Subject: THE Pope—Foe of Mankind. Part VIII. Nuns and nunneries organized foes of free white labor.

The Catholic Union and Times, of Buffalo, N. Y., March 30, 1913, devotes more than half a column to tell how the “Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul” train the pupils of St. Vincent’s Technical School, Main and Eiley Streets, Buffalo. This school is devoted to the training of young girls deprived of their parents and obliged to find a trade for self-support. ” Every year there is,” we are told, “graduated a class of young girls who are adepts in either dress-making, fine white work, or millinery.” “All Buffalo” is this week viewing the springtime showing of “the school’s work in gowns, millinery, and white goods.”

Do the makers of this admirable “convent” work get any pecuniary compensation whatever from its sale? Not one cent. The receipts all go to the nun’s spacious coffers, from which prelate and priest get their “rake-off.” A fetching bridal costume, sure to bring the charitable nuns a big figure, is described at length. And other work brings in to nunnish treasury revenue in proportion.

Says the Catholic Union and Times, March 30, 1913, the writer, evidently, a master hand in describing women’s apparel:

The soft white meteor crepe train is richly embroidered, the work of the school, and the same exquisite needlework is shown in graceful effect, arranged diagonally, across the front of the skirt. The bridal figure seems to be holding a reception, and her guests wear equally handsome gowns in dainty colored fabrics. The school designs its gowns from New York and Paris models as shown in the books of these dress centers.

Perhaps the most unique figure is one wearing the famous “Mademoiselle Maggie’ ‘ gown. The French girl with the English name is a veritable “find” in the art world of Paris. She makes her designs in her studio, working out each gown as a picture, then paints her trailing roses or violets over the filmy fabrics. Above the mantel of the school’s show-room are two framed pictures showing Mademoiselle Maggie at work. St. Vincent’s clever workers have made a gown similar. It is garlanded with hand-painted roses both on tunic and bodice, and the distinctive touch of Paris is given in the bird of Paradise perched on shoulder and at the looping of the skirt. Birds and fruit have supplemented ribbon and flowers as a decoration this season.

A superb opera cloak of biscuit-colored broadcloth and lined with a coral-hued silk is a fit wrap for the exquisite gowns. On this wrap there is a touch of the Bulgarian colors in the rich velvet of many tones and colors which edges the deep collar at the back. Many of the gowns have the Bulgarian colors introduced with splendid effect, In this same room are shown dressy street and afternoon costumes and separate waists, artistically fashioned, for wearing with tailor suits.

Across the hall is the millinery department, where all the newest shapes nattily trimmed are displayed. And when these white-bonneted sisters, whose headgear never changes, winter or summer, year in and year out, holds in her hand one of the dainty bits of straw and descants on its smartness and style, the visitor must surely realize the meaning of ” being in the world yet not of it.”

Pretty wash gowns for little folk are shown in another apartment. The wee gowns are made in muslin, gingham, pique and distinctive mark of style and excellent workmanship. In this same room is a line of piece-gowns for schoolgirls and women. They are in pique and tub silks and various muslins, and all most attractive in design. Nor are the very little ones omitted, for the making of dainty white wear for babies has always been characteristic of St. Vincent’s School. Besides being the showroom of the children’s and grown-ups’ cotton gowns, it is the dry-goods’ counter for the house. Here are sold a choice assortment of laces, ribbons, and the various frivolous accessories which help to make feminine wear so attractive looking. On the glass showcase lie books of samples from which patrons may select exclusive fabrics to be purchased in New York or abroad.

The graduating class of the school are the fitters of the dressmaking department. Every year a large number receive diplomas, and it is left to individual choice whether a pupil will start for herself outside or remain with the school. If she prefers the latter, as many do, she receives the same rate per day as her skill would earn elsewhere. Trained under the careful and efficient eye of the sisters, the girls of St. Vincents Technical School are always in demand. But there is something more, for what convent-taught woman but bears upon her character the stamp of the gentle mentors who taught her the beauty of faith and strength of good morals.

The nuns, who own everything made^by these poor girls, having nothing to pay for labor, and little if anything for material, for they beg it of large dry-goods firms or of private persons, compete directly with sewing girls and with poor seamstresses all over Buffalo. Girls are forced to accept small pay everywhere because of nunnish competition. If, on account of poor and inadequate pay, they sometimes take to the street, responsibility rests on nuns, but, above all, their priestly and prelatic bosses. Enemies, systematic, studious, and tireless, of free white labor, organized or unorganized, are priests and nuns — in one word, the hellish Romish System.

