The Express.
London, England, 1851-03-10 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, MONDAY EVENING, MARCH 10, 185

FATHER GAVAZZI'S TENTH ORATION
YESTERDAY LN THE PRINCESS'S CON-
CERT HALL.

" CLERICAL CELIBACY."

The Italian congregation, which gathered in un-
usual force yesterday afternoon, was replaced in the
evening by a German assembly, scarcely less nume-
rous, attracted by the name of Johannes Bone, the
famous denouncer of the holy coatatTreves, in whose
mind the revulsion from legendary imposture has
been so violent that it has rried him into what is
called rationalism, with a tinge of socialist politics,
neither of which objectionable elements disfigure the
teaching of Gas azzi. Indeed, of the thousands of osten-
sibly Itomanist clergymen south of the Alps, who
tacitly reject the palpable absurdities of Ultrainontism,
few if any lapse into the wild theories of the German
school ; and as to socialism, none but maligners of the
Nlontalembert school could impute ideas subversive of
property to the immense majority who seek the free-
dom of the Italian peninsula.
That the papacy is equally an abomination to both
is clear enough :
Hine movet Erydanu., dehinc Germania helium;
!lacteal's insolitis tremucrunt motihus Alpe..
But the wide-spread discontent of Italy is far the
more formidable feature of the two.

The Father began by animadverting in a strain of
indignant scorn to certain emanations of the London
Roman catholic press, equally stupid as obscure, at-
tributing mercenary motives to his denunciations of
papal fraud and imposture; he bade them come and
scrutinize his life, contrasting his humble abode and
scanty fare with the wages of Rome's purple emis-
sary, paid here for degrading his country by a pro-
fusion of earthly comtorts and pomps, the pampered
embodiment of mingled servility and arronce. Let
him cut his pudding, but bid his tools ware of
clumsy calumny. He threw down the gauntlet to
all manly or hcinest impugners; let such come for-
ward if they dare. The anonvmous and the skulk
he scouted as became their lurking scoundrelism.
Entering on the subject of enforced celibacy, he
asked for any warrant in Christ's gospel, or a clear
lucid enactment by any of his apostles, laying a yoke
of such monstrous endurance on so large a body of
men for so many centuries. There was none. lie
came not to question individual instances of excep-
tional prerogative in the pursuit of evangelic perfec-
tion, but to challenge the forcible and systematic
extension to a whole class of what reason as well us
scripture, wherever allusion was made to total conti-
nence, clearly indicated as the rare attribute of a
few. In the scanty passages either of Christ's own
teaching, or that of Paul, where was the groundwork
of this gigantic superstructure? We must seek for
it elsewhere. Its origin is like the gnostic and
Manichean interpolations of Christianity—a com-
pound of Eastern fanaticism and Pagan iniaginini,n.
&molting in the wild fancies of anchorites, stylites,
and the Alexandrian school of Origen. Enough of
comparatively harmless paganism pervades the wor-
ship of I tome—processionsoncense, lust rations,t utelary
genii, and all the cumbrous paraphenialia of a
ritual singularly retentive of primitive idolatries,
but the moral code and ethical discipline of the
Christian community is far less saturated with such
reminiscences as tliese, of the goddess Cybele, the
Corybantes of Greece, the priesthood of India, and
the vestals of Numa. The speaker showed this
vicious and inhuman system at work in the Ellusi-
nian mysteries at Delphi and Dodona, and among
the bonzes of Japan, evincing a full familiarity with'
the details of recondite superstition in the earliest
ages of mankind.
Nor did this emanation of the arch enemy, this foul dis-
tortion of the moral principle, establish itself unchallenged
and undeaminetsl as part and parcel of early Christianity.
The voice of Vigilantius, vigorous and vehement, pro-
claimed the innovation in the days of Jerome, and Iwgun
the long series of remonstrances which have been renewed

