Religious Sexual Perversion in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Literature

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, perversion and its assorted manifestations was used in propaganda directed against the Roman Catholic Church. This was not a new phenomena² but it reached almost hysterical proportions due to the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and resulted in English Protestants describing Roman Catholics as ‘perverts’. Convents were depicted as prisons, brothels and madhouses and were regarded as the locus for all kinds of perversions, sexual perversions in particular. The term ‘pervert’ was used in the context of the ‘pervert’ being led astray from ’true’ religion, and applied to Protestants who converted to the Catholic faith but it carried with it overtones of sexual misconduct. It is therefore not surprising to find accusations that Roman Catholics were indulging in perverted and immoral sexual practices. The main perpetrators of these acts were priests and nuns, a section of society who led secretive lives, which lay them open to suspicion. Sometimes these perversions involved the laity, usually young, innocent girls, and sometimes perversions were hidden behind the convent or seminary wall. Some of these accounts were pure fiction; others purported to be ‘true’ facts. They came in different guises — in novels, in Protestant revelations, nuns’ ‘memoirs’, ex-monks’ exposés and confessional tales, which all fitted into a sub-genre of anti-Catholic literature.

I saw the wicked evil priest I met at the confessional.

Who told me that my eyes were glistening stars

And that he loved me more than sacred things.

And spoke with blasphemous tongue of holy saints,

And said the virgin’s eyes were dull to mine

And wrung my hands with his greedy palms.¹