It is readily admitted, that any person could take one of the Ecclesiastical Registers of Lower Canada, and at his option mark any number of the Roman Priests in the catalogue, and impute to them any crime which he pleased. But if the accuser were closely examined, and among such a multitude of Priests, who in all their clothing are dressed alike, were called upon minutely to delineate them, it is morally impossible, that he could depict more than a hundred Priests dispersed from the borders of Upper Canada to Quebec, in as many different parishes, with the most perfect accuracy, unless he was personally and well acquainted with them.
Maria Monk, however, does most accurately describe all the Priests in the preceding catalogue, and repeats them at the expiration of weeks and months; and the question is this: how is it possible that she could have become acquainted with so many of that body, and by what means can she so precisely depict their external appearance?—The startling, but the only plausible answer which can be given to that question is this:—that she has seen them in the Nunnery, whither, as she maintains, most of them constantly resorted for licentious intercourse with the Nuns.
One other connected fact may here be introduced. Maria Monk well knows the Lady Superior of the Charlestown Nunnery. That acquaintance could not have been made in the United States, because Saint Mary St. George as she called herself, or Sarah Burroughs, daughter of the notorious Stephen Burroughs, as is her real name, removed to Canada at the latter end of May, 1835; nor could it have been prior to the establishment of the Charlestown Nunnery, for at that period Maria Monk was a child, and was not in any Convent except merely as a scholar; and Mary St. George was at Quebec. How then did she become so familiar with that far-famed lady as to be able to describe her so exactly? The only answer is, that she derived her knowledge of the Charlestown Convent and of its Superior, from the intimations given, and from intercourse with that Nun in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery.
Young females often have been sent to the Nunneries in Canada under the fallacious hope of obtaining for them, a superior education; and very frequently, they are suddenly removed after being there but a short period; because the persons to whose partial guardianship they are committed perceive that they are in danger of being ensnared by the Chaplain and his female Syrens.
But there are two other particulars in American Nunneries, the toleration of which almost surpasses credibility.
In reference to girls, they are permitted to visit their friends, even when they reside in the vicinity of the Convent, only for an hour or two monthly—if their relatives are at a distance, they see them only during the annual vacation, and often remain in the Nunnery during that term. No correspondence is permitted between the mother, the guardian, the sister, or the friends of the young female in the Nunnery School, on either side, without the inspection of the argus-eyed agent of the Institution. Parental advice, filial complaints, and confidential communications are equally arrested; and only furnish to the Superiors of the establishment, artifices to thwart the Seniors, to entangle the Juniors, and effectually to cajole both parties. Consequently, it generally happens, that from one term to another, little or no intercourse exists between the youth and her relatives; and it is indubitable, that where any letters do nominally pass between them, they are forgeries; the real letters being surreptitiously detained. Those felonious regulations furnish ample scope for the initiation of girls just entering upon womanhood, into all the wickedness of the Nunnery; while the girls themselves are unconscious of the design, and the Nuns, those nefarious artificers of the iniquity, in subserviency to the Priests, in case of necessity, can exculpate themselves apparently from all participation in the treachery and crimes.
In the nunneries and conventual schools in the United States there is a sort of fairy land, talked about by the nuns to the elder girls. It is called the "Nuns' Island." That country is always described as an earthly paradise; and to girls who are manifestly fascinated by the witcheries of the nuns, and in whom moral sensibility has become blunted by the unmeaning superstitions which they witness, and which they mechanically perform, a visit to the "Nuns' Island," is always proposed as the greatest privilege, and the most costly reward, which can be given for constant obsequiousness to the nuns, and unreserved compliance with their requirements. The term "Nuns' Island," is thus used to express the nunneries in Canada, and probably some similar institutions in the United States, where they are not too difficult of access. At all events, girls just entering upon the character of women, after proper training, are finally gratified with a visit to the "Nuns' Island." They are taken to Montreal, and in the nunneries there are at once taught "the mystery of iniquity;" in all the living reality which Maria Monk describes. Those girls from the United States, who are represented as novices; in Maria Monk's "Awful Disclosures," were young ladies from the United States, who had been decoyed to visit the "Nuns' Island," and who, not being Papists, often were found very intractable; but posterior circumstances enforce the belief, that having found resistance vain, they had not returned to their school where they were duly qualified to continue the course into which they had been coerced, so as fully to elude all possibility of discovery and exposure. That mother who intrusts her daughter to a nunnery school, is chargeable with the high crime of openly conducting her into the chambers of pollution, and the path to irreligion, and the bottomless pit.
These combined circumstances satisfactorily prove that, the narrative of Maria Monk should be believed by all impartial persons; at least, until other evidence can be adduced, and the offer of exploring the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, by the New York Protestant Association, has been accepted and decided.
3. Additional evidence of the truth of Maria Monk's narrative is deduced from the exact conformity of the facts which she states concerning the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, when compared with the authoritative principles of the Jesuit Priesthood as recorded in their own duly sanctioned volumes. It is essential to remark, that of those books she knows nothing; that she has never seen one of them, and if she could grasp them, that they would impart no illumination to her mind, being in Latin; and yet in many momentous particulars, neither Lartigue nor any one of the Jesuit Priests now in Montreal, who was educated in France, could more minutely and accurately furnish an exposition or practical illustration of the atrocious themes, than Maria Monk has unconsciously done.
Maria Monk's "Awful Disclosures," are reducible to three classes: intolerable sensuality; diversified murder; and most scandalous mendacity: comprehending flagrant, and obdurate, and unceasing violations of the sixth, seventh, and ninth commandments.