PASTOR CHINIQUY

AN EXAMINATION OF HIS
"FIFTY YEARS IN
THE CHURCH OF ROME"

by

REV. SYDNEY F. SMITH, S.J.

AN ESSAY
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN
1908

This is the substance of Chiniquy's indictment against the bishops and clergy of the two countries of which he had experience, and in support of it he brings together numerous facts, or what purport to be such, full of detail and of long conversations, all so conceived as to suggest that the greatest part of the iniquities of these people were either too palpable to need proof, or were attested by the acknowledgements of the accused persons themselves. That a book of this kind should deeply impress readers of the Protestant Alliance type is not surprising. But more prudent minds will note:

(1) that this mass of denunciation was not published till after 1885 -- that is, after a quarter of a century from the date when, with his apostasy, his experiences of Catholic life from the inside must have ceased;

(2) that all rests on this unsupported testimony of Chiniquy himself; and

(3) that the whole tone of the book is that of a man absolutely egotistic and impracticable, absolutely incapable of seeing any other side but his own, absolutely reckless in his charges against any one who should venture to oppose him, and absolutely exaggerated at all times in his language;

(4) in short, that the author of a story which makes out the Catholic Church of Canada and the United States, at the date of which he writes, to be so essentially different from what unbiased witnesses find it to be within the scope of their own direct observation, is one who paints himself in his own book as destitute of all those qualities which predispose a discerning reader to repose confidence in an author's statements.

To this general motive for distrust others accede as soon as we begin to carry our examination into the details of the book. Thus in his fourth chapter he tells us of a secret meeting in the house of one of his uncles, which was attended by several of the leading inhabitants of Kamouraska. Its object was to discuss the conduct of the clergy in the confessional, and the narrator fills six closely printed pages with a detailed report of the speeches then delivered. He was not invited to the meeting, but was present at it in the character of an eavesdropper, hiding in some unobserved corner, his age at the time being ten. We must suppose, then, that this youthful scribe, with an itelligence beyond his years, took down the speeches in shorthand, for future use; or rather, since we are not credulous enough to believe this, we must suppose that all this account of the meeting was pure invention of his after-years, and must conclude that the man was capable of such amplifications and inventions, and of palming them off as truths when it happened to suit his purpose. And this point about his method being established, we may surely suspect him of employing it in the similarly detailed stories with which the book abounds, and in which priests and bishops speak just as fierce a anti-Catholic might wish them to speak, but quite unlike the way in which they are found to speak all the world over.

Nor is it a question here of their speaking as bad men rather than as good men, but of the specific style of the explanations and vindications of their own doctrines and practices which they are made to give. For instance, it is known perfectly well from their theological books what replies priests and other Catholics are taught to give to those who take objection to their Church's doctrine on the lawfulness of Bible reading and of interpreting Scripture inconsistently with the "unanimous consent of the Fathers", on the veneration of our Blessed Lady and the Saints and of its accord with Holy Scripture, on the practice of asking and refraining from asking questions in the confessional, and so on.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that what these Catholic theological books say on these subjects is altogether unsound and indefensible, at least the clergy of Canada might be expected to answer in the language laid down for them in their books, and not in the language which makes Catholics laugh when some composer of Protestant fictions puts it in the mouths of his characters. Yet the priestly characters in Chiniquy's Fifty Years speak invariably like the latter, not the former. And, just as if we came across a traveller's account of a country in which the lions brayed and the donkeys roared, the nightingale cawed and the rooks sang sweetly in the night-time, we should say that our traveller was either joking or lying; so will any intelligent possessor of a historic sense say of Chiniquy's paradoxical account of the sayings and doings of the Canadian and American clergy.

It may be well to give an illustration of what we refer to under this head, and the following is an apposite one (p. 334). Chiniquy had preached a sermon on devotion to our Blessed Lady, and had been congratulated on it by Bishop Prince, then Auxiliary Bishop of Montreal. During the night he professes to have seen how unscriptural had been his preaching, and how opposed to the teaching of the Evangelist, who, when our Lord's mother and brethren stood without, refused to recognize them as having any claims upon Him. It is a well-known passage, and any Catholic commentary would, if referred to, have explained that our Lord wished to teach a lesson to the apostles and their successors in the ministry, of the devotedness with which they must be prepared to subordinate all earthly ties to the service of their ministry. Yet neither to Chiniquy nor to the bishop does it even occur to consider this explanation, and they talk just as if they were two Protestants.

"How", asks Chiniquy, "can we say that Jesus always granted the requests of His mother, when this evangelist tells us He never granted her petitions when acting in His capacity of Saviour of the world?" At which simple, easy question the bishop is represented as seeming "absolutely confused", so that Chiniquy has to help him out by further asking "Who came into the world to save you and me?" to which the bishop replies sheepishly, "It is Jesus"; and "Who is the sinner's best friend, Jesus or Mary?" to which the bishop replies, "It is Jesus ... Jesus said to all sinners, 'Come unto me', He never said 'Go to Mary'" -- the bishop finally extricating himself from his embarassment by saying feebly, "You will find an answer to your questions in the Holy Fathers." Is it likely that a Catholic bishop talked like that? Is it not more likely that the writer who fabricated what he supposes himself to have overheard at the age of ten, fabricated this conversation too, and others like it throughout the book which are similarly destitute of probability?

