The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (11 page)

An entire literary genre of anticlericalism arose, featuring abusive confessors. Whatever the truth of the alleged scandals, the reputation of the Catholic priesthood was being undermined on a broad front. A typical exponent was Antonio Gavin, a Spanish ex-priest and former confessor of Irish extraction. He had been a member of a ‘moral academy’ set up by the Inquisition in Saragossa in the second half of the seventeenth century to investigate allegations against confessors. In 1713 he left the priesthood, in disgust, so he claimed, and travelled to England. His book
A Master-Key to Popery
, aimed at the Protestant prejudices of an English readership, purports to expose an array of abuses in the confessional. There would be many editions in German and English, as well as a French edition, which circulated in Spain for a number of years before it was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books.

Among other allegations, he claimed that young people learned in confession about sins unknown to their consciences; that confessors cross-examined married women inappropriately about their sexual lives; and that confessors insinuated themselves with families for monetary gain. Among many cases, Gavin cited a young woman whose family had been bullied by a confessor. They made him her guardian, and left the family fortune to him. After the death of the father, the priest seduced the girl and left her destitute. In desperation she became the mistress of an army officer, but he was killed while on service in Catalonia. Turning to religion for consolation, she found herself a new confessor,
who said that he would arrange a suitable marriage for her if she would give him the jewellery left by her soldier-lover. This she did, whereupon he ordered her to sleep with him, threatening to turn her over to the Inquisition if she refused. In summary, Gavin claimed that ‘confessors are the occasion of the ruin of many families, many thefts, debaucheries, murders, and divisions’.
⁷

Much anticlerical material was clearly fictitious and even tongue-in-cheek. Denis Diderot’s
La Religieuse
, the narrative of a fictitious nun, Suzanne, was written originally as a joke perpetrated on an aristocratic friend. The ‘author’ was pleading with the Marquis de Croismar to release her from a convent where she was imprisoned. It was eventually published as an epistolary novel in 1796, after Diderot’s death, and was an immediate commercial success.

A typical literary anticlericalist author in the next generation was another former Spanish priest of Irish extraction, Joseph Blanco White of Seville, who had been ordained in 1800 at the age of twenty-five. In 1810, disillusioned with Catholicism (by his own admission, in consequence of abuses in the confessional), he went to England, studied theology at Oxford, and joined the Anglican Church. He became a close friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who admired his poetry, and the Anglican theologian John Henry Newman, who was then a Fellow of Oriel College. So popular was White among the Fellows that he was granted membership in their Common Room. In his book
The Preservative Against Popery
, White inveighs against the tyranny of confession over families, and
women in particular, because of sexual solicitation. He had stories, including the tale of a Franciscan confessor who fell passionately in love with a woman penitent, then murdered her on learning that she was to be married. Newman, even after deciding to become a Catholic, was convinced that White was sincere, and that he had left country and friends ‘all for an idea of truth, or rather for liberty of thought.’
⁸

Many other writers in the jaundiced anti-Catholic genre followed. Juan Antonio Llorente—an Enlightenment convert, bibliographer, and archivist—tells the story of a Capuchin confessor who persuaded some thirteen holy women (
beatas
) that he was in receipt of a supernatural vision telling him he was obliged to satisfy their sexual needs.
⁹

By the mid-nineteenth century, fictional accounts of Catholic clerical seductions and debauchery had become popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca Reed’s
Six Months in a Convent
, a lurid account of her time in an Ursuline convent in Charleston, Massachusetts, appeared in New York in 1835. It was a runaway best-seller. She died of tuberculosis shortly after the book’s publication, and it was believed that her death was caused by the privations she had experienced in the convent. The success of Reed’s book was partly attributed to the anticlericalism of a wave of immigrants from Ireland and Germany. The 1834 Ursuline Convent Riots near Boston also played a role. Rumours had spread that a girl was being kept in the Ursuline Convent against her will. Rioters set the convent on fire in a bid to secure her release.

Against this background, there followed a notorious anticlerical, anti-Catholic work of fiction masquerading as fact. Entitled
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed
, it derived partly from the gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the success of Reed’s earlier book. Maria Monk’s first-person story alleged that she had been incarcerated in the convent of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph in Montreal for seven years. She became pregnant, she claimed, by a priest from the neighbouring seminary, which had a connecting tunnel into the convent. The baby was strangled, according to the account, and dumped in a lime pit in the basement. The political and cultural historian Richard Hofstadter has written that Maria Monk’s novel was ‘probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’
. The book would spawn myriad imitators, of which the novel
Priest and Nun: A Story of Convent Life
, published in New York in 1871, was an example. In an attempt to establish the book’s authenticity, its anonymous author included a prefatory note claiming that in order to depict ‘the insidious principles of the Roman Church’ and the ‘inner of life of the modern nunnery’, the work was ‘strictly based on facts’.
¹⁰

