Bless the Nuns and the Children
Amanda B Reckondwyth
Shipmate
in Hell
Not sure if Hell is the right place for this, but hosts will move it if necessary.
In the old days, when nuns ruled the Catholic schools, children were subjected to a variety of practices of which I'm not sure Jesus would approve. For example:
At the Sunday Children's Mass, at the conclusion of Mass Sister Principal would click a clicker, or sometimes rattle a crotalus, at which everyone was expected to genuflect in unison before leaving church.
In the local Catholic high school, the hem of the skirts of girls' uniforms had to be no more than 14" from the floor. Sister Principal would regularly line girls up and measure their skirts with a yardstick.
My Sunday school class was on the third floor of the school. Each day when class was dismissed, we were instructed to say out loud "My Jesus, mercy!" as we walked down each step. The result of this, Sister said, was that when we reached the ground floor we would each have freed one poor soul from Purgatory. And Sister was listening!
What similar practices do you recall your nuns indulging in?
In the old days, when nuns ruled the Catholic schools, children were subjected to a variety of practices of which I'm not sure Jesus would approve. For example:
At the Sunday Children's Mass, at the conclusion of Mass Sister Principal would click a clicker, or sometimes rattle a crotalus, at which everyone was expected to genuflect in unison before leaving church.
In the local Catholic high school, the hem of the skirts of girls' uniforms had to be no more than 14" from the floor. Sister Principal would regularly line girls up and measure their skirts with a yardstick.
My Sunday school class was on the third floor of the school. Each day when class was dismissed, we were instructed to say out loud "My Jesus, mercy!" as we walked down each step. The result of this, Sister said, was that when we reached the ground floor we would each have freed one poor soul from Purgatory. And Sister was listening!
What similar practices do you recall your nuns indulging in?
Comments
When bedtime rolled around, the nun barked to my sister and I that it was time to head upstairs, while turning to the outsider and ostentatiously asking her in the friendliest way possible: "Would you like to stay up and watch TV with me?"
Years later, my mom and I were at a local mall near the nun's convent, and while I was off wandering in a toy shop or something, my mom, who knew my sentiments on the person in question, tracked me down and said "Sister ******* is at the restaurant down the way, and I've been chatting with her. Do you want to come and say hello?" I unhesitatingly said no, thus forcing my mom to go back and inform the nun that I had absolutely no desire to interact with her.
One morning the nun, who thought I was just so pious and precocious and said so on an ongoing basis, told me to go upstairs and see if the priest was still speaking. After doing so, I returned to the basement and reported, quote unquote: "The guy's still talking", only to receive a shocked lecture on why you shouldn't refer to such a holy man as a "guy".
Granted, I can see a legitimate concern with curtailing over-familiar address and nomenclature, especially given that the nun likely knew the man quite well whereas I didn't know him at all. But looking back there wasn't really any good purpose to referencing his alleged career-based status as a spiritually exalted individual. I have no reason to think the nun was consciously doing anything more sinister than enforcing her understanding of proper deference, but obviously such attitudes, taken in the global aggregate, can have a dangerous impact on numerous Church sectors.
(I've sometimes wondered if the presence of such person-olatrous devotion in respective shacks waxes and wanes according to position on the candle. I'm assuming my story could not have taken place at a traditional[at least as popularly perceived] Quaker meeting, but could it happen in, mutatis mutandis, a Free Kirk Sunday School? One tends to assume they would take a more warts-and-all-approach to clerical reverence and confine the lecture to "That's not how you should talk about adults, Stetson", but I really don't know.)
Just to clarify...
You didn't have a watch, but for the sake of your image, you looked at your wrist as if you had a watch and then the nun got angry at your deception?
Or did you just randomly look at your wrist, and the nun misinterpreted your gesture as a deception, and got angry?
Nothing to do with my 'image', and the nun did not become angry, simply asked someone else in the class. But all my class-mates were amused.
Okay, thanks. I wasn't sure in what way you meant you'd been shamed.
