on so long, and play the part it has in the history of the world's progress.

It will not do to dispose of this question by simply saying that the Catholic Church was all a lie and cheat in the beginning (a lie and cheat most truly it is now, as most other institutions of barbarism would be if transplanted to the present time), nor will it do to call its origin a deliberate scheme for usurping the rights of mankind; for it was not that; it was as natural a growth out of the social, moral, and political causes operating in the first six centuries as the institutions of the troubadours, of chivalry, and of feudalism were of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.

It grew up slowly and naturally, was moulded into its ultimate form by the pressure of many times, and bears the marks as much as any other institution of the various ages and states of civilization that ​have successively been cotemporaneous with it. I can see that it was the product of Christianity coming in contact with the old Pagan modes of thought and feeling, which at that time had full possession of the Roman world; its doctrines were not priestly manufactures, they were simply the expression of prevalent tendencies of the Pagan mind, and the effect of general causes in the moral world.

For instance, it is plain enough to see where its image-worship and hero-worship came from; for, far as these things are removed from the spirit and precepts of Christ, they were actually wants of the popular mind, trained in the long school of Paganism, and familiar with the picturesque materialism of the Greek philosophy. Romanism in its origin was a compromise between Christianism and Paganism, by which nearly all the superstitions and immoralities of the latter contrived to get themselves baptized with the Christian name. And this fatal compromise was the work of the people more than of the priest; thus the decision of the Council of Ephesus ​(held under Pope Celestine, A. D. 431), that it should be permitted to invoke Mary of Nazareth by the style and title of "Mother of God," was received by the people out of doors with shouts of exultation; the prelates as they issued from the synod were saluted with every expression of applause, and the victory was celebrated by a general illumination.

The doctrine was not made by the priests, it was made for them; forced upon them, in fact, by irresistible popular sentiment; and their share in the business was little more than to register the act of the multitude. The confessional, with its appended penances, the purgatory and masses for the dead, the consecration of saintly names and relics, the rise of monasticism, with its fasts and vigils, were all the product of general impulses of Pagan feeling, finding voice and expression in connexion with Christian ideas.

So, too, the dogmatizing theology of Rome, the long creeds fenced by short and sharp anathemas, were no arbitrary creation of the early priests, but ​were a result of that taste and talent for ⟨theological⟩ syllogizing, which the church borrowed from the subtile and disputatious Greek mind. In fact, the whole thing was little more than a Christian translation of Paganism, in which, by a sort of metempsychosis, the soul of ancient Greece seemed to live over again.

So, after all, there is nothing very shocking nor very strange in the rise and growth of this vast fabric of Rome; it rose out of a great number of interests, or intellectual and moral wants and habits embodied into an organized institution by a succession of powerful minds, themselves partaking of these varied influences, and often giving expression to them in connexion with the most vulgar superstitions of the times.

And herein lies the great secret of the strength and success of Rome; in its perpetual willingness to compound with whatever popular vice or superstition, for the sake of unlimited dominion over the public mind. By this means it has acquired a fearful control over opinions and institutions during the fifteen ​hundred years of its reign, and it is impossible to say how far the providence of God may have compelled the vast worldly forces of this Church to contribute to the general safety and blessing of humanity.

Who shall say that he who "makes the wrath of man to praise him," did not also make this stupendous power subservient to his will, during the dark and perilous ages of the past? Who can say that it was not a great thing for Europe, during the centuries of darkness and confusion that came in between the downfall of the Roman Empire and the revival of law and settled government, to have such a Church; a power professing to be not of this world, and declaring itself greater than the world; reposing upon ideas, and often successfully asserting them, in opposition to the brute force which was then the only other great European power? Who can say that it was not much for Europe to have had an intellectual and moral power like that, visibly embodied, and fixed in an institution which could not be moved by the ​shocks of falling states; a power which had its missionaries out in the far north of Germany, and Anglo-Saxon Brittany, sowing the seeds of moral dominion; which could interpose, and often did interpose, between oppression and its victim; proclaimed truces of God to the ferocious savagery of war; took the charge of those young Italian Republics, which otherwise must have been crushed between jostling kingdoms; cherished in the consecrated asylum of its abbeys and monasteries, germs of civilization, which, if cast carelessly out on the embattled elements, would have been trodden under foot of contending warriors; and kept up during those dark ages, an action upon popular sentiment and opinion, which, with all its defects and misdirections, saved the world from falling into utter and irredeemable barbarism. It is easy to say that all this was superstition and idolatry, for so it was; but it was infinitely more humanizing than the old superstition which it displaced, giving the popular imagination idols, images, that were types not of its own barbarism, but of the good and of the beautifully ​true, substituting Holy Families for Thor and Odin, and the Cross, emblem of hope to mankind, for the beak and claw of the Roman eagle.