Nor is the test of self-contradiction wanting to complete our distrust of Chiniquy's allegations. 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 Coll�ge to keep the Bible apart in the library, among the forbidden books. But one day, having obtained access to a copy and surreptitiously spent and hour or so in perusing it, he afterwards felt bound to tell the director, his great friend M. Leprohon. The latter, he assures us, was sad, and while acknowledging his inability to answer his pupil's argumentation, said, "I have something better than my own weak thoughts. I have the thoughts of the Church and of our Holy Father the Pope. They forbid us to put the Bible in the hands of our students." Yet in the story of his boyhood -- in which he tells us how he used as a child to read aloud to the neighboring 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.

And -- to pass over such insights as he gives us into clerical life in the order of the day observed in the presbytery of his first Cur�, where a daily hour was assigned to Bible reading -- we may be content to set against his later allegations the statements he made on the occasion of his controversy with Roussy, a Protestant minister, on January 7, 1851.

This date, indeed, should be noted, for it means that this controversy took place shortly before his departure from Canada to Illinois, and therefore after the many occasions when, according to his Fifty Years, he had felt and expressed to personal friends his concern at finding that the Church feared the Bible and sought to hide it from her children. And yet on the platform, on January 7, 1851, he talks just as a Catholic priest would talk, except, indeed, for the repulsive egotism and browbeating which is all his own. Take, for instance, the following passage:

"Certain Protestants will repeat that the Church forbids the reading of the Bible by the people. This is a cowardly and absurd lie, and it is only the ignorant or the silly amongst Protestants who at present believe this ancient fabrication of heresy. Some unscrupulous ministers, however, are constantly bringing it up before the eyes of their dupes to impose upon them and keep them in a holy horror of what they call Popery. Let Protestants make the tour of Europe and America; let them go into the numerous book-stores they will come across at every step: let them, for instance, go to Montreal, to Mr. Fabre's or to Mr. Sadler's; and everywhere they will find on their shelves thousands of Bibles in all modern languages, printed with the permission of the ecclesiastical authorities. I hold in my hand a New Testament, printed less than five years ago, at Quebec. On the first page I read the following approbation of the Archbishop of Quebec: 'We approve and recommend to the faithful of our diocese this translation of the New Testament, with commentaries on the texts and notes at the foot of the pages. Joseph, Archbishop of Quebec.' Every one of those Catholic Bibles, to be found on sale at every bookseller in Europe and America in like manner, bears irrefutable witness to the fact that Protestantism is fed on lies, when day by day it listens with complacency to its ministers and its newspapers, telling it in various strains that we Catholics are enemies of the Bible."

This and much more to the same effect may be found in the report of the discussion between Chiniquy and Roussy which was republished in 1893, under the title of The Two Chiniquys at the office of the True Witness.

Again, as regards the question of clerical morality, from time to time we get from him, as it were through rifts in the clouds of his inventions, little gimpses into the real life of the Canadian clergy, which reveal them to us in a by no means unpleasant light. What could be more edifying than the account given of M. Perras's priestly life (p. 133), or of M. Bedard's (p. 157)? True, he tries to cast some flies into their ointment, but there is M. T�tu, the Cur� of St. Roch, who was evidently a truly good man, and of whom Chiniquy is contrained to say that he "never saw him in a bad humor a single time during the four years that it was his fortune to work under him in that parish" and "from whose lips an unkind word never proceeded" (p. 169). And there is the young priest, M. Estimanville, who in the cholera time at Quebec was introduced by Chiniquy for the first time to the hospital he was to serve.

"The young priest turned pale, and said, 'Is it possible that such a deadly epidemic is raging where you are taking me? I answered, 'Yes, my dear young brother, it is a fact, and I consider it my duty to tell you not to enter that house, if you are afraid to die.' A few minutes of silence followed ... he then took his handkerchief and wiped away some big drops of sweat which were rolling from his forehead on his cheeks, and said, 'Is there a more holy and desirable way of dying than by ministering to the spiritual and temporal wants of my brethren? No. If it is the will of God that I should fail when fighting at this post of danger, I am ready.' ... He died a few months afterwards" (p. 224).

Nor was this a single case.

"We must be honest" (he writes in another place), "and true towards the Roman Catholic priests of Canada. Few men, if any, have shown more courage and self-denial in the hour of danger than they did. I have seen them at work during the two memorable years 1832 and 1834, with a courage and self-denial worthy of the admiration of heaven and earth. Though they knew that the most horrible tortures and death might be the price of their devotedness, I have not known a single one of them who ever shrank before the danger. At the first appeal, in the midst of the darkest and stormiest nights, as well as in the light of the brightest days, they were always ready to leave their warm and comfortable beds to run to the rescue of the sick and dying" (p. 166).

These admissions, wrung as it were from the traducer of his brethren, may serve to show that the clergy of Canada were not so unlike the clergy elsewhere. That there should be tares among the wheat is always to be expected, and Chiniquy, as we shall see, was his own greatest argument to prove that they were not both wanting in Canada and the United States. But in the first generation of Christian clergy, who received their Master Himself, the proportion of tares to wheat was one in twelve. We may trust that it has never been anything like as high since, nor is there any reason to suppose it was anything like as high among the clergy in whose ranks Chiniquy lived and worked.

But what about the bishops whom Chiniquy represents as such utter monsters? We must refer the reader to Mr. Gilmary Shea's History of the Catholic Church in the United States for an account of the two bishops of Detroit, Bishops Rese and Lefevre, who were evidently quite unlike what we might gather from Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.