in ever; successive age. The historian Evagrius, in 110,
records the struggle of the newly-elected Bishop of Ptole-
mais against its enforcement, and tells us how the eminent
Sens-sins refused to dishonour his wife by its recognition :
whereupon he was nevertheless consecrated hy Theophilus.
Patriarch of Alexandria. At the great Nicene council,
the most august of all the assemblies of churchmen,
the introduction of this heterogeneous element into the leg i
latiou of the Christendom, was mischievously attempted by
a few oriental fanatics, when there arose in that venerable
congress an illustrious confessor of the faith, his head sil-
vered with age, and bearing in his maimed limbs and shat-
tered frame the traces of torture inflicted by the tyrant
l'eephnutius, Bishop of Upper Thebaide, flung the
weight of his years, experience, and wisdom into the balance,
and the collective sagacity of the mewuenic episcopate
stamped the attempt with energetic reprobation. (Cheers.)
The father sifted the councils of Ancyra (313), of
Nero-Ca-sacra (315), of Agazzium (506), and described
the renewal of efforts to enforce the objectionable
system, as evidences of the constant repugnance and
antagonism of the clergy to bye-laws of this charac-
ter. The disastrous consequences of these incessant
inroads on household purity became evident in the
suemeding centuries, and the writings of Petrus
Damianus, of such high authority among papal
chroniclers, confirm, in all the sad details of universal
turpitude, the picture which contemporary writers
draw of clerical incontinency, and the utter disregard
of decency in the infringement of an unnatural regu-
lation. The deposition of bishops for open concubi-
nage became the current business of synods--as that
of Amalfi in 110 the war waged against the in-
stincts of humanity was a fearful and formidable as
well as scandalous contestation.
The tremendous energies of secular ambition were
brought to bear on the further and final enforcement of
celibacy, when the clergy of Europe were transformed by
Hildebrand into a confederated caste arrayed in hostility
to monarchs, magistrates, and all legislation, on the part of
the laity. Amid a tempest of execration from Germany and
the upheaving of northern Europe, this Italian monk carried
nut his anti-social and subversive rruaade, at the very time
exhibiting the monstrous spectacle ofundue intimacy and am-
biguous intercourse with another man's wife,Matilda,wedded
to Godfrey of Lorraine, whom she openly discarded from
bed and board to live for years under the same roof—the
Castle of Canossa— with her favourite champion under cir-
cumstances which a jury box of Englishmen would quickly
qualify. This disturber of courts and households died an
outlaw and an outcast at Salerno; but his handiwork sur-
vived in the political as well as the mural world. What
was the result? Seek for it in the pages of Bocaccio and
in every remnant of contemporary literature! Show me a
scandalous chronicle without a priest, a tale of adultery
without a monk ; bishops, nuns, and friars became the in
evitable dramatis persourrof comic or tragic adventure, and
the grave, austere, and thoughtful volume of Dante bears
its awful testimony to the truth of the troubadour and the
narrative of the novelist—the 15th canto of his " Hell "
fully unfold the Gomorrah of celibacy. (Loud cheers.)

The Father proceeded to stigmatise the prurient
works of church dignitaries, Monsignors della Casa
and Guidiccionc, Cardinals Bembo and Sadoletti, as
the sad but suggestive evidences of deep-seated im-
morality-. The homely intelligence of Switzerland
insisted on each incumbent's open concubinage as a
protection to the parish ; and the triumphant success
of Zwinglius was mainly attributable to his vindica-
tion of honourable marriage. The hotbed
system of clerical seminaries where this un-
natural restraint was cultivated, produced in
Italy fearful and unutterable results. In France,
the history of the court clergy and the annals
of profligacy were identical ; and the open debauch-
ery of Cardinal Dubois and his contemporaries,
was now succeeded by concealed criminality, driven
I by the scrutiny of a more censorious public to despe-
rate deeds of murder, as in the cases of the Cure Min-
grid, the Frere Lestard, and the Abbe Gothland. The
agency of the confessional in promoting unlimited
depravity was pointed out forcibly and convincingly,
and the extent to which female intrigues were male
instrumental in forwarding the ambition of aspirants
at the Roman court was exemplified in the career of
Antonelli, who found his Matilda when delegate
over the city of Macerata in the days of Gregory.
The moral sense was utterly blunted in Rome.
The full development of the social evil was too pain-
ful a topic to dwell on in a mixed assembly, and he
forbore to reveal the ignominy and disgrace of his
native land ; but he loudly arraigned the foul papal
machinery of corruption in morals, as well as op-
pression in government, and inveighed in a strain of
highly eloquent indignation against the late hypo-
critical and imbecile proceeding of the Pope, in
causing the marble angels of Canova, in St. Peter's
Church, to be plastered over with petticoats of
stucco, forsooth, that the modesty of tnoiesiyituri
might not be too rudely shocked by the master-
pieces of genius, while these professed celibates of a
corrupt and demoralising court were night after night
prominent at princely balls remarkable for the semi-
nude costumeof native as w alas foreign fashionable@
—whether these scandalous entertainments,meant as
a mockery of the public mourning, and an insult to i
the national downfall, were given n the gilt saloons ,
of old papal nepotism by the present inheritors of
pontitic plunder, or in hired palaces by a General
Gemeau, commanding the Croats of France—(thunders
of applause}—where the mingled flunkeyism and
frivolity of a degenerate aristocracy pass ate vacant