What
account, indeed, fathers, will you be able to render to him of the
many calumnies you have uttered, seeing that he will examine them,
in that day, not according to the fantasies of Fathers Dicastille,
Gans, and Pennalossa, who justify them, but according to the eternal
laws of truth, and the sacred ordinances of his own Church, which,
so far from attempting to vindicate that crime, abhors it to such a
degree that she visits it with the same penalty as wilfull murder?
By the first and second councils of Arles she has decided that the
communion shall be denied to slanderers as well as murderers, till the
approach of death. The Council of Lateran has judged those unworthy of
admission into the ecclesiastical state who have been convicted of the
crime, even though they may have reformed. The popes have even
threatened to deprive of the communion at death those who have
calumniated bishops, priests, or deacons. And the authors of a
defamatory libel, who fail to prove what they have advanced, are
condemned by Pope Adrian to be whipped,- yes, reverend fathers,
flagellentur is the word. So strong has been the repugnance of the
Church at all times to the errors of your Society- a Society so
thoroughly depraved as to invent excuses for the grossest of crimes,
such as calumny, chiefly that it may enjoy the greater freedom in
perpetrating them itself. There can be no doubt, fathers, that you
would be capable of producing abundance of mischief in this way, had
God not permitted you to furnish with your own hands the means of
preventing the evil, and of rendering your slanders perfectly
innocuous; for, to deprive you of all credibility, it was quite enough
to publish the strange maxim that it is no crime to calumniate.
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