Nor, as Chiniquy has little to tell against Bishop Vandevelde, need we say more than that, as we have ascertained from well-informed correspondents, he was a little weak in his government, perhaps, but was a thoroughly good and conscientious man, and by no means likely to have had a habit of secret tippling. Bishop Bourget of Montreal and Bishop O'Regan of Chicago were the prelates who had to do most of the unpleasant work in restraining Chiniquy, and were, therefore, his pet aversions. What is to be said of them? Bishop Bourget, so far being a harsh, inconsiderate, unscrupulous and mendacious character, was a prelate who left a deep and lasting impression on the Canadians by reason of his very remarkable holiness of life. He was a man of the most delicate charity and tenderness, quite incapable of doing the smallest injustice even to the most guilty, and when compelled to punish ever anxious to make the way of penitence and restoration easy for the offender. Indeed, so eminent was Bishop Bourget for his virtues that his contemporaries looked forward to the possibility of his being beatified some day. And we may add that the letters written by him in this Chiniquy case, of which we have copies now lying before us, all bear out this estimate of his character. They breathe throughout a spirit of the most exquisite conscientiousness and charity.

About Bishop O'Reagan, Mr. Gilmary Shea gives us the following facts. He was born at Lavelloc, in County Mayo [in Ireland], and was educated at Maynooth. Archbishop McHale made him Professor of Holy Scripture at St. Jarlath's College. He came to St. Louis in 1849 at the request of Archbishop Kendrick, to be head of the Seminary at Carondelet. When he received the Bulls (appointing him to the see of Chicago) he sent them back, saying that he was a college man without missionary experience; and when he was ordered to accept, he said: "I accept only in the spirit of obedience." He began his administration with energy, and feeling the want of good priests, made ernest efforts to obtain them for his English-speaking, German and French congregations. He introduced system, and did much to restore discipline, but his methods caused discontent, which was fostered by many. Bishop O'Regan had entered heartily into works for the good of the diocese, and expended large sums of his own means for it. But, tired out by the opposition of Chiniquy and some others, he resolved to visit Rome and plead in person for his release from a burden which he felt to be beyond his strength to bear. His resignation was eventually accepted, and he was transferred to the titular see of Dora on June 25, 1858. He then returned to Europe, and spent the remainder of his life in retirement in Ireland and England. He died in London, at Brompton, on November 13, 1866, aged 57, and his remains were carried to his native parish of Confert. Mr. Gilmary Shea adds: "It may be said of Bishop O'Regan that he was a man in the truest sense, single-minded, firm as a rock, and honest as gold, a lover of truth and justice, whom no self-interest could mislead and no corruption could contaminate. He held fast the affection of many and won the esteem of all."

So far we have been occupied with the general character of Chiniquy's accusations, the truth or falsehood of which we have sought to estimate by applying tests furnished chiefly by his own writings. Probably our readers will agree with us that the result has been to show that this person is not exactly the kind of witness who can claim to be taken on his own valuation, and, apart from an external confirmation which is not available, can be trusted implicitly. We must now go through the stages of his life up to the time of his apostasy, to see how far his own account of it agrees with that of others.

To help us in our task we have for the one side his Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, which is the fullest presentation he has given us of his story; and for the other side we have some documents which have been procured for us by the kindness of a Canadian friend. These are:

(1) Biographical Notes Concerning the Apostate Chiniquy, a paper which has been published quite recently: this was drawn up by Monsignor T�tu, of Quebec Cathedral, a grandson of the Hon. Amable Dionne, who married one of Chiniquy's maternal aunts (Document A).

(2) A copy of a manuscript belonging to the Archives of the Coll�ge St. Marie, at Montreal, entitled Manuscrit trouv� dans les papiers de M. le Chanoine Lamarche apr�s sa mort. This paper is an account and a criticism of Chiniquy's life, but is defective, the first twenty pages being missing as well as all that followed the forty-four pages preserved. From internal evidence the writer is M. Mailloux, a Grand Vicar of Quebec, who knew Chiniquy very well in his Canadian days, and was afterwards sent to Illinois to undo the evil lie he had wrought there (Document B).

(3) A copy of a letter dated March 19, 1857, and addressed by Bishop Bourget of Montreal to the "Canadian Catholics of Bourbonnais." It has been transcribed for us from the Courrier de Canada, a Montreal paper, in which it appeared on April 7, 1857 (Document C).

(4) A paper entitled Explanations of certain Facts misrepresented by M. Chiniquy in his Letter of April 18, 1857. This paper is also by Bishop Bourget, and is dated May 6, 1857. It has been copied for us from the archives of the See of Montreal (Document D).

(5) A number of letters exchanged between Bishop Bourget and others between the years 1848 and 1858. These have likewise been transcribed for us from the authentic copies in Bishop Bourget's Register (Document E).

Charles Chiniquy was born on July 30, 1809, at Kamouraska, a town on the right bank of the St. Lawrence, some forty miles below Quebec. His parents were Charles Chiniquy, a notary by profession, and Reine Chiniquy, n�e Perrault. His father dying on July 19, 1821, he was adopted by his uncle, the Hon. Amable Dionne, who, on finding that he desired to be brought up for the priesthood, sent him to school at the Little Seminary of St. Nicolet. When he had been there three years a difficulty arose. "Owing to a misunderstanding between myself and my uncle Dionne he had ceased to maintain me at college" (p. 66). This is all that Chiniquy himself tells us about the matter, but Document A says: "In 1825 Mr. Dionne ceased paying for him, and refused him admittance into his house, declaring him unworthy of being a member of his honourable family," and the same document in a note says: " I [i.e., Monsignor T�tu] can certify that the Honourable Amable Dionne was an intimate friend of Bishops Plessis and Panet of Quebec, and of Bishop Provencher of the Red River Missions. The greatest sorrow of his life was to see his unworthy nephew, who had always been a bad Catholic, become a bad priest. But that was no fault of his."

