For the honor of humanity we could hope that this opinion was correct;
but facts of recent date compel us to believe that it is as false as it
is ruinous to the best interests of our country and the souls of men.
A few of these facts, gathered from unquestionable sources, and some of
them related by the actors and sufferers themselves, we place before the
reader.
In November, 1854, Ubaldus Borzinski, a monk of the Brothers of Mercy,
addressed an earnest petition to the Pope, setting forth the shocking
immoralities practised in the convents of his order in Bohemia.
He specifies nearly forty crimes, mostly perpetrated by priors and
subpriors, giving time, place, and other particulars, entreating the
Pope to interpose his power, and correct those horrible abuses.
For sending this petition, he was thrown into a madhouse of the Brothers
of Mercy, at Prague, where he still languishes in dreary confinement,
though the only mark of insanity he ever showed was in imagining that
the Pope would interfere with the pleasures of the monks.
This Ubaldus has a brother, like minded with himself, also a member of
the same misnamed order of monks, who has recently effected his escape
from durance vile.
John Evangelist Borzinski was a physician in the convent of the Brothers
of Mercy at Prague. He is a scientific and cultivated man. By the
study of the Psalms and Lessons from the New Testament, which make up
a considerable part of the Breviary used in cloisters, he was first
led into Protestant views. He had been for seventeen years resident in
different cloisters of his order, as sick-nurse, alms gatherer,
student, and physician, and knew the conventual life out and out. As he
testifies: "There was little of the fear of God, so far as I could
see, little of true piety; but abundance of hypocrisy, eye-service,
deception, abuse of the poor sick people in the hospitals, such love
and hatred as are common among the children of this world, and the most
shocking vices of every kind."
He now felt disgust for the cloister life, and for the Romish religion,
and he sought, by the aid of divine grace, to attain to the new birth
through the Word of God. Speaking of his change of views to a Prussian
clergyman, he thus describes his conversion: "Look you, it was thus I
became a Protestant. I found a treasure in that dustheap, and went away
with it." This treasure he prized more and more. He then thought
within himself, if these detached passages can give such light, what an
illumination he must receive if he could read and understand the whole
Bible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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