Romanism, Priests of
Roman Catholic priests are overwhelmed with masses for the dead, showing church practices and abuses.
When Chief Justice Whiteside of England visited Italy, a dozen years ago, he was struck, he tells us, with the multitude of priests, and asked a Roman-Catholic friend what they could possibly find to do. "Find to do!" answered his friend: "they have more to do than they can possibly get through."—"How can that be?" was the natural rejoinder. "What have they to do?"—"They have to say masses for the dead," was the reply. "You see no man in good circumstances likes to die without leaving money, perhaps a hundred crowns, or even five hundred, for masses for his soul,—masses to get him out of purgatory. Or, if he loses his wife or his child, he goes to the priest to order a hundred masses for the benefit of the soul of the departed. Now, for all Italy, this makes such an enormous demand, that the priests are always some tens of thousands of masses in arrear; that is, they were paid last year, or the year before, for masses which they have not yet been able to say."—"But what happens, then," said Mr. Whiteside, "if, as you say, they are always getting into arrear?"—"Oh! then they send a petition to the pope; and he sets it all straight."—"How does he do that?" asked Mr. Whiteside. "Oh! he issues a decree once in every two or three years, that so many thousand masses which have not been said shall be entered in the chancery of heaven as if they had been said; and that, you know, makes all right."