We can gather from these words that the fault of which he was considered guilty was an offense against morality. But, after all, he was then only a boy, and two priests, M. Leprohon, the Director of the College, and M. Brassard, one of the Professors -- thinking that he might change for the better and deeming that there was promise in him, took upon themselves the further burden of his maintenance, and so enabled him to continue his studies and afterwards to pass on to the Greater Seminary. Moreover, M. Leprohon till his death, in 1844, and M. Brassard till the time of Chiniquy's apostasy, continued to take a fatherly interest in him, and the latter to believe in him long after all others had given him up as hopeless. On September 21, 1833, he was ordained priest by Archbishop Signaie in Quebec Cathedral, having been incorporated into that diocese. During the next few years he was assistant priest in three parishes in succession, but in 1838 he was made Cur� of Beauport, a suburb of Quebec, and it was there that he inaugurated the temperance movement which brought him into great prominence. In 1842 he was transferred to his native place, Kamouraska, in the first instance as administrator under the now aged M. Varin, and shortly after as his successor.

This was the place of residence of his uncle Dionne, who was by no means glad to have him in the neighbourhood. His own account is that he signalized his tenure of office at Kamouraska by great doings which won for him the attachment of the people; still, he cannot deny that there was a strong party against him. And Mgr. T�tu's Document tells us that, whilst in that place, "he scandalized many families by his bad conduct," and that "it is absolutely certain that his uncle, Amable Dionne, forbade him to enter his house, and that many parents sent their children to confession to the neighbouring parishes, to protect them from the baneful contact of their Cur�." He remained at Kamouraska till 1846, when one Sunday in September he astonished the congregation by announcing that he was leaving the place to join the Novitiate of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate at Longeuil. What was the reason?

In his Fifty Years he tells us that the ghastly spectacle of an all-pervading priestly immorality made him desire to fly to a place of refuge where he was assured it did not enter (p. 280). In his announcement to his people during the High Mass -- we learn from M. Mailloux (Document B), who tells us he has good authority for what he says -- he declared that he had long felt drawn to the religious life, but had resisted the call, which he could do no longer; besides it was bad for his soul to be so loved, honoured, and venerated as he was by his flock at Kamouraska. It was whispered, however, that there was another reason of a different kind which had most to do with the sudden change. "In 1846," says Document A, "tradition relates that he was caught in the very act of a sin against morals, and was thereupon obliged to leave the diocese of Quebec." This document acknowledges that the archives of Archbishop's House in Quebec contain no official document regarding the crime (which, if Chiniquy by leaving at once avoided a formal trial, there need not have been). But that there was some ground for the suspicion is implied in allusions to it in a private letter contained in Document E. On May 21, 1848, his faithful friend, M. Brassard, always so difficult to convince of the faults of his prot�g�, wrote to Bishop Bourget of Montreal a letter in which he begs the bishop to allow Chiniquy to be his locum-tenens for a short time at Longeuil, and, whilst endeavouring to forestall the bishop's probable objections, says: "I have reason for thinking that his bad conduct [mauvaise histoire] at Kamouraska is only known to his superiors and perhaps to one or two priests, for my brother the doctor, an intimate friend of the late J. Bte. Tache and of M. Dionne, the sworn enemies of M. Chiniquy, told me two years ago that these gentlemen could not refuse M. Chiniquy a certificate of morality, and that he himself, at that time a sworn enemy of priests, had only to reproach him with an excess of zeal. Besides, it seems to me that M. Chiniquy has paid heavily for his fault."

For whatever motives, he joined the Oblates at their house at Longeuil, in the diocese of St. Hyacinthe, and at the time they seem to have thought themselves fortunate in the acquisition of so famous a preacher, "the most eminent priest in the diocese of Quebec," as the P�re Honorat described him to M. Mailloux, (Doc. B). But they soon had occasion to change their minds about his fitness for their life, and he parted with them -- or they with him -- after a thirteen months' sojourn under their roof. According to his own account "when he pressed them to his heart for the last time, he felt the burning tears of many of them falling on his checks ... for they loved him and he loved them " (p. 312). And yet, as M. Mailloux tells us in his Notes (Doc. B), "he carried away with him from the Oblates a paper in which he painted them in the worst colours," a paper which M. Mailloux, to whose house he went that some day, "refused to receive from his hands, accompanying his refusal with words which M. Chiniquy would not be able to forget." What the nature of this portraiture of the Oblate Fathers - a portraiture in the truth of which M. Mailloux evidently disbelieved - may have been, we may perhaps judge from what he says about them in his Fifty Years (p. 306).

Now that he was free from the Oblates his natural course was to return to his own diocese of Quebec, and ask for another post. But M. Mailloux tells us that "to give him one there could not be thought of." Apparently that diocese had had enough of him, either because of the circumstances known to them in connection with his leaving Kamouraska, or because of his general intractability.

Nor would the Bishop of Montreal give him a fixed post, and he was forced to seek hospitality with his old friend M. Brassard, then Cur� of Longeuil, the parish in which was the Oblate House he had just quitted. M. Brassard suggested that he should give up the idea of stationary work, and devote himself wholly to temperance missions, and for this he managed to obtain permission from Bishop Bourget.

