Monk in the Middle: The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery and the Making of Catholic Identity

A re-examination of the influence of Maria Monk's purportedly autobiographical 1836 book, titled Awful Disclosures at the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, on the anti-Catholic American nativistic movement in pre-Civil War United States. Monk (1816-1849), born in Dorchester, now part of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, asserted she had been a nun at Montreal's Hotêl Dieu Convent and had been forced by her superior to kill a companion nun who refused to submit to the sexual demands of the priests at the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice. She also claimed that children born to the nuns as a result of the liaisons with the priests were immediately baptized and then strangled. Some 300,000 copies of Awful Disclosures were sold before Monk was discredited. The author argues that previous scholarship on the Monk episode has focused principally on anti-Catholic nativism in the United States and on the Awful Disclosures' place in the larger genre of antebellum convent tales. His study offers a new interpretation of the controversy surrounding Monk's book by demonstrating its usefulness for historians seeking to understand how American Catholics apprehended their position in that country. Catholics frequently used the Awful Disclosures to stake a claim as authentic Americans and often inverted anti-Catholic rhetoric to suit their political and social needs. Through their response to the Monk episode, Catholic leaders in the United States effectively redeployed anti-Catholic rhetoric to undermine the claims of Monk and her supporters, ultimately forging a distinctive form of Catholic anti-Protestantism and serving with their sectarian foes as partners, perhaps unwittingly, in a common antebellum project of defining and reasserting patriarchy.

American Catholic Studies

Vol. 125

no. 1

25-45

Spring 2014

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