At the beginning of the 19th century, a book appeared in North America entitled The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. Lurid and shocking, it told the story of one Maria Monk who, after a Protestant upbringing near Montreal, entered a Canadian convent to be educated and become a nun. To her horror, she found the place a den of sin, with secret tunnels admitting priests to the convent for purposes whose results flowered in the strangling of unwanted babies, buried in lime pits. It was all very shocking and -- given the anti-Catholic nativism rife at the time --just what a particular section of the American public wanted to hear.
As the facts began to emerge, however, the truth appeared: Far from being a credible witness, Maria Monk was actually a mentally disturbed young woman who had spent time in a Canadian asylum, not convent. She had never been a religious postulant much less a nun, and her "disclosures" were not penned by her but by an anti-Catholic fundamentalist minister, who exploited her fantasies for his own bigoted agenda. Nonetheless, Maria Monk was ripe for the nativist propaganda machine. Her book sold 300,000 copies before the Civil War, a great many more afterward, and is still read in the dark recesses of anti-Catholic America.
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