It was in this work during the next four years that Chiniquy acquired what was certainly the best distinction of his life. He was most extravagant in his language and reckless in his statements, so much so as to elicit from Mgr. Bourget some prudent admonitions. But he had undoubtedly a gift of fiery though undisciplined eloquence and could appeal with effect to the sensibility of his hearers. Nor, though the effects, according to his own acknowledgements, were not as lasting as they might have been had he been more solid and prudent in his advocacy and had he relied more on spiritual and less on merely secular motives, did he fail to do an amount of good to which even those whom he most abused generously testify. Thus M. Mailloux writes of him at this time (Doc. B): "No one in the country can deny that by his sermons on behalf of temperance he has dried many tears; he has brought back peace and happiness to a great many families; he has raised from the gutter many thousands of his unfortunate countrymen; and has set a mark of dishonour on the mania for drinking and getting intoxicated at weddings, meals, family feasts, friendly gatherings, in short in the social relations of the Canadians."

The year 1851 now drew on, and it proved to be an eventful year for Chiniquy's fortunes. According to his own account (p. 345), he received from Bishop Vandevelde of Chicago a letter dated December 1, 1850, in which, addressing him (on the envelope) as the "Apostle of Temperance," he invited him to abandon Canada and put himself at the head of a vast immigration of Canadians which the Bishop wanted to draw into the as yet uncolonised parts of Illinois, south of Kankakee. In this way they would be preserved from the temptations of the cities and their Protestantism, and would be kept together in communities apart, and so become one day a great political force in the United States. Only, the proposal was to be kept for the present a secret, as the Canadian bishops in their selfishness would oppose a movement, however beneficial in itself, which could not but reduce the population of their own parishes.

Whether Bishop Vandevelde ever wrote such a letter may be doubted, for the style as Chiniquy gives it in his book is suspiciously like his own, nor is it likely that the bishop would have made this discreditable request for secrecy to the prejudice of his episcopal brethren in Canada. Still, it is true that the Bishop of Chicago did wish, not to entice Canadian colonists into his diocese, but to divert those who were streaming in unasked, from the cities to the new lands to the south, and that he wanted some Canadian priests to take the spiritual charge of them. But so far from wishing to keep this desire secret from the Canadian bishops, he had written a letter - the text of which is before us (Doc. E) - on March 4, 1850, to Mgr. Bourget of Montreal. In it he lays his trouble before that prelate, and begs for a Canadian priest or two in most moving terms. Possibly it was as the result of this letter that M. Lebel, of Kamouraska, was sent, and so came to be stationed in Chicago when Chiniquy afterwards arrived.

Anyhow, there is no mention of Chiniquy in this letter from Bishop Vandevelde to Bishop Bourget. He went, however, in May, 1851, to Illinois to give a temperance mission to the Canadians there, and took with him a letter from Bishop Bourget, dated May 7, 1851, in which the latter asks Bishop Vandevelde to "regard M. Chiniquy as his own priest all the time he is doing work in his diocese," adding, in the humble and tender tone which characterizes all the letters of that truly saintly man: "I trust that his fervent prayers will draw down upon his ministry the copious benedictions of Heaven, and that I myself may experience some of the fruits of them, I who am the last of all."

It would be a mistake, however, merely from this expression of hope that Chiniquy's prayers might be fruitful, to conclude that the bishop was altogether at ease about him. He wrote him a letter, likewise dated May 7, 1851 (Doc. E), in which he gives him some counsels - namely:

"(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."

That the last two of these counsels were given in view of Chiniquy's personal temperament is sufficiently manifest. That the rest was also, Chiniquy himself must have understood, since in his letter back to the bishop, dated May 13, 1851 (ibid), he writes: "I will not end without asking your lordship to let me be the first told of it, when detraction or calumny casts at your feet its poisons against me. You cannot believe, Monseigneur, how much harm, doubtless without wishing it, you have done to my benefactor and friend, M. Brassard, by confiding to him in the first place certain things which for his happiness and mine he should never have known. If I am guilty it seems to me I ought to bear the weight of my iniquity. And if I am innocent, and it is calumny which is pouring out its poisons over my soul, God will give me the strength, as He has done already in more than one circumstance, to bear all and to pardon all. But let these empoisoned darts wound my soul only, not that of my friend."

These are fair-sounding words, doubtless, and might be the words of an innocent man. Whether they are so or not we can only judge by taking them in connection with what else we can get from independent sources. But we quote them now as testifying that "in more than one circumstance" Chiniquy had been suspected, and, as Bishop Bourget apparently thought, not always without ground. Suspicion is not the same as conviction, but we shall hear more presently of Bishop Bourget's mind on the subject. Still, it is a point to notice, even at this stage, that Chiniquy should have been so unfortunate as to excite suspicions of the same character in so many independent quarters. His uncle Dionne, and therefore some of his school-masters, had suspected him in this way in his youth: the diocesan authorities of Quebec had so far suspected him as to refuse him further work in that diocese: and now we have Bishop Bourget entertaining similar suspicions of him.

Nor can we in this connection leave out of account another thing that may, perhaps, throw a little light on the unpleasantness of his visit to Detroit, which took place just at this time, namely, whilst he was on the way to Chicago. We have already heard his own version of the contretemps which caused him to hasten his departure from that neighbourhood (p. 349), but an American friend assures us that a version of another kind was given him by the late Very Rev. P. Hermaert, formerly Vicar-General of Detroit. That version is that Chiniquy, who used to visit Detroit on his temperance mission from time to time, had been complained of to the bishop for his offensive attentions to the daughter of a respectable family. During one of his visits he found that the bishop was going to call him to account for his misconduct, and he hastened away before the bishop could return to the city.

