Things I learned in Catholic school, revised

     I was baptized into the Catholic church without my authorization. I was just an infant.

     I lived in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school until the 7^th grade.

     I can attest to the fact that there were life lessons I learned from Catholic school that have affected me my entire life.

1.  I learned very early on that the nuns (prison guards) were biased and didn’t give a damn if you knew it. This specific coven was called theOrder of the  Immaculate Heart of Mary. They taught me many skills that probably have made me the survivor I am today.

     I learned very early that one’s treatment by the nuns was based on their specific knowledge of your economic status in the Church. That, and a  snap decision, based on their first look at you, set the course for the rest of your academic life.

    They inventoried and banked the ‘offering’ envelopes that one put in the collection basket every Sunday.  Even children were expected to ‘offer’. One’s name was written on the envelope.  Not only did the nuns track who gave what, children were monitored in how much they donated and how often. One nun went so far as to put my and my classmates names on the chalkboard and every week, listed how much we’d put in the collection plate.

     You were treated accordingly. Thus, Maura F, a tiny mouse of a girl from a family of 12 children (hey. They were good Catholics) routinely was called out and publicly chastised by the nun for not putting anything in the collection basket. Her parents couldn’t afford it, but that made no difference to the nuns. Maura was a ‘dead beat’.

     The Cavanaughs, by contrast, were rich Irish. Colleen was praised for not only being Irish and beautiful, but her family put in money (I cannot remember, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was $20) which, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, was a lot of money. Colleen and her numerous siblings and cousins were treated like kings and queens. Those of us of northern European extraction-Poles, Germans, Italians (who were considered nothing more than oversexed animals), and the Eastern European countries, were treated like the offspring of the miserable, poverty stricken refugees we were.

     Thus I learned that money will get you further ahead than character.

2.  I learned discipline. This made joining the Army so much easier for me. I learned early on to take illogical orders from evil tempered people in odd uniforms.

I learned to line up in alphabetical order and keep my mouth shut. I learned to not question the orders of the frocked women over me, no matter how stupid or unreasonable the order was.

3. I learned hatred. The nuns hated me for what reason I have no idea. I can remember a dozen instances when they demonstrated that, publicly and viciously.  For instance, in the first grade, Sister Ronald Marie shrieked at me..in front of my classmates..that I had ‘poopied’ my pants. Shocked at her accusation, I proclaimed that I had NOT done anything in my pants. This merely infuriated the harridan.  She snatched me up by the collar, dragged me from the classroom into the girl’s “lavvy” (lavatory, or bathroom) and rudely pulled my underpants down…to find that I had told the truth. I had NOT ‘poopied’ my pants. I felt as if I’d been raped. Indeed, I had been, if only emotionally and socially.  

Did she apologize? No. She marched me back into the class room without a word of explanation and from that day forward, I was a pariah. No one wanted to even come near The Girl Who Messed Her Pants.

She didn’t stop at that, though. She put me in the front row, along with some boys who were ‘troublemakers’ in order to “keep an eye on me.”    

    My cousin, Michael, a gentle child, was treated the same, although he was in a different Catholic school. As a second grader, the nun forced him to stand up and pronounced, “Michael, you are the dumbest child in this school.”

4. The nuns taught me fear. I learned early on to cover my tracks, to lay low, to keep myself as far off the nun’s radar as possible. I didn’t ask questions if I didn’t understand something.  It didn’t do much good, the witches obviously gossiped amongst themselves, as I was persecuted by many of them right through the seventh grade. However, I learned to be invisible, to never draw attention to myself, to not expect anything but abuse, no matter how well I did at anything. I learned that the nuns had favorite targets in their classrooms, unfortunate children who served as their outlet for all their fury, their abuse, their frustrations. They found them as surely as a fly finds an open wound on a helpless animal, and acted the same way. I was one of those targets.