The “professed” nuns, as a rule, do not work. They superintend, living like princesses, many having no faith whatever in the religious creed and practices they profess. Convent chaplains are often drunken, nearly always lascivious, priests. The poor detained white pauper or erring girl toils for the support in luxury of lazy nuns and lazier chaplains, as well as other spiritual guardians.

The nuns give at frequent intervals swell dinner parties to bishops and other Church dignitaries. At these Lucullus-like repasts wines, rarest and costliest, paid for by the sweat of white slaves, with viands of most delicate flavor turned out of cuisines the most modern and best appointed, are laid before clerical epicures.

Not a whisper of gratitude from brutish prelate or priest to poor girls laboring in season and out, just for clothing the most inferior and fare the commonest, that “holy fathers” may dine and wine to heart’s content! The visiting women to convent storerooms may admire the handiwork of these girls, but that brings no tangible results to laborers. As soon as any of these girls become incapacitated for work—by sickness or otherwise—she is turned adrift penniless. If she seeks admission to a Roman Catholic hospital, she is met at the door by greedy, voluptuous nun and told: “Nay, nay, we can’t receive you. You are fit subject for the city hospital.”

Nuns’ training schools are vestibules to the red light route.

Nunneries flourish wherever municipal government falls into the hands or under the political influence of Romanists. That the latter very frequently obtain control of flourishing American and Canadian municipalities, let the following testify :

Wednesday night, April 2d, will be Redberry Night at the Hotel Somerset.

This organization, which meets annually in the summer time at Old Orchard Beach, and the fame of which is world-wide, expects the reunion this year will be the greatest that it has ever had.

The committee of arrangements, headed by- Mayor Fitzgerald, has been at work for some weeks perfecting the program, and there is going to be something doing every minute of the time from 9 o’clock until 2. Talent from the various theaters have accepted invitations, and when the dancing in the hall is not going on the dancing and acting of the artists will be the diversion.

Some of the most prominent men in the politics of New England are connected with the club and expect to be present. Among them are Mayor

James O’Donnell, of Lowell; Mayor Scanlon, of Lawrence; Mayor Barry, of Cambridge; ex- Mayor O’Connell, of Worcester; ex-Mayor John P. Feeney, of Woburn ; ex-Mayor Guerin, of Montreal; the Hon. Richard Sullivan, the Hon. P. J. Kennedy, the Hon. W. F. McClellan, the Hon. M. J. Leary, the Hon. J. U. McNamara, and the Hon. A. T. Donovan.

James F. Barry, of Dorchester, is secretary of the committee, and judging from the reports received thus far the Somerset will be crowded to the limit. — Boston Republic, March 29, 1913.

All or nearly all of the above named mayors and ex-mayors are Romanists by profession: every one without an exception a Romanist by political practice.

Nunneries pay no taxes, but their properties are provided in almost every city of the land with gas or electric lamps; asphalt, granolithic, or board sidewalks; roadways surrounding the nunneries are constructed of the best material and maintained regardless of cost. “Nothing too good for the nuns,” motto and practice of the average American ward or city “boss.” Notable is it, however, that a nunnery property depreciates fearfully all surrounding houses and holdings!

Why do nunneries flourish? Because their political agents and allies are sleepless. The Michigan Catholic, March 30, 1913, tells of the expansiveness of one body of these co-workers with labor-degrading nuns and nunneries:

In a talk with a prominent local Knight of Columbus recently, we learned that there is an ever-increasing demand for membership into that worthy society. The local council is flourishing, the members take commendable pride in having one of the finest halls in the country, and councils have multiplied in number all over Michigan until the membership of each has become truly notable, and each council has devised original ways and means for promoting good works. We rejoice that the Knights are alive to their duty. Catholic literature has been widely circulated and Catholic lectures have been brought to the front through the energy of these ideal laymen. We suggested some time ago that the Knights take a stand against the foolish vaudeville, the socalled charity ball, and slot-machine appeals to the charitably-minded, and we have learned that our suggestions have met with the approval of several councils.

Why, again, do nunneries flourish? They are all the time taking in, never giving out money or property. A Montreal nunnish corporation, for instance:

The Grey Nuns of Montreal are building a new and complete establishment at the cost of about six million dollars.

It will contain an orphanage for girls, a school for boys, another for girls, and a home for old people. They will pay for this enlarged means of doing in the city of Montreal by the sale of some of their present property. — United Canada, April 5, 1913.

