The Awful Anti-Catholicism of Maria Monk

The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was one of 19th century America’s best sellers. It sold 300,000 copies before the Civil War. It belongs to a particular genre, that of the “escaped nun.” In his highly recommended book, American Catholic, Charles Morris writes:

The tales follow a consistent pattern: An innocent young girl, full of love for Christ, decides to enter a convent to dedicate her life to God. Her first days at the convent and her novitiate proceed as expected. She is dutiful and prayerful, although her superiors seem stern and cold. But there are mysterious doors she may not enter, ceremonies she may not attend, unexplained footfalls in the night, until she finally becomes a nun and the full horrors of the cloister are revealed.

Maria Monk claimed that she then found out her real duty was to slake the lust of monks and priests who came through a tunnel each night from the nearby monastery. Numerous babies were born in the convent (she is shown in the book’s frontispiece holding her baby), and the older nuns make a ceremony of baptizing and smothering them (to make sure they were “at once admitted into heaven”), then tossing the corpses into a lime pit in the basement. When a nun protested against the execution of her baby, she was tried and sentenced to death by the bishop. She was then tied between two mattresses, and a whole crowd of nuns and priests jumped up and down on her till she died.

The story was actually written by a minister, and the whole thing was a hoax. Maria was never a nun, but she had a child she claimed was fathered by an ex-priest. Eventually the hype died down, and Maria faded into obscurity. She became an alcoholic and a prostitute, and was arrested for picking pockets in a New York bordello. In 1849 she died in prison.