5. I learned Spanish. This was perhaps the only good thing I learned in Catholic school. It was, however, completely unintended by the nuns. Knowing how to speak conversational Spanish is perhaps the one and only thing I learned in Catholic school. Everyone in the world speaks one of three languages as their second language: Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, or English.

Learning Spanish, though, was not a choice in Catholic school. The language you were taught was assigned to you as yet another marker of your social class. 

     You were assigned the language based on how much money your family had.  Thus, the upper crust kids, the truly rich ones, learned French. The middle class kids learned German. Us poor shits learned Spanish.

     Now tell me, when was the last time you needed French? The most recently added French term to the world’s technological lexicon is ‘chauffer’. When was the last time you used German?  When you ordered a beer.

     But you read, see, hear and can use Spanish every single day. It’s everywhere. It’s on signs, on packages, on the radio, on cable. I used what I learned, picked up a lot more over the years, just from using it often with the many Spanish speakers I meet every day. I can still make myself understood in Spanish.

6.  I learned that there are other cultures in the world, but only Catholic ones were ‘good’.  

     My advantage, small as it was, was that I was born white and American. We had swarthy complected  kids from countries I’d never heard of: Armenia. Romania. A whole slew of South American countries. We even had one black boy, from Sudan, (I think) who was an ‘exchange student” in high school, far above my level. They paraded him around like a zoo elephant. 

     That stopped cold when he told my class that African priests are allowed to have wives.  (a fact that is STILL kept quiet.)  Martin Luther King was mentioned in our school, however, we didn’t have American blacks in OUR school. Black Americans were Protestant. Or worse, Baptist. They had no money and even if they had, didn’t feel the need to give what little they had to a bunch of white men in dressing gowns. Thus I learned that not all Catholics were named after saints, as I’d been told. Odelia. Rubio. Cornelius, for heaven’s sakes.

7. I learned exclusivity. There were Catholics, and Everybody else. There was also the distinct class lines the nuns drew based on your ethnicity and your economic status. Irish were  preferred, and money was all that mattered.  Being the target of the nuns taught me that authority wielded in the name of god was a cruel, unreasoning and brutal process. I learned that if one was of the favored class,  one could get away with all sorts of crimes. For instance, Ann Riley…a rich Irish girl…repeatedly bullied and tormented me. She would pinch me, pull my hair (she sat behind me in class), poke me with sharp pencils and lie about me.

      I complained to the nun. My parents were contacted and told that I was being a nuisance in class. I was accused of lying about the bullying. For that I was grounded by my father. The torment went on the entire year and again, traumatized me for a very long time. Ann Riley, if I ever meet you again, you'd better start running.

8. I learned hypocrisy. In fact hypocrisy was endemic and institutional throughout the Catholic Church. My father was a ‘devout Catholic’ in that we went to Mass every Sunday no matter what. Yet he treated me and my sister as if we were the devil’s spawn. I was taught by the Catholic church that if you were holy enough, devout enough, prayed enough, Jesus would answer your prayers.

It never happened. Not once. Not once. I guess that a little girl just ain’t good enough, no matter what she did. Infants, if they died before baptism, were punished by ending up in 'limbo'. You could be the most monstrous person on earth, and if you took the vows to become a priest or a nun on your deathbed, you went to heaven.

9. I was taught self hatred. Girls were on the same level as a dog or a cow. We were NOTHING but breeders. It was our duty to produce many, many Catholic children. Having a life was out of the question. Girls’ career choices consisted of only three fields:  Nun, Mother, Teacher. Boys, on the other hand, were the image of God. They were recruited hard to join the seminary and the priest hood. Which meant that they were taught that girls were temptations. Females were the cause of all the world’s ills.

10. I was brain washed. I learned NOTHING of American history that wasn’t about the Catholic missionaries to North America. I learned about Cortes bravely conquering the savages of Aztec Mexico. (using guns, germs, steel and horses).

