The Dark Box

by John Cornwell

  Unfortunately, Father Prádanos fell ill and died, but he was followed by yet another confessor, the youthful Father Baltasar Alvarez, who was inexperienced in the ambit of high spirituality. When Teresa reported fresh visions and voices, and in particular, the actual, physical presence of Jesus, he was sceptical. He recommended that she get out more, read more widely, and seek distractions. He became increasingly dubious about her experiences, suspecting that they were diabolical. He was finally convinced of her authentic mysticism, however, after he began to have visions himself. She would keep Father Baltasar for three years, but while he was absent for a period, she took on a substitute confessor, who was convinced that she was possessed by demons and in need of exorcism. With the return of Baltasar, she began to perform levitations, witnessed, it was said, by her community. Other advisers and confessors followed, including Peter of Alcántara (one day to be made a saint), who dwelt in a cell just four and a half feet in length, and who slept no more than an hour and a half a day, breaking his fast only once every three days. He kept constant ‘custody of the eyes’ to guard against lust, and wore a spiked ‘discipline’ around his middle. He was said to have given Teresa much spiritual comfort and confessed to her in turn. After his death, he continued to appear to her, offering further spiritual direction.32

  A fine line between genuine mysticism and florid neuroses bordering on psychoses is manifest in the repertoire of strange stories that erupted during the period. Some religious women, such as Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, reported experiencing unbearably high temperatures (interpreted as the ‘furnace of divine love’), stigmata, odours of sanctity, and visions of devils (one was said to sit on Teresa’s breviary to distract her from prayer). Confessors, including highly placed prelates, at times administered spiritual direction to charismatic women who, by today’s state of knowledge, were likely suffering from a range of illnesses—bulimia, anorexia, and forms of self-harm sufficiently injurious to make them bedridden, sometimes for years. The confessors wrote up curious, semi-hagiographical accounts of these subjects, often judging their symptoms—including visions, voices, and ‘lights in prayers’—as on the borders of the diabolical and the authentic. It is perhaps no coincidence that the seventeenth century saw the initiation of Pope Urban VIII’s ‘scientific’ procedures for canonization, a more empirical approach than was used in earlier centuries. A hundred years on, Pope Benedict XIV would draw up a list of saints who allegedly did not eat, attempting to distinguish between those who were holy women and those who were ‘possessed’.33

  Professor Rudolph Bell, in his 1985 book Holy Anorexia, argues that such borderline holy women exemplified the consequences of a new regime of male-dominant Tridentine clericalism; that women seeking the highest levels of sanctity, independent of the cloister and stricter codes of canon law, were driven neurotically in on themselves. Invariably such women had suffered from the envy, even hatred, of prelates who objected to their powers of spiritual insight and spiritual counselling. Whatever the case, their stories reveal a role in the early modern period for the confessor as diagnostician and therapist: now advising, now critiquing, the penitent as patient—hovering between adulation and suspicion, superstition and scepticism. Among the well-attested biographies, we find, for example, the seventeenth-century saint, Margaret Marie Alacoque, a French nun of Parayle-Monial, who founded the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Margaret would deliberately eat cheese knowing that it made her vomit, and by her own admission she ate the vomit of sister nuns.

  HISTORIANS HAVE TENDED to impose a grand unifying narrative on the Counter-Reformation era, claiming widespread conformity of belief and practice, as if the Catholic faithful had begun to march in unified and disciplined step. Yet despite the powerful influence of the Council of Trent on Catholic orthodoxy and militancy for subsequent centuries, Catholic culture and practice were marked by considerable variety, local discretion, and original manifestations of vibrant religious and artistic imagination. Latin Christianity was in a process of revitalisation in every dimension of its life—including art, architecture, music, poetry, and spirituality.

