Awful Disclosures | Page 9

visited the Congregation Nunnery, and both catechised and talked with us on religion. The Superior of the Black Nunnery adjoining, also, occasionally came into the School, enlarged on the advantages we enjoyed in having such teachers, and dropped something now and then relating to her own Convent, calculated to make us entertain the highest ideas of it, and to make us sometimes think of the possibility of getting into it.
Among the instructions given us by the priests, some of the most pointed were those directed against the Protestant Bible. They often enlarged upon the evil tendency of that book, and told us that but for it many a soul now condemned to hell, and suffering eternal punishment, might have been in happiness. They could not say any thing in its favour: for that would be speaking against religion and against God. They warned us against it, and represented it as a thing very dangerous to our souls. In confirmation of this, they would repeat some of the answers taught us at catechism, a few of which I will here give. We had little catechisms ("Le Petit Catechism") put into our hands to study; but the priests soon began to teach us a new set of answers, which were not to be found in our books, and from some of which I received new ideas, and got, as I thought, important light on religious subjects, which confirmed me more and more in my belief in the Roman Catholic doctrines. These questions and answers I can still recall with tolerable accuracy, and some of them I will add here. I never have read them, as we were taught them only by word of mouth.
Question. "Pourquoi le bon Dieu n'a pas fait tous les commandemens?"
_R��ponse_. "Parce que l'homme n'est pas si fort qu'il peut garder tous ses commandemens."
Q. "Why did not God make all the commandments?"
A. "Because man is not strong enough to keep them."
And another. Q. "Pourquoi l'homme ne lit pas l'Evangile?"
R. "Parce que l'esprit de l'homme est trop born�� et trop fa?ble pour comprendre qu'est ce que Dieu a ��crit."
Q. "Why are men not to read the New Testament?"
A. "Because the mind of man is too limited and weak to understand what God has written."
These questions and answers are not to be found in the common catechisms in use in Montreal and other places where I have been, but all the children in the Congregational Nunnery were taught them, and many more not found in these books.


CHAPTER II.
CONGREGATIONAL NUNNERY.
Story told by a fellow Pupil against a Priest--Other Stories--Pretty Mary--Confess to Father Richards--My subsequent Confessions--Left the Congregational Nunnery.
There was a girl thirteen years old whom I knew in the School, who resided in the neighborhood of my mother, and with whom I had been familiar. She told me one day at school of the conduct of a priest with her at confession, at which I was astonished. It was of so criminal and shameful a nature, I could hardly believe it, and yet I had so much confidence that she spoke the truth, that I could not discredit it.
She was partly persuaded by the priest to believe that he could not sin, because he was a priest, and that anything he did to her would sanctify her; and yet she seemed doubtful how she should act. A priest, she had been told by him, is a holy man, and appointed to a holy office, and therefore what would be wicked in other men, could not be so in him. She told me that she had informed her mother of it, who expressed no anger nor disapprobation, but only enjoined it upon her not to speak of it; and remarked to her, that as priests were not like other men, but holy, and sent to instruct and save us, whatever they did was right.
I afterward confessed to the priest that I had heard the story, and had a penance to perform for indulging a sinful curiosity in making inquiries; and the girl had another for communicating it. I afterward learned that other children had been treated in the same manner, and also of similar proceedings in other places.
Indeed, it was not long before such language was used to me, and I well remember how my views of right and wrong were shaken by it. Another girl at the School, from a place above Montreal, called the Lac, told me the following story of what had occurred recently in that vicinity. A young squaw, called la Belle Marie,(pretty Mary,) had been seen going to confession at the house of the priest, who lived a little out of the village. La Belle Marie was afterwards missed, and her murdered body was found in the river. A knife was also found covered with blood, bearing the