This nunnish “donation to charity” of six millions sounds well enough. But, first of all, where did the nuns get the millions, of which the six spoken of are small part indeed? Their original property in Montreal was the munificent grant of a popish French king, who devoted “the between times’ ‘ of busy relations with lewd women to atoning for his ‘ ‘ sins ‘ ‘ by making such grants to nuns and monks.

Then the British took Canada, but thought it to their interest to stand in well with the Papal Church, especially after “Uncle Sam” broke away from stupid King George III and his poorly forged claims of “taxation without representation.” Montreal has grown under British rule to be the first city of the Canadian Provinces. The Grey Nuns have done nothing to promote its growth, never paying a dollar of taxation for two hundred or more years. For every service rendered by the nuns to the sick or destitute they have exacted full pay from governments, provincial or municipal, or from the public direct, through the most improved and persistent forms of mendicancy.

They have been all along, and are to-day, the most deadly enemies of organized white labor. They use the labor of all their proteges who can work for direct corporate profit. Getting work out of hundreds of men and women, for nothing save their board, and that paid for by the public, the nuns undersell every competition in millinery goods, in tailored materials, in boots and shoes, and even in patent medicines.

The New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register tells, in its issue of March 29, 1913, of an infernally constructed system of nunnish White Slavery, which we may expect to see imported by Gibbons of Baltimore, or Prince “Billy” O’Connell of Boston, to the United States. The foreign Orders of nuns in the United States are almost past numbering. They are gatherers of gold for papal coffers and for cardinals’ private purses. They also provide for the sexual comforts of spiritual advisers.

So exacting and so porcine do some of the latter become that nuns in America are obliged to have “Cardinal Protectors” in Rome, to whom they can have recourse for protection against clerical lasciviousness going beyond bounds. “His Eminence” Cardinal Falconio, former Apostolic Delegate to America, is now drawing in the Eternal City heavy fees from various rich nunneries in this country for services as “Cardinal Protector.”

I invite civilized men of this twentieth century to read the following from the New York paper just referred to:

Reference has been made before (says the Catholic Herald) to the strange order of nuns which has its existence in the Old World, and which in Rome is called the “Sepolte Vive” (the Buried Alive). They are the Bernardines of Anglet, the Sisters of St. Bernard, and their Order is unquestionably the most rigorous Order for women in existence, closely resembling that of the Trappists. Far down in the southwest corner of France, on the borders of Spain, may be found the mother house, at the gate of which i$ a signboard praying all visitors to speak in a low tone.

The Order was founded in 1839 by the Abbe Cestac, of Bayonne, and though it has never received the entire approval of the pope on account of the severity of its discipline, he has never condemned it. The nuns of this little community actually build their own houses, workmen being only called in to put on the roof. At first they were mostly curious little huts made entirely of thatch. The floor was of sand, and the furniture consisted merely of a wooden chair and a bed made of branches, with a layer of straw or dried leaves. The buildings now are more substantial, as the thatched huts had to be abandoned on account of dampness.

They still, however, retain their thatched chapel, a quaint structure with sanded door and tiny windows, which let in a dim, religious light. When Queen Victoria visited Biarritz, in 1899, she visited the convent, and prayed in the little chapel. On the altar of the chapel stands a statue of Our Lady of Sorrows, which was given to the convent by the exiled Abbess of a Spanish convent in thanksgiving for the removal of the bann of exile.

The nuns fast constantly, and when they do eat their food consists of vegetables, dry bread, and three times a week a very little meat. The refectory is a long, narrow, whitewashed room, with thatched roof and no artificial flooring, merely the deep sand of the dunes. Each nun has her earthenware pitcher of water and a little drawer in the rough deal table, where she keeps her wooden shoes, fork and platter.

Every hour of the day is carefully mapped out, for the rules of the Order insist that not a moment shall be wasted. Each time the big clock of the monastery chimes the hour, every nun falls on her knees and spends a few moments in prayer.

Out in the field it is marvelous to see how well the oxen know those chimes. Directly they hear them they stop instinctively, starting on their way again the instant the sisters rise from their knees.

The garb of the nuns is white, of coarse flannel, with a long white veil arranged so as to almost conceal their faces. The veils are rendered the more striking by the great white cross affixed to the backs. Each nun wears rough wooden sabots, and round her neck a chain, to which is attached a huge cross. The Bernardines are famous for their exquisite sewing, and make a great many trousseaux, their work being in wide demand.

In the garden the silent nuns may be seen raking, hoeing, and weeding, never raising their eyes and never speaking. A rule of the Order is that all curiosity of these must be mortified. In connection with this it is related that when the Emperor of the French visited the convent in 1854 he asked to see the interior of a cell. The Abbe Cestac threw open the door of one, disclosing a nun seated on a wooden stool, at needlework, her back to the door. The Emperor asked to see her face.

