Update: I just looked up Chiniquy, and found his story interesting.
excerpt from fifty years introduction:
"Chiniquy aspired to the priesthood of Rome, but his joy of being ordained a priest of Rome became "as if a thunderbolt had fallen upon me when I pronounced the awful oath which is required from every priest:
'I will never interpret the Holy Scriptures except according to the unanimous consent of the Holy Fathers' " (excerpt from Chiniquy's "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome"). How unlikeRome's oath is the Scripture, "20But ye have an Unction [Greek, chrisma] from the Holy One, and ye know all things. 27But the Anointing [Greek, chrisma, or unction]
which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same Anointing teachethyou of all things, and is Truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him" (1John 2:20,27)!As a proponent of total abstinence from alcoholic beverages, he was vehemently opposed by his drunken fellow priests.
"For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre" (Titus 1:7). He was horrified at the liberties taken by the priests of Rome, especially with their female confessors, who wererequired to confess their most intimate faults to the ears of a man, in the name of Auricular Confession. "For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret" (Ephesians 5:12).
He led an effort to bring Catholicism to the United States by bringing in a large colony of French
Canadian Catholics to the state of Illinois. Attacked by jealous priests,
Chiniquy was compelled to require the services of Abraham Lincoln, who ably defeated the Jesuits in open court battle; however, as Chiniquy warned, the Jesuits would not forgive or forget their wound. Chiniquy later demonstrated that Lincoln's assassination in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth was carefully orchestrated by a conspiracy of Jesuit-Catholic accomplices. "Lest Satan should get anadvantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices" (2Corinthians 2:11).
Suffice it to say that Chiniquy's breaking into the full freedom and liberty of the Gospel was aided by the whale vomiting its unwanted meal. Rome ultimately excommunicated Chiniquy, but not before he gave his resignation. The bishop "answered angrily: 'Mr. Chiniquy, I am your superior, I do not want to argue with you.
You are inferior: your business is to obey me. Give me at once an act of submission, in which you will simply say that you and your people will submit yourselves to my authority, and promise to do anything I will bid you.'
I calmly answered: 'What you ask me is not an act of submission, it is an act of adoration. I do absolutely refuse to give it.'
'If it be so, sir,' he answered, 'you can no longer be a Roman Catholic priest.' I raised my hands to heaven, and cried with a loud voice:
'May God Almighty be for ever blessed'" (excerpt from Chiniquy's "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome").
"So then it is not of him thatwilleth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy" (Romans 9:16).Chiniquy returned to his room to contemplate the enormity of his situation.
Taking his New Testament, he glanced providentially at these words, "Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men" (1Corinthians 7:23).
Gospel Salvation now became very plain to this former priest. "Strange to say! Those words came to my mind, more as a light than an articulated sound.
They suddenly but most beautifully and powerfully gave me, as much as a man can know it, the knowledge of the great mystery of a
perfect salvation through
Christ alone. They at once brought a great and delightful calm to my soul."