I learned NOTHING about the Aztec’s accomplishments: their astronomy, their math, their agricultural wizardry.  Next time you eat tomatoes or corn, thank an Aztec.

     I was never told of the genocidal French missionaries who provided small pox contaminated blankets to the Indians, thus freeing up land from Minnesota to New Orleans. I wasn’t told about Christopher Columbus’s enslaving the natives of Hispaniola, most of them dying from either disease or outright genocide.

I learned nothing of the history of the United States beyond the Industrial revolution. Nothing at all about the real Revolution, the Civil War, etc. I learned all about the Holy Roman Empire. I knew how to pronounce Hohenzollern and why that mattered. I learned that the British were evil because they'd thrown the yoke of Catholicism aside.  I learned only the Catholic half of the Crusades. I heard about the brave Children's Crusade but nothing about the fact that the Catholic organizers sold all those kids into slavery before they ever reached the desert.  Joan of Arc was a hero but was still inexplicably burned at the stake-by Catholics.  I learned nothing about the Inquisition. Cultures that had changed the world: the Arabs, the Chinese, the Persians-were not even named.I had never heard the word "Islam" "Mohammed" or "Buddha".

     I had no idea who the crafters of the Constitution were. I had no idea what the Constitution WAS. But I did learn about the Magna Carta. I’d heard of Benjamin Franklin and knew he was the guy who flew a kite in a lightning storm. But he and his co-signers were strangers to me. But I could tell you who the Pope was, I could name half a dozen saints, I knew the names of several missionaries. And, of course, I knew who John F. Kennedy was. His picture was on the right hand side of Jesus’s on every wall in the school.

11. I learned that nuns can’t teach anything but religion. I cannot do math to save my soul, because in third grade I was forced into ‘the new math’. Before that social experiment I did well in math. I was learning multiplication and fractions. Then, in the middle of the year, we got new math books that had Venn diagrams and “sets”. No explanations were forthcoming. I was part of a social experiment that failed. Miserably. I learned a phobia of math that clings to me…and has always hampered me, for all my life.

12. I learned that looking busy was more important than actually being so. The nuns loaded our plate with homework. I suppose they believed that doing homework would magically instill the understanding of math that they failed to accomplish in class. Bullshit in, bullshit out. I learned to cheat. I found the answers to half the problems in the back of the math book. Cunningly, the nuns assigned only the questions that weren’t solved in the back of the book, but I learned that often the only difference in two adjacent problems was the numbers. And I could do simple arithmetic. Thus, I was guaranteed of achieving a passing grade on my homework. Yet, when I was called up to the board to do a problem I would invariably get it wrong. Did the nun actually think,this kid is failing math? Or even-gasp-try to HELP?  Never. It would have meant extra work, for them.  Sister Amaris, in 6^th grade, publicly called me a ‘moron’ because I admitted that I had no idea how to ‘reduce a fraction to lowest terms.” Of course I didn’t. I’d been in ‘new math’ for three years when they dumped it. I’d been doing sets and subsets and suddenly was faced with algebra. I didn’t have a clue.

13. I learned to tune them out. I hated school. I learned nothing because I wasn’t interested in what they were spouting.  I was always the fidgeter, wanting to be outside, be outside, no matter the weather. Thus I learned to make it through the long days, the years, inside my head. I daydreamed the entire time I was in Catholic school. I learned to keep one ear open in certain classes, such as math, so that when I was called on (always in alphabetical order, as we were seated that way) I would count down to the question I would be called on to answer,  had the time to do the problem as best I could and answer promptly. Going up to the board was misery, but again…not getting the right answer and being told to go sit down taught me that no one really gave a damn about me or my learning. 

14.  I learned that the justice system in Catholic school was capricious, vicarious, and life endangering. I was sometimes punished by having to 'go to Jug". Why it was called Jug I have no idea, but jug was being kept after school as punishment for something you did during the day. One reported to the nun nazi in charge of jug, gave her the ticket saying who you were, and one was then assigned busy work as punishment instead of remedial ANYTHING.