The American sisters were very much of the fire-and-brimstone type and we regularly did air raid drill in the convent basement (the Communists were coming). To be fair this was the late 50s and the closing years of MCCarthyism. At least they didn’t hit us but they did do public shaming quite well. The Good Shepherd sisters were mostly English and Irish missionaries and were much kinder than the few ( and mostly ferocious Singaporean lay teachers,who yelled at us like barrack-room sergeants and also did public humiliation with some style. I did feel for the Chinese girls for whom loss of face was terrible. At least half the kids were Hindu (Indian) or Buddhist/ Confucianist) and I don’t recall any pressure on them to convert. They did “ethics” while we little Catholics were catechised, though I recall a nun exhorting us to pray for the “ little pagan children” as she reminded us slackers how much better behaved & diligent said pagans were ( she waa right, of course).
The Presentation sisters were an orginally-Irish congregation. They were tough and handy with the cane but very effective teachers. In those days in Oz the boys went off to the local Brothers school so 5th & 6th grade girls were taught in composite classes ( 60 to a room) with an invisible barrier between the 2 classes; one group did “silent work” while the other class was formally taught. I reckon I learned most of the 6th grade curriculum by osmosis as a 5th grader.
The gulag was quite something else: back in 1965 there were 200 of us boarders and a community of 50 enclosed religious ( including postulants and novices,and elderly retired nuns) still in the 1800 habit. We were constantly watched from up at 6-30 till bed abou 9, and a nun slept in each dormitory so no talking. Mass every morning and marched in “ ranks” everywhere, genuflected on cue to the clack of the “cricket” ( modified castanet, usually wielded by the Mistress of Discipline) who radiated passive aggression.
We were constantly watched by nuns & prefects alike: the latter wore silk sashes across their burgeoning bosoms ( rather like a deacon’s stole) and nuns carried little books where your name could be recorded of caught whispering in study time, “wasting time” being untidy in dress, bed poorly made, or terrible handwriting/ inkblots. We were expected to learn and use the Frenchified handwriting and unlearn standard cursive script learned elsewhere (epic fail for me). We weren’t physically chastised but they practised piblic humiliation at Weekly Notes ( after Sunday Mass) when each individual would have her status publicly proclaimed by the Mistress General to wit: Very Good, Good ( with minor infraction read to all) Fair ( bordering on bad) and Unsatisfactory ( hanging offence). The worst offenders were usually in solitary in the infirmary and were not mentioned (passed over). It was a brutal regime, not surprisingly as the foundress had been educated by her Jansenist priest-brother in the post Revolution years in France. They had nothing to learn from either the Committee of Public Safety or the Stalinist gulags.
In my teens the youth club regularly stayed with a community of Anglican nuns in St David's, Pembrokeshire, and they were delightful. The only complaint - they used nylon sheets which were dreadful. Other than that, we had a whale of a time. One nun in particular was game for anything, including hitching up her habit so she could go for a spin riding pillion on a motorbike.
Later on, I got to know the nuns of the Community of the Holy Name, and they too were wonderful.
A lot of water has gone under the post-V2 bridge. Being now 74 most of those I knew are long gone. However the largely male-governed triumphalist model ( still beloved of trads and trids) is as dead as the dodo.
The only Anglican sisters I’ve ever met in Oz were the Sisters of the Church. When I was at uni in the 70s there were a handful left who lived in a cottage near Sydney Uni. When I sang at CCSL ( AC shrine church in early 2000s there were 2 left who used to attend for Solemn and Awful Occasions. They ran a girls’ school in Waverley ( eastern Sydney burbs) till late 60s; I was amused to find that St Gabriel’s was next door to the Chritian Bros school which my atheistical spouse attended 1964-9.
Sic transit gloria etc
At Sunday Children's Mass we sat with our classmates, with Sister Teacher at the end of the pew. The Children's Mass was generally taken by a certain supply priest -- I think he was a Franciscan -- who was very good with children. His sermons were usually a question-and-answer fest that we listened to with rapt attention, eager to put our hands up to answer his questions. This drove the nuns batty. "Put your hands down!" they would hiss. "Don't answer him!"
The priest got even with them, though. One Halloween he was speaking about its origins as the Eve of All Saints, and how the custom of giving candy to appease the spirits of the dead came about. "Now if you're going out tonight to get candy," he said, "be sure to ring the doorbell at the convent. The nuns will be ready to give you all the candy you want."
I wonder how many times the convent doorbell rang that night.
She had all the grim qualities described so far it seems only there's a change of tone and tack at the end as he remembers the Sister being caught off guard by the sight of a beatific five-year old. 'Oh, how beautiful!'
Sister Edith Margaret of CHN is my great-aunt
What's black and white and hits people with sticks?