This much history compels us to say in praise of Rome. We cannot deny it the merit of having worked well during those terrible ages. So long as its doctrines and ceremonies expressed the highest ideas that benighted men had; so long as it was in advance of the average intellect and heart of the ages; so long as it was the result of vital organic growth, and not, as now, of dead mechanical pressure; so long we cheerfully accord it the merit of having done the best it could, and we can say no more for it.

Its struggle ever since has been to drag the heart and brain of man backward into the night out of which it came. It has been the scourge of modern civilization, obstinately keeping the free progressive spirit of man locked up in the same eternal prison of an arbitrary ritual, and an artificial creed, containing dogmas at which common sense revolts, enforced by ​Anathemas at which humanity shudders; so ordering things that there could be no change or progression, without a life and death conflict; compelling the spirit of reform to be revolutionary; giving Europe a whole century of Religious war; and bequeathing to European civilization a spirit of intolerance, tyranny, and fiery denunciation, which, but for the presence of a spirit stronger than itself, would have left the world at this time as far from Chistianity and Christian civilization, as in the days of Hildebrand and Innocent the Third.

The only wonder is that such a church should be able to push its fortunes so far into the centre of modern civilization, with which it can feel no sympathy, and which it only embraces to destroy. I confess I find it difficult to believe that a total lie could administer comfort and aid to so many millions of souls; and the explanation is, no doubt, that it is not a total lie; for even its worse doctrines are founded on certain great truths which are accepted by the common heart of humanity. They are, as we ​may say, caricatures of truths which seize the vulgar imagination with a powerful grasp, and cause it to be enchanted with the very slavery they impose. Take for instance its doctrines of universality, infallibility, and apostolic succession, and we find that they are all simply exaggerations or caricatures of great Christian truths.

There is such a thing as universal truth, and there is such a thing as Apostolic succession, made not by Edicts, Bulls, and Church Canons, but by an interior life divine and true. But all these Rome has perverted, by hardening the diffusive spirit of truth into so much mechanism cast into a mould in which it has been forcibly kept; and by getting progressively falser and falser, as the world has got older and wiser, till the universality became only another name for a narrow and intolerant sectism, while the infallibility committed itself to absurdity after absurdity, at which reason turns giddy, and faith has no resource but to shut her eyes; and the Apostolic succession became narrowed down into a mere dynasty of Priests and Pontiffs. A hierarchy of magicians, saving souls by ​machinery, opening and shutting the kingdom of heaven by a sesame of incantations which it would have been the labor of a lifetime to make so much as intelligible to St. Peter or St. Paul.

In this abyss of superstition and moral pollution, when the voice of Luther came upon it like thunder; when priests and monks had taken to sell salvation on slips of paper or parchment; when heaven, salvation, the grace of God, were made marketable commodities, priced and ticketed, bought and sold, till thinking men began to doubt whether there really could be any heaven at all; it was time for the spirit of God that was in man to speak out against that hierarchy of priests who were preying on the credulity of mankind. This was the spirit and power of the Lutheran protest against Rome. It was not creed against creed, it was not creed at all in the beginning; it was reality against formalism, the prophet against the priest. It was not so much the casting off of theological absurdities, as it was the uprising of the human heart against ecclesiastical immoralities.

​So with the immoral but very profitable traffic which Rome carried on with relics of the dead. It cunningly seized upon one of the strongest cords of human nature; for although we call it superstition, yet is there a profound feeling at the bottom of this veneration for relics. How oft have we wept with affection over a lock of hair, or some such dear memento of a departed friend? With what loving devotion the heart clings to the slightest thing that brings back to us a name hallowed in our affections? The shirt in which Henri IV. of France received the dagger of Ravaillac is still preserved and exhibited to the admiring patriot. The friends of Nelson preserve the coat in which he fell at Trafalgar. And so the patriotic American will perform his pilgrimage to the old Stone House at Newburgh, once the head-quarters of Washington, filled with sacred mementos of the Revolution; and how do your people bend with affection and emotion over the immortal tomb at Mount Vernon! The feeling to which these things appeal is one of the deepest and holiest of human nature, and it has ​been successfully used by Rome to rob the poor and enchant the human heart with its pretensions. The mind turns away with disgust from the monstrous impostures which it has practised in the traffic of relics. Lord Oxford mentions having seen for sale at a small town in Italy, among other relics, a finger nail from the hand of St. Peter, a bit of the worm that never dies, preserved in spirits, a quill from the cock that crew at the crucifixion, and the chemise of the Holy Virgin. His lordship says: "The good man that showed us all these commodities was got in such a train of calling them the blessed this, and the blessed that, that at last he showed us a 'bit of the blessed fig-tree that Christ cursed.'"

