The Demands of Rome: Her Own Story of Thirty-One Years as a Sister of Charity in the Order of the Sisters of Charity of Providence of the Roman Catholic ChurchSchoffen, Elizabeth
Religion
The Demands of Rome: Her Own Story of Thirty-One Years as a Sister of Charity in the Order of the Sisters of Charity of Providence of the Roman Catholic Church
Schoffen, Elizabeth
Ex-nuns -- United States -- Biography; Monastic and religious life of women
I have previously mentioned that I was compelled by rule to go to
confession every eight days. I wish to comment on this Sacrament of
Penance, as confession is called, and some of the other practices and
ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion.
Of all the practices that holds adherents to the Roman Catholic system,
the telling of the many faults to the so-called mediator between God and
man--the priest--stands paramount. Why not? Roman Catholics are raised
to think and believe that by confessing their sins to the man
representative of Christ in the confessional and receiving absolution,
God has also forgiven them. God's Word says in 1st Timothy, second
chapter, fifth verse, "For there is one God, and one mediator between
God and man, the man Christ Jesus." Not any representative of Christ,
but Christ Himself.
The confessional box is a trap for the convent, and after the poor girls
are once there they are shackled more than ever in the faith of the
religion by the priest in the confessional. The girls abandon
themselves, body, heart and soul, to the instructions and directions of
this ungentlemanly man--for no true gentleman would ever ask the dirty,
filthy, indecent questions in public or private that these men ask many
of the girls and women in this so-called holy private place, the
confessional--this man, whom we, as sisters and Roman Catholics look to
as the mediator between us and God, often in the form of a drunken man.
Yes, I have known not a few, and have waited on them in my work at the
hospital for a great many years, and I cannot call to my mind one of
these "holy men of God" who did not partake of the best liquors
obtainable, and I have had to protect more than one from the people
there so there would be no scandal.
Then to these liquor-soaked priests I was forced to turn and kneel to
confess my sins, to lay bare the innermost thoughts of my soul and most
sensitive feelings of the heart and then submit to the most humiliating,
shameful questions--so shameful and degrading that I am not permitted to
print them or to repeat them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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