THE INSPECTION OF NUNNERIES.
WE do not know a peculiarity in the British character which is more puzzling or unaccountable than its persistent malignity about Nunneries. We can understand an Italian being rather bitter about them, for he has been fighting the priests all his life, and he regards the convents of both sexes as their strong- holds, and he has been for centuries compelled to trust his children to their care; or a Frenchman, for he thinks woman's business is to charm men, and feels a vow of celibacy as in some sort an insult to his own powers of attraction ; or even a German of the South, for he has suffered from nuns. They reigned under the Concordat in Austrian hospitals, and worse nurses, more especially for women in childbirth, it would not be possible to find. But Englishmen have never been oppressed by nuns, and are not especially hostile to old maids, and as a race are not by any means morbidly prurient, and though hostile to the Papacy, think no particular evil of ordinary Catholics, yet their view of nunneries is certainly more malignant than that of any Continental people. They will believe anything about nuns, and the more unlikely the charge is, the more eagerly do they seize upon it. The notion that most nuns are very ordinary old maids, who solace extremely empty lives by performing religious ceremonies with great exactness, who sing psalms, and recite ayes, and worship the confessor, just as Protestant old maids go to church, and teach classes, and worship the clergy- man, seems absolutely incomprehensible to their minds. Catholic priests may be good men, possibly, though the mass of Englishmen never believe in their vow of continence, and consider the "priest's niece" an institution to be found in every Continental parish ; and monks are not specially hated except for their dress ; but about nuns Englishmen, for the most part, are implacable. They are all of them bad, except the Sisters of Mercy, who are usually excepted from condemnation, and who are good by an accident partaking of the nature of a miracle. All nuns are presumptively wicked, and every nunnery is as an institution more or less of a torture-cham- ber, a brothel, and a madhouse,—that, brutally expressed, is the immovable British faith. So intense is the belief, that ordinary Philistinism gives way before it, and the most prudish of races cir- culates and buys and approves of tracts which, if they were directed against the Haymarket instead of the Nunneries, he would pro- secute. Decent people, God-fearing people in their way, actually subscribe to publish things for merely offering which they would, in any other circumstances, punch the seller's head. As far as we can make out, there is a positive wish to believe evil of nunneries. The people are delighted with this Cracow scandal, so delighted that if the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Times, or Mr. Gladstone, or anybody they are accustomed to credit, were to say, what is probably the fact, that the case 'was an ordinary one of brutal cruelty to a monomaniac, —a kind of case which was the common- est of cruelties in England fifty years ago,—he would be set down as an ill-meaning fool, who did not understand nunneries, and had not the proper detestation of them. A man like Mr. Newdegate, for instance, a county member of the best kind, a man in many ways of decided ability and with a character which raises the credit of the House—a more upright or disinterested person pro - bably never lived—is quite capable of going into a wild rage with anybody who discredited the story of Barbara Ubryk, of founding a motion on it, of making a speech about it, in which he would show that the Cracow Nunnery was the ideal of nunneries, and that they were spreading in England faster than Trades' Unions.
Indeed, another county member, Sir Robert Anstruther, is going to found a motion upon it. He has given notice that he shall next session bring in a resolution demanding the inspection of Nunneries, the concrete form which English dislike of such retreats usually takes. We are by no means sure that, unless Government inter- feres pretty sharply, he will not carry his motion, for it is quite certain that if it were submitted to a plebiscite of the whole people, it would be carried by a majority of millions. The good
folks, to do them justice, are not prepared to prohibit nunneries altogether. To do that would be to interfere with religious liberty, and the one question on which the average Englishman prefers abstract principle to concrete expediency is religious liberty. He is not quite sure whether he would put down the Mormons, thinking it more correct, on the whole, to pelt Mormon devotees, lest there should be a precedent established for putting down somebody else with a more popular creed. But inspection !— that is a compromise which he cordially approves. It would not be exactly an oppression, but would be an insult, would precisely embody his own suspiciousness of nuns, and their works, and their ways, without inflicting bodily pain or enforcing any patent restriction upon religious freedom. Why, if everything is all right, he thinks, should the Catholics object to inspection, as the Tele- graph puts it, by an easy-going, courteous old gentleman, who would probably see as little as he could help, and never wink at anybody in a veil or without one ? Where is the oppression ?
