SHOCKING CRUELTY.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2090, 4 November 1880, Page 3

SHOCKING CRUELTY.

An appalling act of cruelty is reported from Pontremoli, in Italy. It appears that a female lay (errant, employed in the Carmelite convent of that name, had baea detected in the act of stealing some bread, the property of the sisterhood, and that for this offence she was tried before an impromptu tribunal, consisting of the abbess and two of the senior nuns. Pronounced guilty, the sentence passed upon her by these pious ladies condemned her “to undergo the torments of purgatory.” At once self-constituted judges and executioners, the abbess and her reverend coadjutors proceeded forthwith to enforce their barbarous sentence in the following manner. Having conveyed their victim to a cell in which an iron stove stood out from the wall, they caused the stove to be heated in her presence, and then, tying her hands tightly together behind her back, held her face down for several minutes close to the surface of the glowing metal. Her struggles and heartrending entreaties for mercy were of no avail. The aidless nuns, deaf to her outcries, protracted !ier martyrdom until her scorched eyes had lost their sight for ever, and her whole face was converted into one huge blister. So profound was the horror generated throughout the sisterhood by this unheard-of torture, that its perpetrators, despite conventual discipline, were denounced by several members of the community to the local authorities, who, after instituting a searching inquiry into the circumstances of the case, have consigned the abbess and her confederate tormentors to prison, where they are now awaiting their trial.