There was a time when the Bishop of Trêves, like Leo. X., wanted money for the completion of his cathedral. That church possessed a relic, the coat without seam worn by our Saviour. This the bishop determined should be the "golden fleece" of Trêves. He summoned pilgrims to pay their veneration to the garment, and with magnanimous audacity, founded ​the pilgrimage on the bull of Leo. X. in 1514. That bull promised "a full remission of sins in all future times to all believers who go in pilgrimage to the exhibition of the Holy Coat at Tréves, sincerely confess and repent of their sins, or at least have a firm intention to do so, and moreover contribute largely to the decoration of the Cathedral at Trêves." A million and a half of people obeyed this call in six weeks, and the deluded multitude were heard on bended knees to say, "Holy Coat, to thee I come; Holy Coat, to thee I pray; Holy Coat, pray for me."

Now who shall compute the stupifying and brutalizing effects of such a religion? Who will dare say that a principle which so debases reason is not like bands of iron around the expanding heart and struggling limbs of modern freedom? Who will dare tell me that this terrible Church does not lie upon the bosom of the present time like a vast unwieldy and offensive corpse, crushing the life-blood out of the body of modern civilization? It is not as a religious creed that we are looking at this thing; it is not for its ​theological sins that we are here to condemn it; but it is its effect upon civilization and upon political and social freedom that we are discussing. What must be the ultimate political night that settles upon a people who are without individuality of opinions and independence of will, and whose brains are made tools of in the hands of a clan or an order! Look out there into that sad Europe, and see it all! See, there, how the Catholic element everywhere marks itself with night, and drags the soul, and energies, and freedom of the people backwards and downwards into political and social inaction—into unfathomable quagmires of death!

You see it upon the soil, upon commerce, upon trade, upon industry, upon every resource of national greatness, upon the very face of the people, where submission and ignorance sit enthroned over the crushed and degraded intellect. In all Catholic countries on the face of the globe the jail is greater than the school-house—the hospital for the infirm, than the means of self-support and self-respect.

Look for instance at Catholic and Protestant Ger​many. The quick eye of Mirabeau saw the great disparity. He said, "The want of knowledge and industry of Catholic Germany must be attributed to the bigotry which in those superb countries sways both government and people. Festivals, processions, pilgrimages, mummery, render the latter idle, stupid, and careless. The sway of the priests renders them ignorant, despotic, cruel, and above all, implacably inimical to everything that might enlighten the human mind. These two causes are eternally destructive of all human knowledge, and the ruin of knowledge brings on that of commerce and industry."

The Dictionnaire de la Conversation says: "The way of the Austrian government has ever been to insure the strengthening and development of the statu quo." There is neither liberty of thought, of commerce, nor of home in Austria. Progress is the terror of all Catholic countries, but especially of Austria, Bavaria, and Italy!

To go no further back than the sixteenth century, from that time until now, no change has come over ​their policy. There they are as they were three centuries ago, down in eternal stagnation and immobility.

And the people—the poor people—the victims, without education, without means of industry, without the sanctity of home, without anything but the priesthood and the police!

Alas, Austria you do not see that in refusing to progress, you go backwards. It is not for nations to stand still; if they are not rising, they are sinking; Catholic Germany and Italy are sinking. But just step over into Protestant Prussia, and see how she is proudly marching up the hill at the head of liberal progress. See her education universally diffused, and freedom of opinion everywhere allowed. See commerce, trade, and industry emancipated from the slavery that crushes them in Austria. See plenty smiling from the fields of toil, and industrial activity chasing away the spectres of pauperism and social ruin, that everywhere stalk abroad like a mighty army of death over the face of all Austria.

The contrast I have drawn here between Austria ​and Prussia, holds good for all other Catholic countries of Europe, excepting Belgium, over which the bright light of liberty is shining. She has found that wherever you trace the influence of priests, politically, there night and gloom and tyranny follow behind. Let us next view Switzerland, dear Switzerland, which kindly opened its arms to receive me, and made me for a time the guest of the republic, when I was compelled at last to fly before the infuriated bands of the Jesuits of Austria. My heart will ever beat warmly for Switzerland, but it must beat sadly, too, when I think of the moral and social degradation into which one half of it is plunged and held down by the same hand which crushes the south of Germany, and which drove me and so many others out of Germany and Bavaria because I had defied its power, resisted its bribes, and caused at least one government to place itself in opposition to its schemes for enslaving the whole of Germany and breaking up the republic of Switzerland.

