““Haeretics” are accused of crimes in which the Church has more or less openly indulged even down to the beginning of our century. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX., issued two bulls against the Stedingers “for various heathen and magical practices”, and the latter, as a matter of course, were exterminated in the name of Christ and His Holy Mother. In 1282 a parish priest of Inverkeithing, named John, performed rites on Easter day by far worse than “magical”. Collecting a crowd of young girls, he forced them to enter into “divine ecstasies” and Bacchanalian fury, dancing the old Amazonian circle-dance around the figure of the heathen “god of the gardens”. Notwithstanding that upon the complaint if some of his parishioners he was cited before his bishop, he retained his benefice because he proved that such was the common usage of the country.
The Waldenses, those “earliest Protestants”, were accused of the most unnatural horrors; burned, butchered, and exterminated for calumnies heaped upon them by their accusers. Meanwhile the latter, in open triumph, forming their heathen processions of “Corpus Christi”, with emblems modeled on those of Baal-Peor and “Osiris”, and every city in Southern France carrying, in yearly processions on Easter days, loaves and cakes fashioned like the so-much-decried emblems of the Hindu Sivites and Vishnites, as late as 1825! Deprived of their old means for slandering Christian sects whose religious views differ from their own, it is now the turn of the “heathen”, Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese, to share with the ancient religions the honor of having cast in their teeth, denunciations of their “libidinous religions.”
Without going far for proofs of equal if not surpassing immorality, we would remind Roman Catholic writers of certain bas-reliefs on the doors of St. Peter’s Cathedral. They are as brazen faced as the door itself; but less so than any author, who, knowing all this, feigns to ignore historical facts. A long succession of Popes have reposed their pastoral eyes upon these brazen pictures of the vilest obscenity, through those many centuries, without ever finding the slightest necessity for removing them. Quite the contrary; for we might name certain Popes and Cardinals who made it a lifelong study to copy these heathen suggestions of “nature-gods”, in practice as well as in theory.
In Polish Podolia there was some years ago, in a Roman Catholic Church, a statue of Christ, in black marble. It was reputed to perform miracles on certain days, such as having its hair and beard grow in the sight of the public, and indulging in other less innocent wonders. This show was finally prohibited by the Russian Government. When in 1585 the Protestants took Embrun (Department of the Upper Alps), they found in the churches of this town relics of such a character, that, as the Chronicle expresses it, “old Huguenot soldiers were seen to blush, several weeks after, at the bare mention of the discovery.”
In a corner of the Church of St. Fiacre, near Monceaux, in France, there was – and it still is there, if we mistake not – a seat called “the chair of St. Fiacre”, which had the reputation of conferring fecundity upon barren women. A rock in the vicinity of Athens, not far from the so-called “Tomb of Socrates”, is said to be possessed of the same virtue. When some twenty years since, the Queen Amelia, perhaps in a merry moment, was said to have tried the experiment, there was no end of most insulting abuse heaped upon her, by a Catholic Padre, on his way through Syra to some mission. The Queen, he declared, was a “superstitious heretic”; “An abominable witch”; “Jezebel using magic arts.” Much more the zealous missionary would doubtless have added, had he not found himself, right in the middle of his vituperations, landed in a pool of mud, outside the window. The virtuous elocutionist was forced to this unusual transit by the strong arm of a Greek officer, who happened to enter the room, at the right moment.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 