UNITED STATES
Waterloo Record
By Alex Good
The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
by Hubert Wolf (Knopf, 498 pages, $35 hardcover)
Long before the current landslide of reports of child sexual abuse became headline news, the Catholic Church was a hotbed of scandal.
Indeed, the link goes back as far as the dawn of the modern mass media, with prints of all the debaucheries going on behind cloistered walls making great propaganda material during the Reformation. Catholic-themed porn was off and running.
More recently, an entire sub-sub-genre of semi-mainstream Eurotrash films in the 1970s, dubbed “nunsploitation,” took convents as the setting for tales of sexual perversion. A notorious precursor was Ken Russell’s 1971 film “The Devils,” which even managed to get banned in many countries.
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