      I remember one occasion when the nun put the number 10,000 on the board and said, " write down this number on your piece of paper, subtract 100 from it until you reach zero." Here I am, a child, having to some stupid math shit in order to learn something about changing my behavior, the bad of which had never been explained to me. I hated math anyway and subtraction is difficult in the minds of a scared child. Why was I scared? Well, first, I Was In Trouble. Second...I had to walk a little over a mile to and from school. In a northern winter, it gets dark at 4 pm. It snows.It rains. And now I am being kept after school-with no idea if my parents had been notified that I wouldn't be coming home on time-and it's getting dark. There were several times that I finally was released (even the Jug nazi got tired of waiting on math phobes like me to finish the nonsense) at 6 PM. And I, a unhappy, hungry little girl, walking a mile home. In the dark. In the middle of a big city. Facing the unhappy fate of trying to explain to my parents why I was late. For which I would probably be punished yet again.

15. I learned that the nuns didn’t give a shit about their students accomplishments.        The nuns job (which they obviously hated, but I suppose they had to have SOME sort of useful occupation. A convent in the middle of a city isn’t conducive to cheese making or being shepherds.) was to teach. I don't know if they were actually required to have any training in teaching. Their days were stupefyingly boring. Talk all day, pass out tests, collect homework, pass the kid. If I were so stupid as to ask a question, they didn’t have the answer if it wasn't in an approved Catholic book. (look up 'nihil obstat').  In 7^th grade, we learned about atoms. I asked what the particles of an atom (proton,neutron, electron) were made of. They had no answer. Despite the mental shackles they’d put me in, I was highly intelligent and a smart kid. I read. A lot. I knew even then that something had to make an atomic particle what it was. It just didn’t EXIST. Something made them what they were. I know about quarks, about sub atomic particles…but THEY didn’t.  

16. I learned that being a parrot was the way to get through it all. Garbage in, garbage out. Even as early as second grade I knew it was all bullshit. All of it. Every bit of it was merely propaganda. Once that worked out to my advantage. In fifth grade, my nun was Sister Edward Marie (interesting how all the nuns wanted to be called by men’s names). I have no idea what she taught, all I remember is that she was my teacher in the mornings. But it must have been something politically charged, because at the dinner table, my parents literally went berserk when I repeated what Sister EM had taught us. I learned later it was ‘Communism’. It was the one and only time my father actually involved himself in my school life. Apparently he went to the school THAT NIGHT and talked with someone about the ‘communist’ Sister Edward Marie.

     She was missing for quite some time. I’m betting she was shipped off to another convent just to keep her big trap shut.  

17. I learned that escape was easily had in books. That probably saved me in so many ways. I learned a shitload from books. I would read the encyclopedia. (except anything in I, J, and K, as that volume was missing from the school library). I learned there was a huge world outside the brick walls of the Catholic Penitentiary for Children. That the world had other peoples, other languages, other cultures, other histories. That there was far more to the world than Catholicism.

18. I became atheist at a young enough age to withstand the relentless and daily inculcation of religion. My second grade teacher was Sister Thomas More. (Thomas More was made a saint after his deserved beheading. The Vatican has a habit of canonizing monstrous men who had not a shred of mercy, compassion or morals.) Sister TM  asked me why I was crying. I said my father had told me my cat had died (yeah, in the gas chamber at the animal shelter where he’d dumped it). I asked her, would my cat be waiting for me in Heaven? That hideous woman, that cold and heartless woman, unwittingly destroyed the entire artificial construct of Catholicism that had been so assiduously implanted in my mind by saying these words:  “Of course not. Animals don’t go to heaven, they have no souls.”

    In retrospect, I should thank her.

