Holy Hell by Vyrse

A 1941 Franco law gave children of unknown parentage "the usual" names. For forty years, Catholic prisons, homes, clinics and a nun with "a good file" of adopters moved children away from their mothers, often on falsified papers. The 300,000 figure is a myth. The paperwork is not.

Read the full piece, with all 17 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-usual-names

On September 11, 1857, Mormon militiamen massacred ~120 emigrants they had disarmed under a white flag, sparing only children too young to testify — then blamed the Paiutes for a century. One man was ever punished, on his own coffin, at the site. The church's 2007 statement of "profound regret" still avoids one word.

Read the full piece, with all 11 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-meadow

John Paul II called him "an efficacious guide to youth." The Vatican's own communiqué, once he was safely dead, called his life "devoid of scruples." Marcial Maciel abused at least 60 boys by his order's own count, while accusations sat in Vatican mailboxes from 1978 — and the envelopes kept arriving.

Read the full piece, with all 10 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-founder

A toddler drowned in Trent in 1475. Seventeen Jews were tortured into confessing his "ritual murder"; thirteen were executed. The papal investigator found them innocent — Rome censured him, and later gave the invented martyr a feast day. The cult ran 490 years, until a notice in a diocesan bulletin ended it in 1965.

Read the full piece, with all 8 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/simonino

She had a seven-year medical file: temporal lobe epilepsy, confirmed by EEG, treatable. Her bishop authorized the Rite of Exorcism instead. Sixty-seven sessions later she weighed 68 pounds and was dead — and a German court convicted her parents and both priests of negligent homicide. The rite survives unchanged.

Read the full piece, with all 7 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-rite

In 1587 the pope made castration excommunicable. In 1589 the same pope hired four castrati for St Peter's. For three centuries the church bought the voices of boys cut at eight years old — each one legally required to claim a wild boar did it. The last of them made recordings. You can still listen.

Read the full piece, with all 10 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-voice-of-an-angel

A local historian bought 796 death certificates with her own money and found no graves. The state confirmed "significant quantities of human remains" in the chambers of a disused sewage system at a Catholic mother-and-baby home. The excavation began in 2025. It is recovering the children one by one.

Read the full piece, with all 10 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/significant-quantities

On July 22, 1209, a crusading army massacred the Catholic town of Béziers for sheltering 222 accused heretics. The famous quote is a legend no eyewitness recorded. The legate's own letter to the Pope is worse: "neither sex nor age," nearly twenty thousand claimed dead, reported as a miracle.

Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/kill-them-all

For 20 years America's largest Protestant denomination told abuse survivors that tracking predators was impossible. Its own commissioned investigation found the Executive Committee had been keeping a secret list the whole time: 703 names, guarded for the lawyers, never used to warn a single church.

Read the full piece, with all 3 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-list

In 1543 the father of the Reformation published a numbered program: burn the synagogues, raze the homes, seize the books, expel the people. In 1938 a Lutheran bishop celebrated Kristallnacht as its birthday fulfillment. At Nuremberg, a hanged propagandist called the book his precedent.

Read the full piece, with all 4 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/away-with-them