(One’s level of piety, whether devotional or
practical, depends much on knowledge being either learned or misconceived. In
these analyses we have made mention, occasionally, of books that either help or
hinder the grand object of piety. It seems natural, consequently, to supplement
the analyses, now and again, with correlating book reports.)
GABOURY’S CRITICAL BOOK REPORT
Sarah J. Richardson, Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal, ed. Edward P. Hood (1857;
LibriVox recording, read by Brendan Stallard, 2011.)
This story began to surface
when an escaped nun attempted to explain to her Protestant hosts the reason for
her constant nervousness. At the behest of these persons that she told the
story of her sufferings to, this former nun dictated the account here told, and
it was published in 1857. Only after she married would the Subject of this
narrative consent to share the story at large, so much did she fear her
‘relentless persecutors’: the Roman Catholic priests.
In Montreal during this period, “no one can
assist a runaway nun with impunity if caught in the act.” Only on her third
attempt did this nun, after fifteen years or so of confinement, privations,
abuse, and torture, make a lasting escape. Sarah J. Richardson (her married
name) was never a nun by choice. She was made one by force. The priests who
bought her named her Sister Agnes.
This woman’s story unfolds like
so. Wanting to give his six year old girl a better life, an ignorant, drunkard
father puts her in the ‘care’ of priests in return for $100.00. Thus, at that
tender age does the girl’s ‘history of punishments’ begin. At the White
Nunnery, little girls are very strictly treated. As the captive soon found out,
forgetting to close a door softly enough can get you a cat-of-nine-tails upon
the head and shoulders. The girls are never permitted to speak to one another,
may not turn in their beds during the nite, and get fifteen minutes of
recreation per day. The terrors they are subjected to cause some of them to
have fits and to become sick, which their scanty diet helps to remedy but
little. They are not permitted to receive visitors, have to fast every third
day, and are made to endure ‘nothing but toil and self-denial.’ Believing as
they are told, that the priests know all their thoughts, they quickly learn to
confess, obey, and fear. “Can the world of woe itself furnish deceit of a
darker dye?”
At age ten, the Subject is sent
to the Grey Nunnery at Montreal,
which is the place, or prison, most of the narrative is occupied to describe.
Once at this nunnery, she is brought into a room where a coffin is waiting. The
presence of the coffin seems to signify that the priests will now kill her, a
thought that makes her feel that she might die of fear before they do it. It
turns out that she is made to lie down in that coffin during a ceremony meant
to illustrate her death to the world. Imagine being in that coffin, reader, at
the age of ten with Roman priests muttering over you in the Latin tongue.
Sounds like a scene from The Exorcist or
something. In this nunnery, the girls must do hard labor, with but little food
for support and strength, all the while fearing the priests as much as they
fear the devil himself. And no wonder. After spilling a little water, for example,
the Subject is locked in a scary room for twenty-four hours in a standing
posture, notwithstanding her confession of sorrow. From this grim vantage
point, she can hear the shrieking of others because of their own punishments,
and some of them praying for death instead of life.
In the context of her first,
arduous escape into the world, the Subject asks, “Is it strange that I felt
that life was hardly worth preserving?” When she is betrayed into the hands of
the priests, she questions ‘the justice of the Power that rules the world.’
Then she sinks even lower, and begins to doubt the existence of that Power.
“Why were my prayers and tears disregarded?” she moans. “What have I done to
deserve a life of misery?” she asks. Upon her return, she is told to choose one
punishment out of the following three: consignment to the ‘fasting room’ where
decomposing corpses are; consignment to the ‘lime room’ with its noxious vapors
and bottomless pit; or consignment to the ‘cell’ where devices of terror and
torture-traps are kept. She ends up in the third room. Once locked in there to
consider what her fate might be, in comes a priest masquerading as the devil in
order to terrify her. This episode occasions one of the most valuable
revelations to the girl. The devil has the key to the room, she reasons, which
can only mean that he and the priests are in league together. An acceptable
deduction for the girl to make! (She knows that the devil and the priest are
the same person.) After five days and nites without food and water, the girl,
now, not surprisingly, is nearly dead. The bitter part of death being now past,
continued life disappoints her extremely. A Mother Superior (herself under
fear) revivifies her with bread and wine concealed for the purpose. “The nun
who was found guilty of showing mercy to a fellow sufferer was sure to find
none for herself.” We are urged to conceive at this point, “the state of that
community where humanity is a crime, where mercy is considered a weakness of
which one should be ashamed.” Imagine wanting to extend mercy, but having to
restrain yourself for fear of being found out, sent away, and replaced by
someone cruel. What a terrible tyranny to live under! And just like what
happens in gulags (they still exist), the prisoners learn to turn on each other
to score points with superiors.
