Six Months in a Convent is a memoir written by Rebecca Reed and published in 1835. It is an account of her stay at the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1832. The account was primarily written before, and published after, the 1834 Ursuline Convent riots, in which the facility was destroyed by rioting Protestants, and may have played a role in inspiring those riots. Reed was a witness at trials involving accused participants in the rioting.
Rebecca Reed was a young Episcopalian woman from Boston who had attended the school operated by the Ursulines in 1831 as a charity scholar: a day student for whom the convent waived tuition fees. In 1832, she declared her intent to enter the Ursuline novitiate, but left the convent after six months as a postulant (originally one who makes a request or demand, hence a candidate).
In the memoir, Reed described the convent as a prison, where young girls were forced into Roman Catholicism, with grotesque punishment for those who refused. This book, along with a growing number of propaganda magazines including the Christian Watchman and Boston Recorder , stoked the fires of anti-Catholicism in Boston and the surrounding area. [1]
Although not published until 1835, some versions of the manuscript apparently circulated among the primarily Protestant student community, and versions of it may have gained wider circulation in Charlestown. Some authors, including a former student at the school, have speculated that discussion of the manuscript may have contributed to the anti-Catholic sentiment which incited riots. [2] Reed's claims were alleged by the Ursulines to inspire riots that burned the convent.
Reed's narrative, released one year after the rioters were tried, sold 200,000 copies in one month. A response to its allegations was published by Mother Superior Mary St. George. [3]
Reed's book was soon followed by another bestselling supposed exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery , (1836) in which Maria Monk claimed that a convent in Montreal served as a harem for Catholic priests, and that any resulting children were murdered after baptism. The tale of Maria Monk was, in fact, clearly modeled on the Gothic novels popular in the early 19th century. This literary genre had already been used for anti-Catholic sentiments in works such as Matthew Lewis's The Monk .
Maria Monk was a Canadian woman whose book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836) claimed to expose systematic sexual abuse of nuns and infanticide of the resulting children by Catholic priests in her convent in Montreal. The book is considered by scholars to be an anti-Catholic hoax.
Lyman Beecher was a Presbyterian minister, and the father of 13 children, many of whom became writers or ministers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Beecher, Edward Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Catharine Beecher, and Thomas K. Beecher.
The Monk: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796. Written early in Lewis's career, it was published before he turned twenty. In one letter, he claimed to have written it in ten weeks, but other correspondence suggests that he had at least started it, or something similar, a couple of years earlier. It is a prime example of the type of Gothic that specializes in horror.
Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards Catholics and opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy, and its adherents. At various points after the Reformation, some majority-Protestant states, including England, Northern Ireland, Prussia, Scotland, and the United States, turned anti-Catholicism, opposition to the authority of Catholic clergy (anti-clericalism), opposition to the authority of the pope (anti-papalism), mockery of Catholic rituals, and opposition to Catholic adherents into major political themes and policies of religious discrimination and religious persecution. Major examples of groups that have targeted Catholics in recent history include Ulster loyalists in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the second Ku Klux Klan in the United States. The anti-Catholic sentiment which resulted from this trend frequently led to religious discrimination against Catholic communities and individuals and it occasionally led to the religious persecution of them. Historian John Wolffe identifies four types of anti-Catholicism: constitutional-national, theological, popular and socio-cultural.
The Ursuline Convent riots occurred August 11 and 12, 1834, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Boston, in what is now Somerville, Massachusetts. During the riot, a convent of Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns was burned down by a Protestant mob. The event was triggered by reported abuse of a member of the order, and was fueled by the rebirth of extreme anti-Catholic sentiment in antebellum New England.
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Benedict Joseph Fenwick was an American Catholic prelate, Jesuit, and educator who served as the Bishop of Boston from 1825 until his death in 1846. In 1843, he founded the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Prior to that, he was twice the president of Georgetown College and established several educational institutions in New York City and Boston.
John Thayer was the first native of New England ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Thayer was educated at Yale College and was a Protestant in his early life. He was ordained as a Congregationalist minister and served as a chaplain during the American Revolutionary War. While visiting Rome in 1783, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith, an act which caused a sensation in New England at the time. He credited his conversion to miracles attributed to the noted mendicant, Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, who lived and died there in that period.
The Broad Street Riot was a massive brawl that occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 11, 1837, between Irish Americans and Yankee firefighters. An estimated 800 people were involved in the actual fighting, with at least 10,000 spectators egging them on. Nearby homes were sacked and vandalized, and the occupants beaten. Many on both sides were seriously injured, but no immediate deaths resulted from the violence. After raging for hours, the riot was quelled when Mayor Samuel Eliot called in the state militia.
Edward Beecher was an American theologian, the son of Lyman Beecher and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher.
Anti-Catholicism in the United States concerns the anti-Catholic attitudes which were first brought to the Thirteen Colonies by Protestant European settlers, mostly composed of English Puritans, during the British colonization of North America. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society and they continued to exist during the following centuries. The first type, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the European wars of religion, consisted of the biblical Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon variety and it dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late 17th century. The second type was a variety which was partially derived from xenophobic, ethnocentric, nativist, and racist sentiments and distrust of increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria and Mexico. It usually focused on the pope's control of bishops, priests, and deacons.
Virgil Horace Barber was an American Jesuit.
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East Somerville is a neighborhood in the eastern part of the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, United States. The community stretches east along Broadway, from Massachusetts Route 28 to Sullivan Square and Interstate 93 on the city line with the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown.
Rebecca Theresa Reed (1813-1838) was an American escaped nun and author of the memoir Six Months in a Convent, which influenced the first of many anti-Catholic waves. Reed’s book vividly describes her experience in an Ursuline convent and has sold thousands of copies. Her writing inspired people like Maria Monk to speak out about their mistreatment in the Roman Catholic Church.