A Bone Filled Catholicism: Protestant Imaginations and Catholic Revelations of Captivity and Abuse in 19th Century Anti-Catholic Literature

The Catholic church in the 19th century Protestant imagination was one in which women were held captive in convents and sexually abused by priests and children born from assault were baptized, killed, and cast into pits under the church. For almost a century, Catholic studies has turned to these narratives as evidence of Anglo-Americans’ anti-Catholic sentiments. However, recent revelations about the activities of the Catholic church, namely increased scholarship on and awareness of the horrors Native boarding schools, Magdalene laundries, and clerical sexual abuse, reveal the reality of many anti-Catholic narratives. This paper returns to anti-Catholic literature as a source of both the Protestant imagination of Catholicism and a revelation about the historical experience of Catholicism in North America, putting these fictional accounts in conversation with the experiences held captive and abused at Catholic-run Native boarding schools and Magdalene laundries in the 19th century.