The abominations related in this
narrative are so numerous as to be nearly numberless. For what a priest
interprets as a cross look, a crown of thorns is pressed upon the girl’s head.
She must wear it for six hours, during which time she is made to work while the
blood drips down. That’s just one horror story picked out of my notes at
random. During her second escape, seeking refuge from house to house (seven to
nine miles apart), she is, one can easily believe, ‘cold, hungry, almost sick,
and entirely friendless.’ The storm raining down upon her head sounds like ‘the
last convulsive sound of a broken heart.’ The prospect of freedom nerves her
onward, however, and she, ‘a friendless wanderer,’ makes it to Vermont where she
finally finds kindness and affection in a Brainard home before she is caught
the second time. The punishments for that escape, including over a week of
starvation, nearly kill her. She is promised, in addition, a whole year of
daily punishments for this last revolt.
Some time before these
punishments are accomplished, I think, she escapes the final time, makes it all
the way to Massachusetts
thanks to connexions made by Protestant Orangemen, and hides out there long
enough to begin a new life and even marry. Thus, the ‘dull, dreary, and
monotonous life’ that is ‘varied only by pain and privations’ is at an end,
though the young woman continues through the whole of the rest of her days in a
worrisome, agitated state. She remains always on the lookout, in fear of the
Roman Catholic priests whose hearts ‘feel no sympathy for human woe’ and their
‘system of bigotry, cruelty, and hatred, which they call religion.’
Such is my summary that fails to
do justice to the terrifying account that I have just listened to. Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal is
disturbing to listen to but riveting all the way. And so it will be gotten
through in short order by those who begin to listen to it, I think. The voice
of Brendan Stallard, moreover, is suitably somber and soft-spoken. The evils
that this woman was made to suffer are so vividly told that the book left me
wiped out at the end, though I was hoping for more information about her
post-convent life. I have read many of Poe’s horror stories, like The Pit and the Pendulum and The Premature Burial. Even stories like
those are less horrific than ‘the fearful outrage…upon humanity’ related by
this woman. Imagine, even the most talented writer of horror could not dream up
anything to equal the actual horrors of Roman Catholic contrivance. This may
beg the question to some, ‘Is the story true?’ In spite of all the digging that
I did, I could find no decisive answer. Some persons in the story are named,
but not fully. And the central character in the affair is something of a
mystery herself. But most persons, including the Subject, had to be left
unnamed in order to dodge the wrath of Rome.
This seems like justification enough for these omissions. What might bestow
credibility to the woman’s testimony are answers to questions like these: Did a
nun, in that day or in some other, have to lie down in a coffin for
consecration to her office? Do the coffins of nuns follow them to their
postings? Was this nunnery ever guarded by men with guns? Answers to the
negative would be discrediting to some degree. Answers to the positive would
not prove enough. Around the year 2000, some journalists attempted a reception
into a Roman Catholic institution in Quebec.
I recall seeing that on television. While I can’t remember the means by which
this place was guarded, it was an impenetrable fortress for sure, and those
persistent journalists were kept out of there. This contemporary incident lends
credit to the 19th century narrative. The author makes it clear that
it was not unusual, in that day, for a nun to be seen walking unassisted along
the street. It was the normalcy of this that facilitated one of her escapes.
This nuance is also to the narrative’s credit, for all nuns being as closely
guarded as the Subject was just won’t stand up to a scrutiny of history.
What about some of the things
that she claims to have witnessed or suffered in this nunnery? Did she really
see a woman being tortured on the medieval-style rack, for instance? This claim
sounds fantastic, true. But that Roman priests used such a torture device is a
fact of history. Why not in 19th century Canada? Is the raping of boys not a
form of torture? Who will dare to answer no to this question? Roman Catholic
priests are still torturing, then, maybe in your own city, town, village, or
hamlet. If victims were not regularly coming forward with evidence of having
been raped by priests in the 20th century, it might be plausible
that a more decent, civilized priesthood existed in the 19th century
than the vile one portrayed by the Subject. The sins and crimes among priests
today furnish ample reason to believe that there is much truth, maybe whole
truth, in this woman’s harrowing story. Furthermore, in light of the Roman
Catholic pedophilia cover-up, what this woman says about the duplicity of
priests is entirely believable. They will say or do almost anything, will they
not, to discredit testimonies to their evil deeds? May the rumor that this
story is a piece of fiction not be a lie concocted by the Roman Catholic Establishment?
