In virtue of the credit they
have acquired in the world, they can practise defamation without
dreading the justice of mortals; and, on the strength of their
self-assumed authority in matters of conscience, they have invented
maxims for enabling them to do it without any fear of the justice of
God.
This, fathers, is the fertile source of your base slanders. On
this principle was Father Brisacier led to scatter his calumnies about
him, with such zeal as to draw down on his head the censure of the
late Archbishop of Paris. Actuated by the same motives, Father D'Anjou
launched his invectives from the pulpit of the Church of St.
Benedict in Paris on the 8th of March, 1655, against those
honourable gentlemen who were intrusted with the charitable funds
raised for the poor of Picardy and Champagne, to which they themselves
had largely contributed; and, uttering a base falsehood, calculated
(if your slanders had been considered worthy of any credit) to dry
up the stream of that charity, he had the assurance to say, "that he
knew, from good authority, that certain persons had diverted that
money from its proper use, to employ it against the Church and the
State"; a calumny which obliged the curate of the parish, who is a
doctor of the Sorbonne, to mount the pulpit the very next day, in
order to give it the lie direct. To the same source must be traced the
conduct of your Father Crasset, who preached calumny at such a furious
rate in Orleans that the Archbishop of that place was under the
necessity of interdicting him as a public slanderer.
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