Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery

This is certainly a strange story. I would like to know more about the fallout from this book. Was there an investigation of the nunneries in Montreal and Quebec? How did the public respond to this? It is obviously very believable. The characters she develops and the detail with which she describes the nunnery are so believable that they can only be written by an expert. But there are some things which, if I did not already know it was fiction, would have sounded alarms in my head. First, these are just normal people, not members of a cult and yet this seems to be what Monk describes. I don't believe that normal people could carry out the murder of a nun, by jumping on her for that matter, without serious moral qualms. Secondly, it's too derisive towards Catholics. Anything that is so strongly negative has to be questioned.

From an ethical standpoint this is horribly unethical. Mencken's fiction was a harmless experiment that uncovered some flaws in people. But this slander has the potential to do damage to the reputation of Catholics. We know that it was responsible for the burning of one nunnery.

Lastly, I don't think people would be as gullible towards this article as they were towards Mencken's. I think people have a pretty good ability to call out exaggeration and discredit it. Mencken's article slipped under the radar because his fabrication was harmless and presented without such high drama. This story, I think, wouldn't be as easily believed by readers simply because of the great exaggeration that takes place.