The oppression is in the motive. No parent would object, though the schoolmistress might, to the inspection of his daughters' school with the view of ascertaining the extent of the girls' proficiency on the piano ; but suppose it were announced in Parliament and in every newspaper that the object was not that, but to ascertain if the young ladies were in the habit of having illicit babies or of torturing one another, what sort of a remon- strance should we have then ? Members would be torn to pieces in the lobby, and the press would groan under indignant letters fromhalf the mothers in the kingdom, while the whole country would go into a conspiracy to defeat the law. It is very difficult to analyze the exact meaning of a spite which has lasted centuries, and has its root in history, particularly when that spite is varnished over with religious phrases ; but we believe that the present generation desire an inspection of nunneries, to speak with the needful plainness, because they imagine that the nuns do not always observe their vow of chastity,—that is always the charge in the libels,—and because they think nuns may be forcibly confined. The first charge is an exact measure of the unreasonableness of the whole cry. Suppose it absolutely true to any degree dirty imaginations can invent, and what argument is that for inspecting nunneries any more than private houses ? Why should nuns be specially prevented by the State from going wrong, when those who are not nuns are not prevented ? Since when has un- chastity in the unmarried been declared a legal offence, or where is the law for inspecting Essex cottages because illegal babies are very often found there ? We beg pardon of our Catholic fellow-countrymen for using such an argument, but it is really time to grapple fairly with the attack, and not nibble at it. As a matter of fact, we believe the suspicion to be in England absolutely baseless, as baseless as a similar suspicion about any other group of respectable, narrow-minded spinsters of mature age, and to originate in an absolutely different state of things occasionally revealed in Italy and Spain. Of course, in countries where girls take the veil at sixteen, where they are not in reality free agents, the convent being, in fact, a genteel mode of disposing of them, and where the vows are supported by law and opinion, there will be occasional scandals, just as there are scandals every now and then in girls' schools and private households. Where nuns are chosen, so to speak, by lot, there will be bad nuns and good nuns. The tendency of convent life, with its minute espionage, an espionage carried on by the aged or middle-aged, with its severe rules and incessant references to divine approval and vengeance, is not towards such scandals, but rather towards small basenesses and harduesses of heart, but still no doubt scandals may occur. But in England, where a convent is not a provision, where no girl need take the veil if she does not like, and where every nun is absolutely free by law to call the nearest cab and go to seek an engagement as ballet- dancer if she pleases, the chance of any such scandal is very remote, quite as remote as in any girls' school with a handsome master to teach singing or gymnastics. With all Protestant England for detectives, there has not been a good case of this kind established against the nuns ; and if there had been, what would it have proved ? That a woman in a convent can be frail, like a woman out of a convent, an assertion certainly not strange enough or horrible enough to be the ground of a special law which by no possibility could prevent such frailty in the slightest degree.
But nuns may be "incarcerated,"—that is, we believe, the regular phrase,—without anybody knowing? Why may they, any more than in schools or private houses? Of course, it is possible in all of them, —we have had astounding instances of such things in strictly Protestant households,—but why is it exceptionally possi- ble in Nunneries? English convents are neither palaces, like those of Austria, nor little cities, like those of Belgium, nor even houses walled in by public sentiment, like the convents of Ire- land. On the contrary, they are private houses, in frequented places, watched by a hostile population with a never-dying wish to discover something wrong, and deriving all supplies from Pro- testant butchers, bakers, greengrocers, and candlemakers. How in the world is a nun to be locked up in such places against her will, so locked up that she can neither get out, nor send a letter, nor scream ? There is a nunnery in sight as we write, the most suspicious nunnery in London, with high wall, big gates, large garden, and air of utter seclusion ; but we venture to say that if any young woman in the house with decent lungs took it into her head to scream for thirty seconds, it would take a regi- ment of the Guards to protect the place from the people. North London would be surging round the building in five minutes, and in a temper to shed blood. To Hay that the nuns have no power of imprisonment not possessed by any other group of respectable spinsters, say, for example, the ladies managing an orphanage, is to. say nothing. They have infinitely less, for they live amid a popu- lation which only needs a hint to believe them guilty of all the crimes under the sun, to find any amount of money for prosecu- tions, to set every detective engine in full hunt for corroborative testimony. The poor women would not have a chance with the jury, unless some of the fathers of the children they teach so welt sat on it ; and as for evidence, it would not be wanting if the charge were witchcraft. The notion of houses so situated, inhabited by persons so unpopular, and physically so powerless, being used as prisons is absurd, and but for the English hatred of nunneries would be seen to be absurd without discussion, even if they were not filled with Englishwomen. Why they, in par- ticular, the most stiff-necked and lawyerlike of all human beings, with a positive abhorrence of cruelty, should be considered likely to. change their whole natures because they are Catholics and devoted to religious duties, should be believed willing to submit to oppres- sion, and torture, and confinement, is, we confess, a superstition beyond our power of analysis. All we can say is, that if it were so, English Abbesses, or Superintendents, or Mothers, or whatever they may be called, would have much easier lives.
Previous page