  New religious orders were founded that were prepared to engage a rapidly changing and expanding world. These included the Jesuits under Ignatius Loyola, and the Oratorians under Philip Neri. A new spirit of evangelism, and rivalry with Protestant opponents, drew Catholic missionaries to the Americas and the Far East. In almost aggressive rebuttal of the Protestant denial of the real presence in the Eucharist, the great Baroque churches drew the eyes of their congregations to the tabernacle at the centre of the high altar, where resided the ‘sacred species’ of the preserved Eucharist. Basilicas, cathedrals, and other large churches boasted imposing and ornate confessionals.

  Meanwhile, the drive to demonstrate Catholicism’s possession of the moral high ground would lead to intense academic explorations in moral theology. The major preoccupation of Catholic moralists was with distinctions between mortal and venial sin. Moral theology, following the Council of Trent, would focus with casuistic intensity on the refined complexities of intentions and conscience. These approaches to moral and pastoral guidance would lead to heated conflicts between schools of moralists with far reaching consequences for the confessional.

  Four

  Fact, Fiction, and Anticlericalism

  He who acts in obedience to a learned and pious confessor, acts not only with no doubt, but with the greatest security that can be had upon earth,—on the divine words of Jesus Christ, that he who hears his ministers is as though he heard himself: ‘He that heareth you heareth Me.’1

  —Alphonsus Liguori, The Way of Salvation and of Perfection, 1767

  FROM THE FOURTH LATERAN COUNCIL IN THE THIRTEENTH century to the Council of Trent in the sixteenth, and beyond to the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, the Church’s moral theology did not enjoy a separate existence within theology as a whole. While there had been two rich seams of moral and ethical teaching available to theologians—the legacies of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, with their foundations in the thought of Plato and Aristotle—much of what passed for moral theology had focused on the confessor-penitent relationship in the sacrament of penance.2

  Moral guidance, especially when given to members of religious orders and priests, was synonymous with spiritual direction. Such advice centred on ascetical practices and prayer; individual poverty of spirit and obedience; rules relating to obligations to fast, attend Mass, and receive Holy Communion. Matters of sexual transgression in thought, word, and deed were crucial. There was scant emphasis in Trent, and hence in subsequent seminary education, on how the lay faithful should live their moral lives in light of Scripture, or reflection on a positive Christian moral theology: the fostering of the virtues or the common good, ideas inherent in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

  Ever since the period of the penitentials, restitution and reparation to those wronged—by theft, say, or libel—had been advocated as a condition of absolution. Yet the chief focus of interest had been the state of the individual sinner’s soul, not the victims of sin. There was, indeed, the work of the great Spanish moralists of the sixteenth century—Francisco Suárez, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolomé de Las Casas—who had had enlarged on themes of natural law relating to warfare, international law (especially on questions of conquest and colonialism), and property rights. Aspects of their work anticipated the great encyclical of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum, 1891) on Catholic social teaching. But as the moral theologian and professor John Mahoney has pointed out: ‘This social teaching has, until fairly recently been aimed to quite a large extent at the defence of the individual in society, as in the arguments traditionally marshalled to justify and defend the institution of private property’. He added that the Church’s official and humanitarian teachings had concentrated more on the individual’s response ‘to the divine command not to steal, . . . often in the context of his eternal fate’ than the ‘context of the social well-being of others.’3

  Against this ba
ckground, the early modern Catholic confessors and seminary pastoral theologians were preoccupied with ‘what morally may I do or not do to avoid mortal sin?’ (Or, as the novelist David Lodge, four hundred years on, would put it in the title of his satirical novel on Catholic sexual morality, How Far Can You Go?) Hence, in the era that followed the Council of Trent, there was ample scope for conflict between those who pursued the most stringent principles in judging what constituted mortal sin, on the one hand, and those who were inclined to be more permissive, on the other. A rigorist standpoint, Jansenism, emerged in France and the Lowlands in the seventeenth century, based on the book Augustinus by the Louvain theologian Cornelius Jansen, published in 1640, two years after his death. Jansen’s followers advocated the strictest moral standards, ultimately basing themselves on the darker, more negative elements in Augustinian thought, with an emphasis on the corruption of Original Sin. A fiercely antagonistic debate arose between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, whom the Jansenists accused of morally harmful laxity, indicting their ‘casuistry’—alleged chop logic, allowing greater latitude in moral opinions and judgements. The disputes fragmented into a chaos of viewpoints, resulting in Jansenism’s polar opposite, Quietism, which recommended contemplative passivity aimed at achieving unity with God. A key characteristic of Quietism was its opposition to active strivings in one’s moral life.4