“My child,” said the Abbe, “the Emperor and Empress are at the door and wish to see you.”

The nun turned at once toward them and threw back her hood, showing the most exquisite face of a young girl. A murmur escaped from every one. The Bernardine, however, remained absolutely unconcerned, with her hands crossed on her breast and her eyes on the ground.

Scattered about the garden are various shrines containing images of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, and on summer days the sisters come and sit near these with their needlework. Under a thatched shelter stands a beautiful group of Notre Dame de Pitie, which was presented by a lady who had lost every one she loved. Here the Bernardines often come to pray for the souls of the departed, while others saunter along the neighboring footpaths, wrapped in pious meditation and utterly oblivious of the great world outside.

The little thatched chapel serves as a place of worship for the Sceurs de Marie, another religious Order in the vicinity, as well as for the Bernardines themselves, who, faithful to their vow of solitude, have their portion divided off by a curtain, behind which they hear Mass. The only occasion on which the nuns open their lips to speak is at prayer. Even in their hour of recreation they are not allowed to speak or rest, but are always busy with their needles.

A long corridor, out of which opens their cells, is their only sitting-room, and a very cold one it must be in winter, for there are no fires whatsoever at Anglet. Around the walls there are a few pictures and statues, and everywhere one reads admonitory texts, such as, “If you remember your sins God will forget them ; if you forget them, He will remember them.”

The Bernardines have no fear of death. On the contrary, they long for it ; and it is said that none of them are long-lived. Altogether it is the strangest and most austere Order of nuns in the world.

Buried alive are these unfortunate nuns and others, save to lecherous priest and prelate, to whom doors of these living tombs are ever open, day and night.

Do Americans, believing in the right of all men and women to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, believe in any more “Buried Alive” Orders of nuns? Have they not too many such already? Will they not rise up like men, like men in France and in Latin America, to banish conventual White Slavery, “burying alive” institutions from a soil that ought to be sacred to freedom?

The independent citizenry of Pittsburgh is aroused, as the following resolutions of the Guardians of Liberty clearly demonstrate :

Whereas, The inquiry into the Pittsburgh, Pa., police department appropriations by city council developed the following facts at its meeting held January 31, 1913:

A—That girls are being committed by both city and county to sectarian institutions, irrespective of their personal religious preferences, and, as we believe, in direct conflict with law, which belief has later been confirmed by an opinion by the city attorney;

B—The city has been charged $5 per week for the keep of so-called offenders in said institutions, while the county is charged but $2.59 by the same institutions;

C—That, notwithstanding that the Home of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic institution, receives pay for keeping persons sent there, yet the investigation developed that some were confined therein without warrant of law for as long as one and one-half years, being employed in the laundry maintained by said institution, which does public laundry work for pay and uses the proceeds for the benefit of said Catholic Church,

Be it therefore resolved:

1—That General Warren Court, Guardians of Liberty, through its officers, commend the action of Councilman Robert Garland and others in making public these conditions.

2—We demand a more searching investigation, and if the above information be true, we demand as citizens that this method of commercializing religion and the amalgamation of Church and State shall immediately cease, and that city council and county officials take such action as is necessary.

3—We further demand that all church property used by any religious denomination for financial profit or gain, and especially the above named laundry, shall be required to pay taxes thereon.

4—We demand that all public or private reformatories, homes, houses of detention, or similar institutions shall be open to public inspection, and that the courts detail qualified officers to inspect same quarterly.

5—We demand that further commitments to sectarian institutions shall immediately cease, and request city council and county officials to take such action as will at once secure the release of any person or persons illegally detained therein.

Signed, Wm. S. Gkeene, Master Guardian.
H. L. Walker, Recorder.
[seal]

Bad, indescribably bad, as are conditions in the convents and prison houses of “Buried Alive’ ‘ nuns, they are heavenly compared with the satanic, sodomitic wickedness in many male monastic institutions, boys’ reformatories, protectories, and the like. I dare not defile my page with any detailed reference to the crimes against high heaven which make these institutions very outposts of hell, a blot on humanity, and a defiance of the Almighty.

Not surely of Americans anywhere should it be said, because of cowardly toleration of papal White Slavery:

Turning their faces to the Temple of Liberty, the Ark of God, builded by Washington, Lafayette, and Jefferson, all Americans should raise in sweetest symphony the hymn which so well expresses America’s heartfelt Christian hope:

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