The Gift – The Testimony of Former Roman Catholic Priest Charles Chiniquy

I was born and baptized a Roman Catholic in 1809, and I was ordained priest in the year 1833, in Canada. I am now in my seventy-fourth year, and it is nearly fifty years since I received the dignity of the priesthood in the Church of Rome.

For twenty-five years I was a priest of that Church, and I tell you frankly that I loved the Church of Rome, and she loved me. I would have shed every drop of my blood for my Church and would have given a thousand times my life to extend her power and dignity over the continent of America, and over the whole world. My great ambition was to convert the Protestants, and bring them into my Church, because I was told, and I preached, that outside the Church of Rome there was no salvation, and I was sorry to think that those multitudes of Protestants were to be lost.

A few years after I was born we lived in a place where there were no schools. My mother became my first teacher, and the first book in which she taught me to read was the Bible. When I was eight or nine years old I read the Divine Book with an incredible pleasure, and my heart was much taken up with the beauty of the Word of God. My mother selected the chapters she wished me to read, and the attention I gave to it was such that, many times, I refused to go and play with the little boys outside in order to enjoy the pleasure of reading the Holy Book. Some of the chapters I loved more than others, and these I learned by heart.

But after my mother died, the Bible disappeared from the house, probably through the priest who had tried to obtain possession of it before. Now this Bible is the root of everything in this story. That is the light which was put into my soul when young, and, thanks be to God, that light has never been extinguished. It has remained there: it is to that dear Bible, by the mercy of God, that I owe today the unspeakable joy which I feel at being among the redeemed, among those who have received the light, and are drinking at the pure fountain of truth.

But perhaps you are inclined to say, “Do not the Roman Catholic priests allow their people to read the Bible?” Yes, I thank God that it is so. It is a fact that today, almost all over the world, the Church of Rome grants permission to read the Bible, and you will find the Bible in the homes of some Roman Catholics.

But when we have confessed this we must tell the whole truth. When the priest puts the Bible in the hands of his people, or when a priest receives the Bible from his church, there is a condition. The condition is that though the priest or people may read the Bible, they must never, under any circumstances, interpret a single word according to their conscience, their intelligence, or in their own mind. When I was ordained a priest I swore that I would interpret the Scriptures only according to the unanimous consent of the Holy Fathers.

Friends, go to Roman Catholics today, and ask them if they have permission to read the Bible. They will tell you, “Yes, I can read it.” But ask, “Have you permission to interpret it?” They will tell you, “No.” The priest says positively to the people, and the Church says positively to the priest, that they cannot interpret a single word of the Bible according to their own intelligence and their own conscience, and that it is a grievous sin to take upon themselves the interpretation of a single word. The priest says in effect to the people, “If you try to interpret the Bible with your own intelligence you are lost. It is a most dangerous book. You may read it, but it is better not to read it, because you cannot understand it.”

What is the result of such teaching? The result is, that though both the priests and the people have the Bible in their hands, they do not read it. Would you read a book if you were persuaded that you cannot understand a single word by yourself? Would you be such fools as to waste your time reading a book which you were persuaded you could not understand a single line of? Then, my friends, this is the truth about the Church of Rome. They have a great number of Bibles. You will find Bibles on the tables of the priests and of Catholic laymen, but among ten thousand priests there are not two who read the Bible from the beginning to the end and pay any attention to it. They read a few pages here and there; that is all.

In the Church of Rome the Bible is a sealed book, but it was not so with me. I found it precious to my heart when I was a little boy, and when I became a priest of Rome I read it to make me a strong man, and to make me able to argue for the Church.

My great object was to confound the Protestant ministers of America. I got a copy of the “Holy Fathers,” and I studied it day and night with the Holy Scriptures, in order to prepare myself for the great battle I wanted to fight against the Protestants. I made this study in order to strengthen my faith in the Roman Catholic Church.

But, blessed be God! every time I read the Bible there was a mysterious voice(1) saying to me, “Do you not see that in the Church of Rome you do not follow the teachings of the Word of God, but only the traditions of men?” In the silent hours of the night, when I heard that voice, I wept and cried, but it was repeated with the strength of thunder. I wanted to live and die in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and I prayed to God to silence the voice, but I heard it yet still louder. When I was reading His Word He was trying(2) to break my fetters, but I would not have any fetters broken. He came to me with His saving light, but I would not have it.