Thank heaven these events are matters of history, which will one day vindicate me from the assaults of ​that remorseless band, who have caused my name to be assailed all over the world, because they had no other means to destroy a woman who had ventured into the arena of politics against them and their enslaving diplomacy.

Shelley said, when travelling in Switzerland, that he could tell a Protestant from a Catholic Canton by the dirty faces in the latter. Alas! that dirty face looks out of everything; out of the education, the industry, the commerce, and the whole social fabric of all its Cantons in Switzerland. To see this, we have but to draw a parallel between the Protestant and Catholic Cantons as they sit there beside each other, under the same sky and climate, with a similar soil and territorial extent.

Let us contrast Protestant Zurich, with Catholic Tessin, the latter of which has been slowly decreasing in population since the beginning of the present century, and what is left of it is poor, dirty, ragged, a prey to tax-gatherers and holy orders. Land naturally fertile, left uncultivated, the people without ​education, without ambition, and without any of the prosperity of progressive civilization. Such is poor Tessin, lying there in hopeless stagnation and gloom, a political and moral dwarf, and dead at that, in the midst of the grand and gigantic scenery of the Alps.

But take a view of its Protestant neighbor Zurich, and see how changed the scene, compared with Tessin. The land in Zurich appeared to me to be sterile and naturally unproductive. But the industrious activity of its inhabitants has overcome these impediments of nature, and where the earth was so barren that the hand of toil could not force abundance out of it, I saw manufactories arising, and heard the clatter of machinery, and beheld the tide of commerce bearing wealth and prosperity to its inhabitants. Seldom does beggary crouch in its streets; only in an hour's time I had stepped into another civilization. New manners, new morals, new homes, new men and women compared with that sad fossil of society, lying just back there in Tessin. I said at once, this Canton must have been ​a long time Protestant, to present such a scene of civilization and activity. And when I turned to the page of its history, I found that it had indeed been educated in the Reformation.

As this spot was one of the centres of the Reformation, it is now one of the centres of Swiss civilization.

Look next at Lucerne, with its naturally rich soil, lying in the very heart of Switzerland, geographically placed to be the centre of trade, commerce, and wealth; but alas none of these things are there; even its roads are left uncompleted, because its besotted inhabitants, still embued with an ancient superstition, believe that by enlarging the roads, they open themselves to the enemy. You will not need to be told that this is a Catholic Canton. It is the centre of the Catholic interest in Switzerland, and has the honor of being the residence of the Pope's Nuncio.

Poor Lucerne made so beautiful by the hand of God, but treated so badly by the hand of man. ​This Canton, when I saw it, did not seem to me to have had its face washed in a quarter of a century. Sloth was on its fields, ignorance on the countenance of its inhabitants, and filth everywhere.

What a contrast to Protestant Berne! Here I found the fields smiling with plenty. Education, industry, and trade, if nothing else, would have told me that the Reformation had unlocked the prison doors of this people. I shall never forget how beautiful the people looked to me in their clean and comfortable homes, and their refined and simple manners. It will puzzle the traveller to find a happier peasantry in Europe than that of the Canton of Berne.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you go through the various Catholic and Protestant Cantons of Switzerland, you will find this comparison to hold true with them all. No reflecting person can look upon those scenes without being impressed with the fact that Rome is an enemy to popular freedom, and a Scourge of modern civilization.

​The same thing stares at you in every Catholic country in Europe. You see it in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the South of Ireland; and then how do you see it, also, in the two Americas! Compare South with North America. Will you tell me that climate produces the indescribable difference between the two? You are contradicted by the fact, that the advantages of climate and soil are with South America; and, as if Providence had intended it to be the greatest producing country on earth, it has the most majestic and the longest rivers in the world. I shall not pause to picture the wretched condition of South America, nor shall I attempt to describe the prosperity of North America. I begin to get dizzy myself when I think of it; and to what are you indebted for your superiority? To that sharp individualism, that spirit of progressive freedom, involved in the principles of the reformation.

In 1781 Raynal wrote this of your country, "⟨If⟩ ten millions of men ever find an assured subsistence in these provinces, it will be a great deal." Well, if ​that little party which came out in the Mayflower had been Catholics instead of Puritans, if they had brought with them the spirit of Rome, instead of the Reformation, and if those who followed them to these shores, had brought the same religion, you would not have been over ten millions of people to this day; then the world would have had neither Steamboats nor Telegraphs. These things are too fast for Rome. She looks to the past. She stands with her back to the present: She inhabits the Statu-quo and hates and would destroy, if she could, that principle of progress, which gave you your national existence. America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant principle. It is that principle which has given the world the four greatest facts of modern times—Steam-boats, Rail-roads, Telegraphs, and the American Republic!