    Seldom in life does one experience such an epiphany. At that moment, I understood what religion is-that being, utter bullshit. Religion is merely a weapon humans use on other humans as a means of controlling them. It is the way people control other people. Make the people you want to subjugate afraid. Make them worry that you have this Big Brother, you have the phone number of an invisible guy with unbelievable power, No one has seen him but his works are everywhere; war, exploitation, pain, rape, demonization, suffering, torment, torture, genocide, subjugation, racism: you name all the ills of our species and religion is somewhere behind it. A god is invoked to punish YOU at the behest of and for the betterment of your enemies.

That guy is HIS or HER friend, not yours, and you will suffer if you do not submit. 

The quote is: "No man does evil so cheerfully as when he does it in the name of religion."

     Unlikely as it may seem, Sister Thomas More’s words broke the carefully installed and ideological ice jam in my mind. It all became clear to me, but in a child’s way of thinking. Animals were my only friends. I loved animals and if heaven couldn’t accept an animal, I had no delusions that it would accept me. I’d already been told I was worthless-by my father, by his church.  In all other ways, the Catholic church had taught me to understand that I had no more rights, no more expectations, than the animals. How could I expect to be allowed into that exalted realm, with ‘all the angels and saints’? From what I’d heard, there wasn’t much to do in heaven anyway, other than sing the glories of god.

    God had never been there for me and had demonstrated repeatedly that he didn’t like me. His hired thugs-nuns, priests, my father-made sure I understood this. Thus I felt, if my cat can’t go, I won’t, either.

    I won’t say that I didn’t still labor under fear of god’s punishment for free thinking. I was, after all, still a naive child trying to make my way in a hostile world, and still in the thrall of my father.  Fear and guilt are two weapons the Catholic church has honed to a razors edge. But by the age of emancipation, when I was “invited to leave home’ by my father, I flushed his poison and that of his religion out of my life. It was the best thing in the world for me. All the lessons I’d learned in the Catholic church stood by me, protected me in a world that had real dangers in it. I distrusted everyone, kept my dreams to myself, expected nothing of anybody. I asked nothing of anyone.I never treated other  people the way I’d been treated by Catholics. Bible thumpers found me an irresistible target but I was able to fend them off with a few arguments from the Catholic church. (which taught me that other religions thought Catholics were barbaric-and were right.)
I never stepped foot in a church again until my parents funeral Masses. It was with great happiness that I refused to take Communion (after all, I didn't want to be hyprocritical, even if only in my own mind.). This infuriated my mother's surviving cousin. I merely smiled at her hissy fit.

    This is not to say that I was permanently damaged. No. The treatment I received at the hands of nuns taught me survival skills. I got through it with my mind and soul intact-and free. My mind opened and flowered. Not only was god not pissed off at my liberation, he treated me as he had always done: ignored me completely. As someone said, when you take every thing from someone you have freed them.

    My life changed in every way for the better. I have been religion free for over 50 years and have never regretted a moment of it.

 I am the happiest, most content pagan in the world.

    This is my philosophy on anything religious: if god exists, he does so only to torment us.   

After posting this, one of my anonymous readers pointed out a very important fact about Catholic schools that I'd neglected to mention. I did so only because I was completely unaware of the fact that many Catholic priests were..and are..pedophiles. 
Being a girl, I wasn't pursued by the priests. Honestly, we seldom saw or were visited by the priests while I was in classes. I recall only once, when Father Untner came to our classroom. Why, I cannot remember, but usually the only time we saw the High Priests was at Mass.
But I do know that many boys (and girls) were raped, sexually abused and exploited by priests. The joke goes, "How do you get a nun pregnant? Dress her up like an altar boy."
Now, however, I know the truth. 
If you want to get me truly worked up, mention pedophilia and grown men sexually abusing children. Rape of any sort but that of children especially infuriates me beyond control. I would shoot a child rapist without any regret whatsoever.

This post is long enough. Suffice to say that the death penalty should apply to pedophiles, and I volunteer to push the button or the trigger, whatever it takes, to put them to death.