THE
NUN'S
STORY
Those
fortified with enough caffeine to follow our presidential race,
may have noticed the frequent presence of a priest behind George
W. Bush since the primary season. Not so long ago, such an escort
would have been unthinkable in American politics—particularly
for a Republican candidate—but unfortunately the sudden appearance
of the clerical collar does not mean that the issue of an old
prejudice has been put to rest.
Indeed,
perhaps the biggest surprise of the 2000 campaign is that the
issue of anti-Catholicism has again raised its ugly head, in the
wake of the now infamous speech Governor Bush gave at South Carolina's
Bob Jones University. It wasn't so much what Mr. Bush said as
what he did not say—failing to excoriate the fundamentalist
president of Bob Jones for littering the internet with various
anti-Catholic tirades.
A
wounded Mr. Bush later voiced some regrets of his own, and protested
that he himself was in no way anti-Catholic. He pointed out that
both his father and Ronald Reagan had spoken at BJU without sparking
any protests—but the clerical collars soon began to pop up
anyway, as a sort of ecclesiastical insurance.
Governor
Bush had a valid point about his father and President Reagan,
albeit one that reflects more upon the dedication of our national
political reporters than anything else. Somehow, their speeches
at Bob Jones-or, for that matter, Reagan's notorious speech in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the 1980 campaign, in which
he failed to so much as mention the three civil rights workers
murdered there—never seemed to arouse anything like the media
ire directed toward, say, Jesse Jackson's panderings to the Nation
of Islam.
It
is true, too, that the whole issue of anti-Catholicism has produced
some splendid demagoguery in recent years. One need only recall
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's 1999 jeremiads against the Sensation
exhbition at the Brooklyn Museum, because it included a painting
of the Virgin Mary painted partly with elephant dung. Then there
were the vituperative attacks directed by Thomas Donovan and his
Catholic League against Terence McNally's 1997 play, "Corpus
Christi," before it had even opened. Too often, political
opportunists have used "anti-Catholic" for anyone who happens
to disagree with their particular brand of religion.
Unfortunately,
though, old prejudices—real prejudices—tend to be remarkably
resilient, capable of revivifying themselves in ways that are
often too subtle for us to grasp at first. For further proof,
one need only take a look at the remarkable bookcover reproduced
on this page. Awful Disclosures, by the pseudonymous Maria
Monk, is not simply another sweaty piece of contemporary pornography—but
a book that figured in some of the worst episodes of religious
persecution this country has ever witnessed.
"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 by the curvaceous "nun" on the
cover, Awful Disclosures will prove disappointing. Disobedient
nuns are repeatedly whipped, beaten, and gagged, and there are
plenty of Gothic flourishes, including a great many hidden rooms
and an order of "Black nuns"—but little that the modern reader
would consider explicitly salacious.
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-immmigrant 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 depradations, 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. The ersatz nun featured here is
on the cover of a paperback edition published no longer ago than
1997, by something called Senate—the imprint of no less a
publisher than Random House UK Ltd. It might be justifiable to
publish such a document as something of purely historical interest,
but as both the cover and an inside illustration of various whips
and chains make clear, the publisher's intentions are somewhat
less high-minded.
There
is, as well, an anonymous introduction to this edition that purports
to vouch for all of Maria Monk's "disclosures." The unwitting
reader is offered absurd "proofs" that "the truth contained in
this explosive book was undeniably confirmed" and fed the outright
lie that "...Maria Monk was able to corroborate her claims by
producing reliable witnesses. This show of good faith effectively
prevented the detractors from taking the matter further, and,
over the years, Maria Monk's story has been freed from any suggestion
of untruth."
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—or even
Bob Jones U.—will be able to do much damage to individual
Catholics or the Catholic Church in the forseeable 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 the mainstream booksellers,
Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. 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.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
