Thomas E. Watson

“ The memorable investigation which Duke Leopold of Tuscany caused to be made of the cloistered convents of Italy revealed identically the same cess-pools of vice that came to light in England when Henry VII. uncovered the monasteries.
All the literature of the Renaissance, after men's minds and pens freed themselves from the ignoble fear of popery, bear witness to the same universal everlasting truth—Men and women were made for each other, and no so-called religion can annul the laws of Nature. ”

“ Remember that the nun who was forced, could seldom escape and give the alarm. Remember that the babes born in the cloistered convents were seldom seen of men, and that they could easily be thrown into the hidden vault, where the quick-lime was ready to eat their bones. Remember that it was to the interest of popery to screen the priests, and that the rulers of States were in deadly fear of the wrath of Popes—wrath which sent death to Henry III. of France, William of Orange, and Henry of Navarre. ”

“ But the Turks knew how vain are walls, and barred windows, locked gates and vigilant sentinels. Therefore, the Turks always kept eunuchs in the harem itself, eunuchs whose watchful eyes were ever upon those ladies of the harem. And the eunuchs were powerful men, strong and fierce, but unsexed. They had the strength to guard the women, without the desire to enjoy.
But the Roman Pope builds harems in all Christian lands—harems for his priests to whom he denies marriage.
There are no eunuchs to guard these women. The men who go in unto them are men of like passions as ourselves ”

“ Can you imagine anything more conducive to immorality, [Pg 30] than a "religion," sanctified by the name of Christ, which teaches that its priests can forgive sins, and which publishes a list of market prices for such forgiveness? Do you marvel that Roman Catholic countries are the immoral countries? Do you wonder at the mania for vice and crime among the lower Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese?
When a man could ravish a virgin for six ducats, what girl had any safety except in the fear that libertines might have of her father or her brother, or her sweetheart? ”

“ The enormous popular support given to Calvin, Luther, and Knox, to Henry VIII., to Garibaldi, to Bolivar, and to Juarez, was largely fanned and fed by the intense wrath of the people against the pope-protected immorality of the priests—the adultery which could not be punished because it was interwoven into the system of popery.
The Popes could not punish the priests, because the Popes were equally criminal. The system required celibacy: the system was against the law of God: the system gave the priest absolute power over women, and secret access to them. ”

“ The Italian Pope draws his line around the dungeons of darkness and mystery, and the civil authorities dare not go in.
Everybody knows that young women are caged in those hell-holes. Everybody knows that burly, beefy, red-faced, thick-lipped young priests glide in and out. ”

“ There was a time, under popery, when it was assumed that every Spanish woman had yielded to a priest. And of course a woman who takes one lover will take another; and thus Spain went to moral perdition, with the priests and the nuns in the lead. ”

“ Every encouragement is given to wedlock and to large families: polygamy itself, had its reason, in those hot climates where puberty is reached at so early an age, and where the child-bearing woman is so quickly aged into unfitness for mating with the robust husband. It was partly because the Mosaic law gave so little excuse for immorality, that adultery was so cruelly punished. ”

“ The very language in which the virgin girl is made to pledge herself as "the spouse of Christ," is so abominably obscene and suggestive that it is bound to plant impure curiosity in her mind—and, with a girl, impure curiosity is the lure to the fall. ”

“ Enforced celibacy in normal priests, simply means adultery, hidden behind walls and disguised as religion. Therefore, when adultery has to be tolerated, as an incident to a certain [Pg 9] form of Christianity, the crime eludes the law, the illicit intercourse of the sexes identifies itself with a religious system, and it becomes as impossible to control as does the robber who gains control of the machinery of government. When the robber is the Law, who is to punish the criminal? When adultery is elevated into a system which is recognized as a religion, who is to punish the adulterer? ”

“ There are no bachelor eagles, no spinster swans, no monks among the lions, no nuns among the deer. When we want to make a bachelor out of a horse, we resort to surgery. Most of us know what Mooley, the cow, does in the Spring time, if she is shut up in the pasture with no other company than other Mooley cows.
Without pursuing this line of illustration farther, it is sufficient to say that all animal nature is under the same law. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. Some men repel women: some women abhor men. ”

“ Those nuns whose vows were not broken, were the ugly ones, the old and the ailing. The monks had such complete power over wives through the Confessional, that many women inside the cloister owed their immunity to the women outside.
There was a time, under popery, when no Italian husband was certain that his wife's children were his: hence, for a time paternal affection in Italy almost became extinct. There was a time, under popery, when every Italian wife had an acknowledged lover—her cicisbeo—the priests having paved the way. The husband kept a mistress; the wife, a lover ”

“ They have the right to kidnap children: they have a right to restrain prisoners; they have a right to compel obedience: they have a right to shut out the State and its law: they have a right to punish the refractory, to flog the unruly girl, to starve her into submission, to degrade her with disgusting services, to use her person for their lusts! ”

“ The husband and wife make the Home: the Home is the Gibraltar of organized civilization; and the children are Posterity, in its beginning. Thus marriage, the home, and the children are the conservators of Society. ”

“ When the brilliant, wayward Jewish boy goes astray and meets his untimely fate, we mourn with his broken father as he wails—"O Absolom my son, O my son Absolom!"
That which women have already been, women continue to be. ”

“ What sort of hell would we have in America if popery gained the upper hand, and the negro bucks were taught that they could buy pardons for violating white women?
God Almighty! It makes one sick to think that even now they are admitting young black men to the priesthood.
What will they do, inside the cloistered convents?
No scream from within can be heard outside. Those dead walls tell no tales. The Law dares not scrutinize the interiors where the negro priests can penetrate ”

