Vow of Silence

A Convent Home Run by Monsters and a Secret That Haunted Us for 50 Years

By: Suzanne Walsh

Narrated by: Deirdre O'Connell

Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

A convent children's home run by monsters. A heart-breaking family secret that haunted us for 50 years.

Suzanne suffered five heart attacks and made it through open heart surgery. But even that pales in comparison to the horrors she faced as a young girl.

Her childhood became the ‘stuff of nightmares’ after her father passed away and her mother, unable to get a job in Ireland, had to seek work in London. So ‘Mammy’ was forced into the heart-breaking decision to put Suzanne and her five siblings into church-run orphanages in Dublin while she worked away. It was just meant to be temporary.

Her life soon became a daily struggle to avoid beatings with canes and rosary beads. Suzanne and the other children worked from dawn until midnight, living on disgusting scraps of food, while the nuns dined on fresh fruit, meat and cakes that the ‘orphans’ had cooked for them. Suzanne tried her best to shield her younger sisters from the terror of these hateful ‘women of God’. But it was only the beginning of their troubles....

Eventually, their mother returned from London after four years with enough money to take her children out, and the family was reunited. However, too scared to speak out, the children vowed to take the horrors they had experienced at the orphanages to their graves.

What really happened behind those church doors? This is Suzanne's heart-breaking and touching story.

©2021 Suzanne Walsh (P)2021 Boldwood Books

Don’t turn against God for the failures of man.

Survivors can thrive after tragedy.
I believe there are special blessings for children who survived such cruelty at the hands of those who undoubtedly suffered the same. The lucky ones are those who hopefully were also surrounded by good, decent, loving people.
Nobody ever said life would be easy. It’s also what you make it.

The Ugly Face of Catholicism

This is a devastating tale of criminal malfeasance carried out against the most vulnerable in our society by cowards who had authority over the lives of helpless children.

It is said that the pope collapsed in tears when he read the third secret of Fatima early in the twentieth century. Catholics around the world feared that it contained ominous warnings of an impending World War III. I have grown more convinced over the years that this still-unrevealed secret foretells the crumbling of the Catholic Church from within, a conviction bolstered by Suzanne Walsh's revelations of the nasty nuns who ran Ireland's orphanages.

Extremely slow and quite boring.

While I certainly have sympathy for the hardships these poor children faced, I just don’t think it’s a particularly interesting story. As one of six children, brought up by Irish parents and a strict Catholic schooling, I can understand exactly how cruel the nuns and priests were back in the 1960’s and 70’s, even in America. This account of her childhood is 9 hours of eye rolling, repetitive chapters read in a droning manner without much in the way of inflection or character. Yes, these were terribly sad years she and her siblings endured - but perhaps it would have been better suited for a family journal than a novel. To me it was an eye rolling repetitive description of a childhood that basically sucked.
Sorry that this review sounds callous and unsympathetic, I just wish I had the chance to read one like it before I bought the book!