Anti-Catholic lecture advertisement   Save
Ohio History Connection Archives/Library
Description: This broadside advertises a free lecture by the Rev. J. G. White that promises to expose a papal conspiracy and reveal startling "facts" about the Catholic Church. The broadside also advertises another lecture, presumably for a fee, after the free lecture, for "men only." During the latter lecture, White will discuss the "secret abominations in the confessional." The advertisement refers to a belief that priests molested women in the confessional. The lecturer also hopes to sell copies of his anti-Catholic publications. This broadside represents another aspect of anti-Catholic thought in the 19th century. It plays upon the fears and desires of Protestant Americans to sell books by purporting to reveal sexual abuses within the Roman Catholic Church. These calumnies were most commonly expressed in relation to nunneries, in a genre of tell-all fictions such as "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk," first published in 1836, which detailed the sexual persecution of an innocent girl in a convent by the priests. View on Ohio Memory.
Image ID: OVS1824
Subjects: Anti-Catholicism; Religion in Ohio; Anti-immigration movement;
Places: Ohio History Connection Archives/Library