He arrived at Chicago on this temporary visit in June, 1851, and went on to Bourbonnais. But he was back again by the middle of July, and on August 13th published in the Canadian papers a glowing account of the prairies of Illinois, assuring the Canadians that, unless they were quite comfortable at home, their best course was to go there to settle, which they could do with a certainty of immediate comfort if they only had two hundred dollars with them to start with (p. 354).

This letter caused a great stir, and induced a great many young men to respond to the advice, but at the same time aroused much indignation among their pastors, who saw, what the result proved to be the case, that the scheme was wild, and that famine rather than speedy prosperity was to be anticipated for those who were caught by it. Chiniquy did not, however, indicate in this public letter that it was part of the scheme for him to be at the head of the emigration, as probably it was not at that time, though it looks as if he were working up towards such an eventuality.

In the account in his Fifty Years, Chiniquy gives the readers to understand that he was going to Illinois in response to an invitation prompted by a sense of his merits, and that he was going in a spirit of generosity, and at great sacrifice to his own cherished objects. "I determined (he says) to sacrifice the exalted position God had given me in Canada, to guide the footsteps of the Roman Catholic emigrants from France, Belgium, and Canada towards the regions of the West in order to extend the power and influence of my Church all over the United States" (p. 353). We have our doubts, however, whether his departure for this new sphere of work was so entirely spontaneous, and even whether it was in response to any invitation at all, and not rather because he had begged to be allowed to go, his position in Canada being no longer tenable. Let us see.

In September, 1851, a very unpleasant thing happened to him. "I found," he says, "on September 28, 1851, a short letter on my table from Bishop Bourget, telling me that, for a criminal action, which he did not want to mention, committed with a person he would not name, he had withdrawn all priestly powers and interdicted me" (p. 363). He went "two hours later" to see the bishop, to assert his entire innocence, and to ask for the crime to be stated and the witnesses made known, so that he might meet them face to face and confute them. But this, he tells us, the bishop sternly and coldly refused to do. Then, after taking counsel with M. Brassard, he went off that night to the Jesuit Coll�ge of St. Marie, at Montreal. It was to make "an eight days' retreat," and likewise to have the "help of [Father Schneider's] charity, justice, and experience in forcing the bishop to withdraw his unjust sentence against [him]." He represents Father Schneider as helping him cordially, and, as his (Chiniquy's) reflections made him suspect that his accuser was a certain girl whom shortly before he had turned away from his confessional, believing that she had come to entrap him, Father Schneider had the girl found and brought to the Coll�ge.

There, in Father Schneider's presence, and under the influence of Chiniquy's firm cross-examination, she owned that "he was not guilty," but that she "had come to his confessional to tempt him to sin," and that it was to "revenge [herself] for his rebuking her that she had made the accusation." This was on the third day of his retreat, and therefore on October 2nd, a date we may find it convenient to remember. When the retreat was over, he went back to the bishop to whom he had already sent a copy of the girl's retraction. The bishop, he says, fully accepted it as clearing his character, and as proof that he had nothing against him gave him a "letter expressive of his kindly feelings," and also a "chalice from [his] hands" with which he might offer the Holy Sacrifice for the rest of his life.

It must be clearly understood that this is Chiniquy's account of what happened, and that he first gave it, not at the time of the occurrence, but nearly six years later, in a letter dated April 18, 1857, which was addressed to Bishop Bourget from St. Anne's Kankakee, and was published in the Canadian press (p. 526). Until then nothing had been publicly known about the story of this girl. The occasion of this letter being written arose out of the schism which by that time Chiniquy had stirred up among the French Canadians in Illinois. We shall understand its character better presently; for the moment it is enough to say that Bishop Bourget had thought it necessary to undeceive these poor French Canadians by revealing to them some of Chiniquy's antecedents. Accordingly, when at the beginning of 1857 some of them, who had renounced their momentary schism, sent him a consoling letter to announce the fact, he replied on March 19, 1857, by a letter (Doc. C) addressed "to the Canadian Catholics of Bourbonnais" which letter "was read out in the Bourbonnais Church on Passion Sunday, March 29th" (of that year). We shall have to refer to this letter again afterwards, but must give a long extract from it now.

"M. Chiniquy sets himself on another pedestal to capture admiration, by pretending that God has made him the friend, the father, and the saviour of the emigrants. To judge from these pompous words one would have to believe that he only quitted Canada for the grand work of looking after the thousands of Canadians scattered over all parts of the vast territory of the American Union. But here again I am going to oppose M. Chiniquy with M. Chiniquy, for I suppose that, even if he refuses to believe the words of the bishops, he will at least believe his own. I am going to give an extract from a letter written by this gentleman, but that its nature may be the better understood, I should say that on September 27, 1851, I withdrew from him all the powers I had given him in the diocese, for reasons I gave him in a letter which he ought to have preserved, and which he may publish if he thinks that I have unjustly persecuted him. Under the weight of this terrible blow he wrote to me on October 4th following this letter: --

'Monsignor, tribulations surround me on all sides. I perceive that I must take the sad road of exile, but who will have pity on a proscribed man on a foreign soil, when he whom he had looked up to as his father has no longer a word of mercy for him?... As soon as my retreat is finished I shall go and embrace my poor brothers and mingle my tears with theirs. Then I shall bid an eternal farewell to my country; and I shall go and hide the disgrace of my position in the obscurest and least known corner of the United States. If, when my retreat is ended, I may hope to receive the word of mercy which you thought it necessary to refuse me yesterday, let me know for the sake of the God of mercy, and gladly will I go to receive it before setting out. It will fall like balm on my wounded soul, and will sweeten the rigours of exile.'

