The Council of Trent in 1563 proclaimed an excommunication on everybody who constrained any female to become a novice and to make profession in any convent. At the time there was little need for such a law in Poland, where the nobility for about a hundred years had thought it a shame to have a nun in their family. However, about 1570 there started among Polish young women a tide of vocations, and their determination, added to the Catholic reform of the Church, after two or three decades changed the climate. The nobles started to found new convents and they no longer opposed their daughters’ entering. With this change there returned the mediaeval (though already lawless) idea of “offering” children to God by making them enter convents without asking their consent. In my files of the Polish nuns of that period I found 25 cases of constraint actually being used. They all range from 1580 to 1680; afterwards (and especially in mid-18th century, Age of the so-called Enlightenment) the idea seems to disappear altogether. Even so the last five cases were not motivated by “piety” but by the wish to get rid of a family trouble, a sick or unloved child. In ten cases the oblation finally was not made; either the family changed their mind or the candidate said “no” when asked by the Church authorities (as all had to be asked under the post-Tridentine law) about her own free will. Probably there were more cases of a failed oblation apart of the known ones, because a girl who was a candidate but finally did not join, only rarely came to be mentioned in the convent register at all. There are however also cases of the family changing their mind but the candidate staying in the convent against their decision. In some cases also the girl consented freely to become a nun, when told to by her parents; so that there was in fact no constraint. Altogether there are only three cases known of girls entering a convent under pressure and staying there.