I have no bad feeling against Roman Catholic priests. Some of you may think I have. You are mistaken. Sometimes I weep for them because I know that the poor men – just as I did – are fighting against the Lord, and that they are miserable as I was miserable then. If I relate to you one of the struggles of which I speak, you will understand what it is to be a Roman Catholic priest, and you will pray for them.

Chiniquy was a terrible liar:

Pastor Chiniquy the Seducer

E. L. Core

If you would have some direct downright proof that Catholicism is what Protestants make it to be, something which will come up to the mark, you must lie....
(Newman, True Testimony Insufficient for the Protestant View, 1851)

So said Rev. John Henry Newman, D.D., in a series of Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, in 1851, six years after he had joined the Catholic Church. Within a few years, Charles Chiniquy would appear on the Protestant scene in North America, proving Newman right.

The apostate Catholic priest Chiniquy died in 1899, but his name is still proclaimed and his works still promulgated. Is he denounced as the seducer of maidens, the trickster of the generous, and the slanderer of the innocent — as he should be denounced? Are his works decried as lurid falsehoods, well-crafted to appeal to the basest prurient interests of the superficially proper — as they should be decried?

Hardly. He is accounted an apostle of liberty, his works the trumpet of truth. By whom? By anti-Catholic bigots. Not merely by fundamentalist Protestants but also by atheists.

Charles Chiniquy’s most infamous works — masterpieces of misrepresentation, grotesque caricaturization, fantastical embellishment, and plain, simple lying — are The Priest, the Woman & the Confessional (1875) and Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (1885).

The latter book is the subject of a work by Rev. Sydney F. Smith, S.J., Pastor Chiniquy: An Examination of His “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome”, published by The Catholic Truth Society in 1908. Smith obtained documents concerning Chiniquy that the latter avoided discussing in his own works, and carefully built a case that exposes the faux exposer Chiniquy.

For instance (p. 23), Smith quotes a letter from Chiniquy’s bishop, M. Bourget of Montreal, to Chiniquy himself, about to go to preach a temperance crusade in Illinois; dated May 7, 1851, the letter contains the following instructions to Chiniquy:
1.take strict precautions in your relations with persons of the opposite sex;
2.avoid carefully all that might savour of ostentation, and the desire to attract attention; simplicity is so beautiful and lovable a virtue;
3.pay to the priests of the country the honour due to their ministry; the glory of God is the best recompense of an apostolic man.

One need not be free of anti-Catholic prejudice to get the drift: Chiniquy’s special faults are sexual immorality, pride, jealousy, and greed. Indeed, one need not be free of prejudice to get the drift; one need not be intelligent, even; one must be merely awake.

More telling, Smith relates (p. 11) a lengthy discourse, given by Chiniquy himself in controversy with a Protestant minister surnamed Roussy, January 7, 1851. As revealed in an earlier study, The Two Chiniquys, Chiniquy himself defended the Catholic Church against the charge that it keeps the Bible from the people. Keep in mind the pointed quotation from Newman above; keep in mind that the following words are from Chiniquy’s own mouth, in the very same year Newman was preaching in England on the bigotry of anti-Catholics:

“Protestantism is fed on lies”.

Those words are Chiniquy’s, in 1851; not Father Newman’s, not Bishop Bourget’s, but Chiniquy’s own words, in 1851.

Growing disgust among the Catholic hierarchy, clergy, and laity would change Chiniquy’s tune. Charges against him of sexual immorality date from little later than his childhood; Bishop Bourget’s instructions, quoted above, reveal that he had become known for pride, jealousy, and greed; eventually, he was charged with keeping for his personal use funds donated for the rebuilding of a burned-out American church — and many believed Chiniquy himself had torched it as an excuse to recruit donations from Canadian Catholics.

After being twice suspended from priestly ministry, for moral turpitude and disobedience, he was finally excommunicated as a schismatic, September 3, 1856. Smith quotes (p. 43) a letter written afterwards by M. Mailloux, a Canadian then living in America:

Mr. Chiniquy had in Canada, and still has here, the reputation of being a man of most notorious immorality. The many women he has seduced, or tried to seduce, are ready to testify thereunto. Those who in this country have lived in Mr. Chiniquy’s intimacy loudly proclaim that he has lost his faith long ago, and that he is an infamous hypocrite.

Knowing that — in Chiniquy’s own words — “Protestantism is fed on lies”, he spent the rest of his days telling certain Protestants what they wanted to hear: lies about the Catholic Church. He lied generally about the Catholic Church; he lied specifically about priests, falsely attributing to most of them his own particular sins; and, he lied particularly about individuals who had died and could no longer defend themselves.