It was under these distressing sensations and in these painful circumstances that he decided to preach the Canadian emigration."

Our readers will note several things about this letter. First, it was written From St. Marie's Coll�ge while he was still in retreat under Father Schneider, and on October 4th - that is to say, two days after the supposed visit and retraction of the unnamed girl.

And yet there is not in it a word of reference to this retraction, nor is what he does say consistent with that story - for Chiniquy certainly does not write as if he felt confident that the bishop would now acknowledge his innocence and reinstate him. Secondly, the letter shows that he was going reluctantly to Illinois, and (so far as he knew then), not to preach, but to hide his disgrace in obscurity. Thirdly, the whole tone of the letter is one of a man who pleads for mercy, not of one who protests his innocence. Fourthly, the circumstances under which it was written imply that he was professing, even if he did not feel, a hearty repentance for an offence committed; since it is evident Bishop Bourget deemed him guilty, and that being so, neither would he have removed the suspension, nor Bishop Vandevelde have accepted him for his diocese, unless he had professed repentance. Fifthly, two other contemporary letters that are before us (Doc. E) point in the same direction. For on October 6th Bishop Bourget wrote to Chiniquy, while still in retreat at St. Marie's, a letter which is apparently the answer to Chiniquy's of October 4th. It breathes the same spirit as all Bishop Bourget's letters, and the reader may judge if it is that of an intolerant despot:

"Monsieur, I am praying myself and getting others to pray for you, and my heart is not so deaf as you appear to think. My desire is that the most sincere repentance may penetrate down to the very depths and to the innermost parts of your heart. I pray for this with all the fervour of my soul, and if I am not heard it will assuredly be because of my innumerable infidelities. O! that I could be free to weep over them, and to bury myself for ever in some Chartreuse, under one of the sons of St. Bruno, whose happy and holy feast the Church keeps to-day."

In this letter the Bishop makes no reference to Chiniquy going to the United States, probably because that project was not as yet arranged. But M. Brassard, on hearing of the misfortune of his prot�g�, took advantage of Bishop Vandevelde's presence at the time in the neighbourhood, and besought that prelate to give him a chance of retrieving himself.

A letter from Bishop Vandevelde to Bishop Bourget was a result of this. It is dated "Troy, October 15, 1851," and contains the following passage, the only one of interest to us now: "After all the instances made by M. le Cur� de Longeuil (M. Brassard), and the promises of his prot�g�, I consented to give the latter a trial on condition that he got an exeat from Mgr. Bourget exclusively for the diocese of Chicago" (Doc. E).

It will be admitted that these various letters throw on the episode of September 25, 1851, a light somewhat different from that in which it appears in Chiniquy's own published account above given, and there will be something further to say on the matter presently. But we have heard Chiniquy appeal to two testimonials of esteem, a letter and a chalice, which the Bishop gave him as a means by which he might always be able to vindicate his character in reward to the charge brought against him by this girl. Let us now investigate this point.

The letter is a letter written by Bishop Bourget in response to Bishop Vandevelde's stipulation that Chiniquy, before he could accept him, must have an exeat for the diocese of Chicago. It runs as follows (p. 528): --

"Montreal, October 13, 1851.

"The Rev. Charles Chiniquy.

"Sir,-

"You ask my permission to leave my diocese, to go and offer your services to the Bishop of Chicago. As you belong to the diocese of Quebec, I think it belongs to my Lord the Archbishop to give you the dismissal you wish. As for me I cannot but thank you for your labours amongst us, and I wish you in return the most abundant blessings from Heaven. You shall ever be in my remembrance and in my heart, and I hope that divine Providence will permit me at a future time to testify all the gratitude I owe you.

"Meanwhile, I remain your very humble and obedient servant,

"+Ignatius, Bishop of Montreal."

Chiniquy describes this letter as a "testimonial of esteem" (p. 528), and again as "a perfect recantation of all he had said and done against me" (p. 370). Perhaps an undiscerning reader will be disposed to agree in that estimate of its language; but a Catholic acquainted with the style of an exeat, or permission to leave one diocese for another, will rather take it as a proof of Chiniquy's insincerity that he should thus represent it, for we may be sure he knew better what was significant about this particular document. The complimentary words refer to the results he had attained by his temperance preaching, and it is in keeping with Bishop Bourget's character that, in his desire to say the best he could of the unfortunate man, he should give generous recognition to what stood to his credit.

As he himself says (Doc. D) on this point, "We said nothing too much in adding that we protested to him that the diocese of Montreal would never forget his labours for the establishment of temperance. But all this proves that if we refused faculties to M. Chiniquy, it was solely for a motive of conscience, and for the good of the souls for whom we shall have to answer one day before God."

But what is really significant about this "testimonial of esteem" is that it contains not a word of testimonial to Chiniquy's personal integrity. There is generally a printed form for these exeats, with space left to fill in names and anything extra the bishop may think fit to add; and that there was such an one then in use in the diocese of Montreal may be seen from the exeat Chiniquy gives as having been issued to him about a year previously (p. 324). There, in the printed part, we have the phrase "[Charles Chiniquy...] is very well known to us, and we regard him as leading a praiseworthy life in consonance with his ecclesiastical profession, and bound by no ecclesiastical censures so far as is known to us."

