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(More customer reviews)I think these excepts from a review by Kevin Baker says it all.
"Maria" and her book burst upon the American scene in 1836. At the time, the nation was enduring a wave of nativist, "Know-Nothing" feeling. Just two years earlier, a mob of disgruntled Boston workingmen had marched on a convent of Ursuline nuns in nearby Charlestown and burned it to the ground.
Worse was yet to come-thanks in good part to Miss Monk. Awful Disclosures purported to be the memoir of how, as a young girl growing up in Montreal, she converted to Catholicism, joined a local nunnery-and found herself in a convent that sounds more like a road company of Marat/Sade than anything ever sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church.
For any of you tempted to carnal sin ..... Awful Disclosures will prove disappointing.
More disturbing are Maria's "revelations" about how nuns from wealthy families would be secretly murdered or imprisoned if they tried to leave the convent-or how all nuns were forced to have sex with Catholic priests. The progeny of these liaisons were supposedly baptized-then murdered and buried within the convent walls. Nuns who refused to accede to these practices were also murdered. In one particularly repulsive scene, a defiant young nun is placed under a bed and crushed to death by a swarm of priests and nuns who leap on it, laughing and mocking her, at the behest of a bishop. To avoid a similar fate-and to save her unborn child-Maria fled to New York and (if the phrase is not too redundant) straight into the arms of Know-Nothings and journalists.
Awful Disclosures became an instant bestseller. This is not too surprising, since it was ghost-written by some professional hack. Just how many of its calumnies were invented by Maria is unclear, but they conveniently echoed the most widespread anti-Catholic slanders.
For lending her name and person to this propaganda, Maria was lionized for a time by a group of Protestant clerics, and sent out on a series of speaking tours. Then the inevitable shoe fell. Maria's mother revealed that she had never been a nun at all, but the runaway inmate of a Catholic asylum for delinquent girls. The father of her child had not been a priest at all, but the boyfriend who helped her escape. Her clerical champions-and her publishers-quietly fell away, leaving her nearly as penniless as when she had first arrived in New York. "When she gave birth to a second fatherless child, she did not bother to name him after a priest," William V. Shannon wrote pointedly in his excellent history, The American Irish.
Maria seems to have become a prostitute, and died in prison after being arrested for pickpocketing. Her lies lived after her, as lies will. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, successive waves of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant violence wracked the nation. A series of wild riots near Philadelphia, in 1844, left 13 dead; while three Catholic churches and many Catholic homes were burned to the ground. Priests, nuns, and thousands of lay Catholics were forced to flee for their lives. A similar orgy of violence was narrowly avoided in New York the same year, when Bishop "Dagger John" Hughes summoned armed volunteers to defend the Old St. Patrick's Church, and warned the city's Know-Nothing mayor that he would turn New York into "a second Moscow" if any Catholics or their houses of worship were attacked. Bishop Hughes was referring to Czar Alexander I's decision to burn down Moscow rather than let it fall into the hands of Napoleon, and the force of his threat was enough to keep New York at peace for a change.
Yet through the mid-1850's, nativist mobs committed more murders and burned more churches and homes, in cities from Baltimore to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Know-Nothing politicians won sweeping electoral victories, once taking over almost the whole Massachusetts legislature, and threatening America's whole legacy of immigration. Throughout these depredations, the bible of the Know-Nothings remained Awful Disclosures-no matter how thoroughly Maria Monk was discredited. Shannon records that the book "went through twenty printings, sold 300,000 copies, and down to the Civil War served as the 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' of the Know-Nothing movement. The book was again in circulation on a small scale in the presidential campaign of 1960."
John Kennedy was running for president in 1960, and he was thought to have put the whole issue of anti-Catholicism to rest once and for all that year. Yet here it is back with us, forty years later-along with Awful Disclosures.
In an age when every outrageous conspiracy theory and nugget of internet gossip are passed off as the historical record, the truth is more important than ever. It is doubtful that Maria Monk .... will be able to do much damage to individual Catholics or the Catholic Church in the foreseeable future (or that new readers of Awful Disclosures will be outraged about anything so much as the fact that the disclosures aren't awfully erotic.)
Its instructive to note, though, that just this past April the American Jewish Committee was forced to run a large ad in The New York Times, protesting that an even more notorious fraud, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was being re-published by a pair of extremist publishers, and distributed through ... mainstream booksellers. Yet what are we to expect when even a major, respected publishing house is willing to make a few bucks by passing off old ethnic and religious slurs as mere sexual highjinks? Once the whole tissue of truth is torn, once reality becomes a weak and tattered thing, there is no keeping down the most monstrous of lies. This is why history matters. This is why truth matters.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal
1836. This volume includes an appendix containing reception of the first editions, sequel of her narrative, review of the case; also a supplement giving more particulars of the nunnery and grounds. This book embraces the contents of the first editions of the author's Awful Disclosures, together with the sequel of her narrative, giving an account of events after her escape from the Nunnery, and of her return to Montreal to procure legal investigation of her charges. It also furnishes all the testimony that was published against her, of every description, as well as that which was given in confirmation of her story. At the close will be found a review of the whole subject, furnished by a gentleman well qualified for the purpose; and finally, a short supplement, giving further particulars interesting to the public. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read.
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