(Surely, not all Protestants are anti-Catholic bigots; not all Protestants want lies about the Catholic Church: some eschew them, some condemn them, some couldn’t care less about them. But the market among Protestants for slanderous misrepresentation of the Catholic Church is nonetheless enormous.)

Smith points out (p. 10) Chiniquy’s poorly wrought lie about Catholics and the Bible:

He is continually telling his readers that the Church of Rome forbids the reading of Scripture to the laity, and even to her ecclesiastical students. Thus when he was a young seminarian at St. Nicolet he tells us it was the rule of the College to keep the Bible apart in the library, among the forbidden books.... Yet in the story of his boyhood — in which he tells us how he used as a child to read aloud to the neighbouring farmers out of a Bible belonging to his family, and how the priest, hearing of this, came one day to take the forbidden book away — he has to acknowledge that this copy had been given to his father as a seminary prize in his early days.

Upon reading this tortured tale in Fifty Years, what would a reasonable person do? Chiniquy is not merely revealed as a liar; he is not merely revealed as a poor liar; he is revealed as a poor liar by his very own words, in the self-same book. Upon reading this, a reasonable person would toss the book aside and take up something with more enduring substance, like the day’s comic strips.

But not the anti-Catholic bigots: the fundamentalist Protestants and the atheists. No. Among them, any lie is to be believed: any lie — no matter how outrageous, no matter how mundane, no matter how clever, no matter how stupid — any lie is to be believed, and excused, as long as it is told about the Catholic Church.

Here, at this juncture, might come at last incredulity from Protestant fundamentalists: “Do you really expect us to believe” (they may ask) “that Pastor Chiniquy wasn’t telling the truth?” Swallowing camels, they strain out gnats. They accept — wholesale, without question, without pause — that a world-wide organization with nearly 2,000 years of history is populated by nothing but (on the one hand) devious, cunning, unscrupulous, lascivious, faithless fiends who dupe (on the other hand) the naive and ignorant masses. Yet, they balk at the suggestion that one man told lies to get himself prestige, influence, and money — as if the notion offends their delicate sensibilities.

Indeed, as I have said, Chiniquy’s bald-faced lies are used as ammunition against the Catholic Church by Protestant fundamentalists and by atheists. (This can be easily demonstrated by a Web search.) Yes, the fundamentalists and the atheists are ranged on the same side, using Chiniquy’s lies to attack the Catholic Church. Yet, something inexplicable deters the fundamentalists from realizing that the mere fact of siding with atheists ought to show them they are on the wrong side.

Mindless hatred is inexplicable, no?

Continue with Father Smith’s seldom-seen examination of Pastor Chiniquy’s life and his Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, now available on the World Wide Web by the efforts of Sue Smith, Antoine Valentim, and Jim Goodluck (link below).

Smith’s prose flows like slow-moving streams, occasionally filling up small pools, eventually to overflow and proceed further downstream. And — in starkest contrast to Chiniquy — Smith is master of the ironical understatement, as when he writes (p. 63) of Chiniquy:

It was his misfortune to be continually having charges of the same kind brought against him from different and independent quarters.

But Smith does give Chiniquy his due. Of his work in preaching temperance, Smith says (p. 21): “It was in this work during the next four years that Chiniquy acquired what was certainly the best distinction of his life.”

Following this gracious example, let us too give Chiniquy his due. Surely, it cannot be denied that he exercised one virtue consistently throughout his life: consistency. Even in his youth, he was the seducer of maidens; later, he was the seducer of generous Catholics who only wanted to contribute financially to the work of the Church; last, he was the seducer of naive Protestants who didn’t know better than to retch at his vile impostures — and he still is.

Yes, let us give him his due — Pastor Chiniquy the Seducer.

Pastor Chiniquy: An Examination of His Fifty Years in the Church of Rome
(Rev. Sydney F. Smith, S.J., 1908)

It is by wholesale, retail, systematic, unscrupulous lying, for I can use no gentler term, that the many rivulets are made to flow for the feeding the great Protestant Tradition....
(Newman, Fable the Basis of the Protestant View, 1851)

http://catholicity.elcore.net/PastorChiniquyTheSeducer.html

Unfortunately there is nothing in Chiniquy’s doctrine that wasn’t in line with what the RCC teaches prior to his conversion.

