Page:Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (Truslove & Bray).djvu/135

131 the Nunnery, the priests, from more, I presume, than a hundred country places, admitted for shameful and criminal purposes; from St. Charles, St. Denis, St Mark's, St.Antoine, Chambly, Berthier, St, John's, &c.

How unexpected to them will he the disclosures I make! Shut up in a place from which there has been thought to be but one way of egress, and that the passage to the grave, they considered themselves safe in perpetrating crimes in our presence, and in making victims would never reach the world for relief or redress us share in their criminality as often as they chose, and conducted more shamelessly than even the brutes.

These debauchées would come in without ceremony, concealing their names, both by night and day. Being within the walls of that prison-house of death, where the cries and pains of the injured innocence of their for their wrongs, without remorse or shame, they would glory, not only in sating their brutal passions, but even in torturing in the most barbarous manner, the feelings of those under their power; telling us at the same time, that this mortifying the flesh was religion, and pleasing to God. The more they could torture us, or make us violate our own feelings, the more pleasure they took in their unclean revelling; and all their brutal obscenity they called meritorious before God.

We were sometimes invited to put ourselves to voluntary sufferings in a variety of ways, not for a penance, but to show our devotion to God. A priest would sometimes say to us —

"Now, which of you have love enough for Jesus Christ to stick a pin through your cheeks?"

Some of us would signify our readiness, and immediately thrust one through up to the head. Sometimes he would propose that we should repeat the operation several times on the spot! and the cheeks of a number of the nuns would be bloody.

There were other acts occasionally proposed and