The facts, fictions and factions of alleged clerical abuse had led in 1851 to the curious trial of John Henry Newman, friend, as we have seen above, of White’s. After becoming a Catholic priest, Newman founded an Oratorian house (following rules laid down by Philip Neri) at Edgbaston in Birmingham, England. While he was overseeing the building
of the house, he was obliged to refute rumours, prompted by a speech in the House of Commons, that Catholic religious houses were designing basement ‘cells’ for nefarious purposes. Richard Spooner, member of Parliament for North Warwickshire, had delivered a speech on the Religious Houses Bill, suggesting that a large religious convent in Edgbaston had ‘fitted up the whole of the underground with cells, and what were those cells for?’ To which the House resounded with ‘hear, hear’. The mayor of Birmingham was accordingly called upon to inspect Newman’s basement area, and confirmed that the site was innocent.
¹¹

To combat the ugly rumours about Catholic priests, Newman impugned the wayward Protestant imagination. Citing the cliché of Catholic institutions, such as the slander that all convents and monasteries were places of torture and sexual perversion, he turned the image against the Church’s antagonists. It was the Protestant imagination that was a grim convent or workhouse where the ‘thick atmosphere refracts and distorts such straggling rays as enter in.’
¹²

In a crowded lecture in Birmingham, Newman ill-advisedly accused one Giacinto Achilli of sexual depravity. Achilli was a former Italian priest of the Dominican order who had apostatised in Italy and escaped to England. He had been touring the country denouncing the Catholic Church for abuses in the confessional and other crimes. In September 1851 Achilli instituted criminal libel proceedings against Newman, which could result in an unlimited fine or imprisonment. Unfortunately, crucial evidence against Achilli in the keeping of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman was not to be
found. Newman lost the case and received his sentence on 31 January 1853. The fine was £100, a derisory figure; but Newman was also obliged to bear the costs of the case, which amounted to more than £14,000—about a million pounds at today’s value (about $1.5 million in US dollars). The judge rebuked Newman, declaring that he ‘had been everything good’ when he was a Protestant, ‘but had fallen’ on becoming a Catholic.
¹³
Such was Newman’s popularity among wealthy Catholics that he raised the money easily enough with a margin to spare.

T
HE ANTICLERICALISM
of the mid- to late nineteenth century was exacerbated by the clergy’s resistance to the rise of secularism and the consequent conflict between the Catholic Church and the governments of the emerging nation-states of Europe. In France, where anticlericalism was at its height through the second half of the century, there was a widespread perception of the clergy as manipulative in the confessional, if not always abusive. There were also widespread charges of hypocrisy. The title of a book by Michel Morphy, published in Paris in 1884, was
Les mystères de la pornographie clericale; secrets honteux de la confession, immoralités, obscénités, et guerre aux prêtres, corrupteurs de la jeunesse
(Mysteries of clerical pornography, the shameful secrets of the confessional, immoralities, obscenities, and the war against priests, corrupters of youth). Later in the century anticlericalism flared anew in
France following the Church’s disgrace for its anti-Semitic attacks on Alfred Dreyfus, the wrongly accused and imprisoned Jewish army officer. Dreyfus was charged with treason and sent to Devil’s Island: the case divided the nation. Those representing the right-wing segments of the Church insisted on his guilt even after his reprieve.

At the same time, priests were prompting anger throughout France because of their campaigns against the new styles of dancing, such as the polka—which encouraged touching and embracing. Confessors were counselling married women against collaborating with their husbands in popular forms of birth control, such as mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus, and anal intercourse. Priestly interference in matters of the marital bedroom was depicted in Marcel Jouhandeau’s novels, for example, and clerical hypocrisy was vividly dramatised by Stendhal (
Le Rouge et le Noir
) and Octave Mirbeau (
Sébastien Roch
).

A
S ANTI
-S
EMITISM
, and, in particular, allegations against Catholic confessors, spread on both sides of the Atlantic, the posthumous reputation of an unusual priest in France was gaining national, and eventually international, attention for his remarkable feats as an ascetic and confessor. Jean-Marie Vianney was parish priest of the village of Ars, a poor farming community near the city of Lyons. Born in 1786, Vianney was a man of meagre education but profound piety. He found
his seminary formation difficult, as he was a slow learner. He often spent part of the night flat on his face in church, with only snatches of sleep on the stone floor of his bedroom—using a log for a pillow. He whipped himself daily with a metal scourge, spattering the walls with blood. For food he would boil a pan of potatoes once a week and live off them until the final ones were black and rotten. He performed his fasts and self-mortifications, he declared, in order to rid the parish of the devils that inhabited it. On one occasion he reported that a devil had beaten him up in the church during the night.
¹⁴

Convinced that his parish was sunk in wickedness, he set about a campaign of spiritual renewal. He cut down the trees in his orchard so that children would not be tempted to steal his apples. He declared war on the taverns and the occasional dances and fiestas. Week by week from the pulpit, he preached against the sin of dancing, declaring that the doors of the taverns were the entrances to Hell. Finally he acquired money from a wealthy pious local to pay off the owners of the taverns in order to close them down; but he did not rest until he had banned dancing, which he believed to be a prelude to every carnal temptation.