  A major focus of conflict between moralists, moreover, was the principle known as ‘probabilism’, which meant that a confessor should recommend a solution to a tricky moral case by invoking the most lenient judgement on offer, even if it was held by a single pastoral theologian. Probabilism was defended by many Jesuits. Much time was expended on test cases, such as whether it would be breaking the fast on an official fast day (Good Friday, say), leading to mortal sin, if one were to eat tiny quantities of food frequently through the day, which might amount to more than the normal fast-day allowance of the single main meal.

  In the end, papal authority weighed in, condemning the extremes of both Jansenism and Quietism, in 1653 and 1689 respectively.5 In time, the wider disputes were eased, if not entirely settled, by the influential works and teaching of Alphonsus Liguori in the 1700s. Son of an aristocratic family in Naples, Liguori was a man of wide scholarship and artistic talent. He was an accomplished harpsichordist, having practised the instrument for three hours each day during his youth. He had trained originally as a lawyer, but after witnessing a rigged court case in Naples he devoted himself to work among the poor, both in the city and the countryside—where he discovered that the peasants were sunk in ignorance of the faith. After ordination to the priesthood, he founded the Redemptorist congregation, dedicated to parish mission work, retreats, preaching, and, above all, hearing confessions. He wrote more than a hundred works—mainly instructions for priests and works of apologetics against the Church’s enemies. His lasting legacy, however, was his Theologia Moralis (Moral Theology), which went through nine revisions during his lifetime, and a vast number after his death. There are many thousands of editions and translations of his various works on morals in existence.

  Liguori was dedicated to the task of preparing priests as confessors. His achievement—for better or for worse—was to limit the scope of Catholic moral and pastoral theology to the questions, scruples, and judgements that arise in the confessional. He succeeded, however, in promoting an uneasy peace between the rigorists and the laxists. As we shall see, his prestige and influence would shape the textbooks in moral and pastoral theology into the first half of the twentieth century, and, in consequence, the guidance given to confessors up to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Among his many reflections on the supreme importance of confession, and the need for souls to be moulded by their confessors, was his recommendation of blind obedience to one’s confessor. Pius IX would declare him a ‘Doctor of the Church’, and in 1950 Pius XII would proclaim that the teaching of Alphonsus Liguori was the ‘most thoroughly approved’ and ‘safe norm’ throughout the Church. The pontiff also declared him patron of moral theologians.6

  BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1787, Liguori noted that attendance at confession was in steep decline. His impression of the reason for the collapse, based on personal experience of parish life in Italy’s cities and rural communities, was that rigorist confessors were routinely withdrawing absolution from their penitents. Other reasons were not difficult to discern. Sexual solicitation had continued to give confessors a bad name, and there was a perception, on the part of men, that confessors were coming between themselves and their women. Anticlericalism was spreading throughout Europe, partly because of a growing resentment over the power that priests wielded over women in confession. The anticlerical sentiments grew especially in France, where Voltaire, along with other Enlightenment philosophers, had prepared the ground with their claims for the supremacy of reason over faith and accusations of clerical corruption. The French Revolution dealt a further massive blow to the Church in France, which had been closely associated with the privileges of monarchy and aristocracy. Some 20,000 priests were laicised under threat of death or imprisonment. Parishes were abandoned in their thousands, and some 30,000 religious sent into exile. The Mass and the sacraments virtually disappeared.

  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 Wh
ite 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