“ The women have been taught that these men cannot sin, and that in serving these men they will be serving God. Besides, if they do sin with the priests, the priests can forgive the sins. This being so, what happens, when the lustful young priest slips into the cloistered convent, goes to the nun's bed-room and solicits her to yield to him, as Mary yielded to the angel?
(See "Why Priests Should Wed." Page 103.)
The cloistered convent is built like a huge dungeon. The encircling walls about it, are thick and high. No one enters in unto the unmarried women excepting the bachelor priests. ”

“ I shall not relate that the husbands whose wives have been abducted, are forced to silence and exile. * * * I shall not dwell upon the cruel insult by which the outraged husbands are being compelled to receive in their houses their wives who had been prostituted, especially when they carry in their wombs the fruit of the criminal love."
Great God! What a picture of the Papal Court!
Petrarch adds, "The people are quite aware of everything I know myself."
The people knew; the people murmured: the people were helpless. Adultery had interwoven itself into the very fabric of religion ”

“ Instead of being the wife of one man, the nun could be the mistress of several.
(Dr. Angelo Rappaport, p. 36.)
Why was it that Irenæus and Epiphanius poured out such unprintable descriptions of the immorality of those "heretics" who refused to marry and who professed to be virgins? Did these Fathers of the Christian Church grossly slander those celibate heretics? Were the men and the women who indulged in those sexual excesses, while pretending to be chaste, any better or any worse than the human creatures of today? ”

“ But where robbery has disguised itself as Law, and one class has aimed the law-making machine at the others, saying "Stand and deliver!" whole regions have become deserts, and great peoples have been blotted out. ”

“ Are the sons of freemen to countenance, nay, asked to build impassible walls around a licentious, lecherous, profligate horde of foreign priests and monks, who choose to come among us, and erect a little fortification, which they call nunneries for their protection? ”

“ The denial made by the unmarried priests is at variance with their looks, is at variance with admitted facts, is at variance with what we ourselves know of the overwhelming strength of our carnal desires: yet the impudent denial is so brazen, so persistent, and so threatening, that we either accept it, or enter the plea of nolle contendere.
The accusation against the pretended virgins involves so many apparently good men and chaste women, that we shrink from remembering the difference between publicity and privacy ”

“ It is chiefly to provide for the illicit offspring of priests and nuns, and such other unmarried females as the priests can seduce through the confessional.
But, it will be said, there are no lying-in hospitals attached [Pg 17] to the nunneries in this country. True, there are not; but I know from my own experience, through the confessional, that it would be well, if there were.
There would be fewer abortions; there would be fewer infants strangled and murdered.
It is not generally known to Americans that the crime of procuring abortion, is a common, everyday crime in popish nunneries. ”

“ Again, Erasmus asks what would Saint Augustine say now, if he were to see these convents and monasteries become "public brothels."
In those standard works, "The History of Prostitution" and "Human Sexuality," you will learn the fearful fact that the utter lewdness of nuns and of wives who had been debauched by the priests, became so universal that the trade of the professional harlot was almost entirely taken away from her. Why should loose men pay, when there were so many places of gratuitous entertainment? ”

“ The woman is easily led to believe that God's will is enlisted in her behalf, and that He has commissioned the priest to accomplish what the husband failed at: result, happy wife, bouncing babe, rapturous husband, chuckling priest. ”

“ Those reasons do not necessarily imply a lack of virility: some men simply prefer not to take a wife; some women just naturally fear the loss of independence, or they never meet the King who will take no denial, or they nobly burden their lives with duties which demand self-sacrifice. ”

“ Many of these children were by married women, whose husbands and brothers, and relatives were ready, if necessary, to wade knee-deep in blood for the holy immaculate infallible church of Rome."
And why were these American Catholics willing to wade in blood for popery? Because they did not know the truth about it.
The same reason holds good today; and that's the reason the priests are frantically trying to violate our Constitutional right of free speech and free press. ”

“ It is when the robbers intrench themselves in Parliaments, Reichstags and Congresses, and the robbery takes the form of "Law," that spoliation becomes destructive. Bank laws and money-contraction laws beat down more victims than armies. ”

“ I freely admit that there are exceptional men and women who voluntarily choose the unmarried life. There have always been such exceptions to the rule, and there probably always will be: the reasons need not be discussed. ”

“ Bernard of the 10th century exhausts his wrath upon the hideous vices of the monks and nuns "behind the partition." "What abominable lust!" cries this stern old anchorite. He exclaims—
"Would that those who cannot rule their sexuality would fear to give their conduct the name of celibacy. It is better to marry than to burn.... Take away from the church [Pg 27] honorable marriage and the undefiled bed, and do you not fill it with concubines, incestuous persons, onanists, male concubines, and with every kind of unclean person?" ”

“ Once again, let me say, men and women in their animal natures are just like other animals. They hunger, they thirst, they are hot, they are cold, they are sick, they are well, they love, they hate, they fight, they yearn for mates, and having found mates, they mate. ”

“ They Foolishly Take Vows Which
Insult Nature and God?
CHAPTER II.
Why is it that a human document ten thousand years old has the same effect upon us, as a newspaper story of yesterday? Why is it that we love or hate the men and women who live in the songs of Homer? Why do we grieve, or rejoice with those who live in the pages of Plutarch; and feel deeply moved when David and Jonathan are forced apart; when Joseph is sold by his brethren; when the song of Solomon voices the deathless devotion of the country girl for her mountain lover ”

“ In fact, the highwayman, the cattle-lifter and the pickpocket have never in the least affected the destinies of nations. The pirate and the buccaneer have never been able to destroy the commerce of the seas, beggar provinces, and change noble harbors into neglected pools. ”

“ We forget how this passion takes advantage of night, of undress, and of secret contact of the physical man and woman, to heat their normal blood, no matter how sanctified they may really be in their daily visible life. ”