Das moderne Geistesleben Spaniens) gave the income of the Jesuit body at Manresa alone as more than £15,000 a year, and this is only one among a thousand instances of an intensely wealthy community. Before the Philippine Islands were taken from Spain the Church drew 113,000,000 pesetas a year from the Islands, the State being content with a further 66,000,000. Barcelona had 165 convents until the recent riots, many of them worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The province of Catalonia supported 2,300 of these institutions.
Nor must the English reader be misled by audacious Catholic assurances that these wealthy communities represent the voluntary piety of the faithful, and are holy retreats to which the timid may retire from "the world." Even in this country the Catholic clergy generally—I am not speaking at random: I have been a priest and a monk—disdain and detest the communities of monks. Cardinal Manning was sternly opposed to them. The idleness and petty hypocrisy to which their ascetic professions lead is fully described in my Twelve Years in a Monastery. As I had the further advantage of living in monasteries in a “Catholic” country (Belgium), I obtained some idea of the real nature of such institutions under more or less normal conditions. The appalling laziness of the vast majority, the gross ignorance which masquerades as humility, the enormous consumption of alcohol behind closed doors, the all-pervading hypocrisy and very widespread immorality would, if they were fully appreciated by the educated laity of Belgium, turn the smouldering anti-clericalism into a fierce blaze of anger. Not one monk in twenty merited respect, even in his superstitions. The great majority were grossly sensual, lazy, and hypocritical. But even in Belgium there is a large body of critical observers, and the monasteries of Spain have the same corruption in a far greater degree.
The gross animality of the monks, the unscrupulousness of the Jesuits—for the Jesuit in Spain is a Jesuit—and the widespread immorality of the clergy are well known to Spaniards. Any who imagine that the charge of flagrant immorality against the Spanish clergy is a Protestant or Rationalist calumny should read the article, “The Priest and the People in Spain,” in the Daily News, October 18, 1909.