For example,

From the Secret of the Rosary, endorsed by Pope Benedict:

“One day the King fell seriously ill and when he was given up for dead he found himself, in a vision, before the judgement seat of Our Lord. Many devils were there accusing him of all the sins he had committed and Our Lord as Sovereign Judge was just about to condemn him to hell when Our Lady appeared to intercede for him. She called for a pair of scales and had his sins placed in one of the balances whereas she put the rosary that he had always worn on the other scale, together with all the Rosaries that had been said because of his example. It was found that the Rosaries weighed more than his sins.

Looking at him with great kindness Our Lady said: “As a reward for this little honor that you paid me in wearing my Rosary, I have obtained a great grace for you from my Son. Your life will be spared for a few more years. See that you spend these years wisely, and do penance.”

When the King regained consciousness he cried out: “Blessed be the Rosary of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, by which I have been delivered from eternal damnation!”

After he had recovered his health he spent the rest of his life in spreading devotion to the Holy Rosary and said it faithfully every day.

People who love the Blessed Virgin out to follow the example of King Alphonsus and that of the saints whom I have mentioned so that they too may win other souls for the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary. They will then receive great graces on earth and eternal life later on. “They that explain me shall have life everlasting life.” [1] Ecclus. 24:31”

Another story on how saying rosaries can earn you salvation:

“Later on, when she was at prayer she fell into ecstasy and had a vision of her soul appearing before the Supreme Judge. Saint Michael put all her penances and to her prayers on one side of the scale and all her sins and imperfections on the other. The tray of her good works were greatly outweighed by that of her sins and imperfections.

Filled with alarm, she cried out for mercy, imploring the help of the Blessed Virgin, her gracious advocate, who took the one and only Rosary she had said for her penance and dropped it on the tray of her good works. This one Rosary was so heavy that it weighed more than all her sins as well as her good works. Our Lady then reproved her for having refused to follow the counsel of her servant Dominic and for not saying the Rosary every day.

As soon as she came to herself she rushed and threw herself at the feet of Saint Dominic and told him all that had happened, begged his forgiveness and promised to say the Rosary faithfully every day. By this means she rose to Christian perfection and finally to the glory of everlasting life.”

http://www.rosary-center.org/secret.htm

Popes on the “sure and most efficacious means” for help from heaven:

“We constantly seek for help from Heaven - the sole means of effecting anything - that our labours and our care may obtain their wished for object. We deem that there could be no surer and more efficacious means to this end than by religion and piety to obtain the favour of the great Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, the guardian of our peace and the minister to us of heavenly grace, who is placed on the highest summit of power and glory in Heaven, in order that she may bestow the help of her patronage on men who through so many labours and dangers are striving to reach that eternal city. Now that the anniversary, therefore, of manifold and exceedingly great favours obtained by a Christian people through the devotion of the Rosary is at hand, We desire that that same devotion should be offered by the whole Catholic world with the greatest earnestness to the Blessed Virgin, that by her intercession her Divine Son may be appeased and softened in the evils which afflict us. And therefore We determined, Venerable Brethren, to despatch to you these letters in order that, informed of Our designs, your authority and zeal might excite the piety of your people to conform themselves to them.” (ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON DEVOTION OF THE ROSARY)
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_01091883_supremi-apostolatus-officio_en.html

A decree to perform them:

“We decree and order that in the whole Catholic world, during this year, the devotion of the Rosary shall be solemnly celebrated by special and splendid services. From the first day of next October, therefore, until the second day of the November following, in every parish and, if the ecclesiastical authority deem it opportune and of use, in every chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin - let five decades of the Rosary be recited with the addition of the Litany of Loreto.” (SUPREMI APOSTOLATUS OFFICIO, ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON DEVOTION OF THE ROSARY)

The importance of the Rosary to a Pope:

“With these words, dear brothers and sisters, I set the first year of my Pontificate within the daily rhythm of the Rosary. Today, as I begin the twenty-fifth year of my service as the Successor of Peter, I wish to do the same. How many graces have I received in these years from the Blessed Virgin through the Rosary: Magnificat anima mea Dominum! I wish to lift up my thanks to the Lord in the words of his Most Holy Mother, under whose protection I have placed my Petrine ministry: Totus Tuus!” (ROSARIUM VIRGINIS MARIAE OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF JOHN PAUL II)

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20021016_rosarium-virginis-mariae_en.html

I don’t know about you, but a religion that depicts our mediator between God and man as a foolish Judge inclined to believe the accusations of Demons, only to be thwarted by the mediation of Mary who pleads... not the blood of Christ, but the prayers of Rosaries... sounds pretty false to me.

I don’t know about him and Lincoln, but Chiniquy was right to reject these doctrines.

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