But in the "exeat" of October 13, 1851, there is a significant omission of any such attestation of personal character as would certainly have been inserted had it been possible to give it truthfully. And the Archbishop of Quebec, who, as Mgr. Bourget says, was the prelate whose exeat was needful, seems to have given it on October 19th, in response to the solicitations of Mgr. Bourget and M. Brassard, but with similar omissions. For Bishop Bourget, in forwarding it to Mgr. Vandevelde on October 18th (Doc. E), speaks of it as "not altogether in conformity with your desires," and Mgr. T�tu (Doc. A) says, "The Bishop of Quebec gave him an exeat for the diocese of Chicago without a single word of recommendation." So much in correction of the false construction which Chiniquy puts upon Bishop Bourget's exeat.

The construction he puts upon the gift of a chalice is not less misleading. "The best proof," he says in the letter written to Bishop Bourget on April 18, 1857, "that you know very well that I was not interdicted by your rash and unjust sentence is that you gave me that chalice as a token of your esteem and of my honesty" (p. 529). It proved nothing of the sort.

Chiniquy had professed, whether sincerely or not, that he was truly sorry for the offences which had led to his suspension, and though Bishop Bourget did not feel justified in giving him further employment, Bishop Vandevelde, who was sadly in want of priests, was inclined to give him another chance. Accordingly the suspension was taken off him and, as he was about to start an entirely new mission, nothing was more natural than that Bishop Bourget should give him a chalice -- not, indeed, for himself, but for the mission about to be started and in need of sacred vessels.

So far these contemporary letters convict Chiniquy of untruthfulness, and this may dispose us to doubt whether it is true that, when suspending him on September 28th, Bishop Bourget refused to tell him either the nature of the crime imputed to him or the name of the accuser. Be it recollected that in Bishop Bourget's Letter to the Canadians of Bourbonnais (Doc. C) he says that he suspended Chiniquy "for reasons stated in a letter which he must have kept and which he may publish if he likes."

Chiniquy's reply to this challenge in his letter to the papers of April 18, 1857, was by bringing forward his story of the girl coming to his confessional, and one would like to know what the Bishop's comment on it may have been. We can have it, for the Bishop, who naturally could not engage in a newspaper controversy with a suspended priest, thought it well that his clergy should know the true facts now that Chiniquy was endeavouring to misrepresent them.

Accordingly he drew up the paper we have called Doc. D, and of which we have before us a certified copy taken from the archives of the diocese of Montreal. It is entitled Explanations of certain Facts misrepresented by Chiniquy in his Letter of April 18, 1857, and is dated May 6, 1857. It begins with the words, "These explanations are confided to the wise discretion of the priests, so that each may make such use of them as he thinks desirable." There will then be no impropriety in our quoting from them at this distance of time. The following passage bears on the point now before us:

"M. Chiniquy pretends that we did not tell him for what crime we withdrew his faculties. This is false, for we told it to him with all possible distinctness (en toutes lettres) in our letter of September 29th [? 27], 1851, which nevertheless he cites as if it were to his advantage.

"He pretends that we refused him all means of justifying himself. To this we reply that our invariable practice has been not to proceed canonically against any one whatever except when the accusers were resolved to sustain their accusations under oath and in the presence of the person they accuse. If M. Chiniquy desires to appeal to the Archbishop of Quebec, or to the Pope, he will find us perfectly prepared to satisfy him on this point.

"As to the incident of the poor girl whom he brings on the scene, it is so disadvantageous to him that he would have done better for his own credit to be silent about it. However much it costs us we will explain about this incident, as it is the sole argument on which he relies to create the impression that the bishops are tyrants who oppress and condemn their priests without a shadow of justice. Some time after the culpability of M. Chiniquy had been clearly demonstrated to us a certain girl came to depose against him, who said she would feel an intense repugnance to be confronted with him. This testimony therefore could not, in conformity with our ordinary method of proceeding, enter into the evidence against him. So we contented ourselves with telling this gentleman that, over and beyond all that had been deposed against him, a certain girl had quite recently complained of him.

"Now see what M. Chiniquy does. He confines himself to this fact alone, sends for the girl and gets her to retract. To all this bit of scheming (man�ge) we replied by pointing out the contradiction between M. Chiniquy's words and his actions, saying to him: 'You pretended that you did not know this girl when I refused to name her to you. How, then, was it so easy for you to find her and make her retract?' And to this he had nothing to reply at that time. Hence what he says now (in 1857) about this girl, namely, that it was she who wished to tempt him; that it was in vengeance that she had accused him, and that he had been able to discover her by means of a certain individual whom he had remarked exchanging a few words with her, is a story which any sensible man will see is made up after the event. Moreover, this girl afterwards confirmed her first deposition, under oath, and it was certainly not from us that she received one hundred dollars for that if indeed it is true at all that she was paid."

We can judge now what were the real motives that caused M. Chiniquy to abandon Canada for Illinois, and whether he has stated them truthfully. Probably our readers will consider that he has not, and that, on the principle "false in one thing false in all," he has created a presumption against the truth of any future allegations he may make, those only excepted which are confirmed by independent witnesses. Keeping this presumption in mind, we must pass on to consider his life in Illinois.