A duplicitous person is one who
practices deception by pretending to feel or act one way while feeling or doing
the opposite. Members of the Roman Catholic clergy pretend to be torn up about
pedophilia in their ranks, and they pretend that everything is being done to
stop the abuse. They shuffle their guilty associates around the world when they
should be turning them over and confessing all that they know. This is proof
that their sympathy for victims is a sham. They are, just as they were in Sarah
J. Richardson’s day, ‘vile, unscrupulous, hypocritical pretenders.’ And the
Pope obviously wants it that way, for he makes no effort to bring justice to
his pedophile brethren and their enablers. The Pope is the chief enabler, for
he will not discipline his priests. The Subject’s assessment is sound: A kind
heart in a priest, for the Roman Catholic Church, is a cardinal sin. Some nuns,
too, are more cross than kind. The book is right about that, just as my own
sisters allege. They had nuns for teachers in the 1960’s. But nuns are wicked
mostly because this conduct runs downhill from the priests.
What about the story’s literary
style? What can this tell us? It is difficult to believe that this young,
uneducated woman, so soon after her final escape, would have been capable of
speaking like so: “Can the world of woe itself furnish deceit of a darker dye?”
This is poetic prose of a high order. This woman might have been particularly
gifted. This is possible. But suppose that she was not. It would have been
acceptable and normal for the editor she dictated her story to, to suggest,
with her consent, apt expressions with which to add color and emotion to plain
facts. Puritan pastors, for instance, embellished in that way, the ‘Captivity
Narratives’ that they helped their suffering brethren to compose. ‘Ghost
writers’ provide the same service today, which does not lessen the truthfulness
of a memoir.
Suppose
that Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal
is nothing more than an invention posing as a chronicle. Yet the Roman Catholic
Priesthood has been guilty, at some time in its history, even in our own day,
of sins and crimes at least as vicious as those charged against it here. I’m
not saying that this is a work of fiction. In consideration of what we already
know about the Roman Church, it is believable enough. Because of the research
into Roman Catholicism that I have already done, my belief in this story
exceeds my doubt. The ‘Convent Horror Story,’ like the ‘Puritan Captivity
Narrative,’ is, indeed, a genre of literature. But then so are ‘Letters’ and
‘Remains.’ The fact that this story is categorized under a certain genre does
not mean that its contents are untrue. There are enough stories of convent
horror to constitute a genre. Maybe this is so, not because of a dishonest,
concerted aim to disgrace the Roman Catholic Church, but because the Roman
Catholic Priesthood is guilty of the atrocities alleged against it. Maybe the
complainants, in publishing their testimonies, had one chief goal in mind: to spare
unsuspecting people from similar treatment. What about the ‘pedophile priest’
scandal of our own day? Could a genre be created out of that, do you think?
Does the genre not exist already? It does, and some of the stories are so well
uncovered and documented that only the most Popish of idolaters dare deny their
legitimacy. Will those stories be believed a century or two from now? Or will
they be doubted while the priests are occupied with new perversions?
The Subject relates the appalling
abuse that the priests put upon her in very great detail. Can we believe her
claim, that as bad as all of that was, yet there were some evil deeds that
modesty forbade her to testify of? Well, imagine a Roman priest raping an altar
boy, and then ask yourself this question: What will a perverted priest not do? And consider, too, that a
religious woman in the 19th century is not likely to put into print
an entirely ‘tell-all’ book.
If justice counted for something
in this country, we would not forgive evils like pedophilia just because they
are done under cover of religion. We would pursue justice in the religious
quarter with more zeal than we do anywhere else because religion claims to be
more upright and honorable than the rest of the world. Be not deceived into supposing
that convents and the like are not dens of iniquity still. If priests are
perpetrating pedophilia in more open places than convents, what, think you,
must be happening behind the fences and doors of Romish institutions that no
outsider may look into?
Content: A (Upsetting,
engaging religious narrative.)
Style: A (Active and vivid.)
Tone: A (Somber and sympathetic.)
Grading Table: A: a keeper:
reread it; promote it; share it.
B: an average book:
let it go.
C: read only if you
have to.
