largely-paid

Updated: June 7, 2025

Such, in the eighteenth century, was the ecclesiastical staff with which we are familiar, court bishops, drawing-room abbes imposed from above on their diocese or their abbey, non-residents, charged with functions which they do not fulfill, largely-paid idlers, parasites of the Church, and, besides all this, worldly, gallant, often unbelievers, strange leaders of a Christian clergy and which, one would say, were expressly selected to undermine Catholic faith in the minds of their flocks, or monastic discipline in their convents.

Hippolyte Taine - The Modern Regime, Volume 1