“Are You Allowed to Read the Bible in a Convent?”: Protestant Perspectives on the Catholic Approach to Scripture in Convent Narratives, 1830–1860

“Among the instructions given to us by the priests, some of the most pointed were directed against the … Bible. They often enlarged upon the evil tendency of that book, and told us that but for it many a soul condemned to hell, and suffering eternal punishment, might have been in happiness.”

—Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Convent of Montreal (1836)

Introduction

In January of 1836 the shocking story of a runaway nun from a Canadian convent came off the press. Within weeks of its publication, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal sold over 20,000 copies in the United States. By 1860, sales surpassed 300,000, making Monk’s book second in sales only to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War.¹ The lurid details filling its pages dramatically altered the way Americans viewed nuns and convent life. Although rumors of women confined in convents helped to ignite the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts two years before,² nothing had prepared the public for Maria Monk.

The book led readers through a labyrinthine nightmare of infanticide, rape, “criminal intercourse,” cold-hearted murders, vivid scenes of torture, extreme isolation, and dark intrigue. Although investigators revealed Monk as an impostor who had really lived in a Canadian Magdalen asylum for the rehabilitation of prostitutes, and never spent time in a convent, her story haunted the American public, which became increasingly suspicious of and intrigued by convent life. By the early 1850s several state governments enacted formal convent inspection laws and debated banning monastic institutions in the U.S. altogether. Throughout the era, to indulge the public’s fascination with the subject, major publishers churned out a wave of other convent narratives with similar plots, characters, and accusations, making the convent exposé a genre in its own right.

In these narratives, otherwise filled with scenes of abduction, confinement, and torture, the alleged absence of the Bible in convents served to condemn vowed religious life as much as any other indictment. Rebecca Reed, whose Six Months in a Convent, appeared a year before Maria Monk’s work, attested to never seeing the Bible while residing at the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, and that the priests and mother superior always denied her requests for one. The Bible’s absence remained a common theme throughout the ensuing convent narratives.³ Josephine Bunkley, an “escaped nun” from Bardstown, Kentucky, averred that convent schools worked to “estrange the hearts of the children from their Bibles.” Sister Agnes (1854), a convent narrative published first in London, England before becoming a sensation in the United States, described a woman being beaten “by a big stick” for “reading the word of God.”⁴ Whether highly sensational or mild in tone, and whether they focused on the lives of escaped nuns or Protestant pupils in convent schools, convent narratives unanimously attested to the belief that the Bible had no place in the convent.

The Bible played a consistent role in convent literature, as important as the nuns and priests themselves.⁵ Filled with embedded meaning for nineteenth-century readers, the Bible served to demarcate true religion from false, “Bible-Christians” from corrupted traditions. In an atmosphere in which public spokespersons repeatedly referred to the Bible to condemn or condone, appeals to the Bible carried great weight. The escaped nun tales at once accused convent residents of being ignorant and opposed to the Bible, argued that convent life and Catholicism were un-Biblical, and presented the Bible as integral to family devotions and domesticity as opposed to religious life and celibacy. While heroic male Protestants often rescued women from the confines of convents in these narratives, the Bible ultimately provided refuge in distress and liberation from tyranny for the female captives.

Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures (London, 1836)

Scholars began seriously examining the convent narratives in the 1930s. Focusing mostly on Maria Monk and the controversy following the publication of Awful Disclosures...