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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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