Hi Pepper,
I am an Welsh Irish Catholic American. I am a descendant of the Brady Bunch…and not the ones from TV.
Yesterday, I drove to the Columbia River to visit my elder cousin, a grandson of the first child of the Brady’s. My great grandmother was a most devout Catholic from Swansea, Wales who could not rest in her grave if any of us left the Catholic Church, and this was past down to my grandmother.
We were talking about how some Catholic parishes can have some very closed people who are not friendly, welcoming, or charitable, and then you can go to another place and find the exact opposite. Yet people are all hearing the same message being taught.
He asked what grade school I went to. I told him the nuns were from Ireland and very abusive. I lived in an Italian immigrant neighborhood and we had an Italian Jesuit heading the Italian mission church that was 5 blocks away. We usually went there. He and my father and other parents finally had the nuns come up to his parish about how they were loading the children down with so much homework and being severe.
My father came out of the meeting saying the nuns acted like they could never do anything wrong.
A year later, my mother had a severe nervous breakdown. I remember staying at my grandmother’s. My father had the diagnosis of my mother on the dining room table. I was 14. I was a heavy reader. I remember reading she was manic depressive, had a multiple personality – I thought she was like Edith in ‘All in the Family’ with Archie Bunker, always well liked by the few who knew her. Anyway, I got my hair cut. It looked very nice after this funky one I was allowed to have in the 7th grade. We were not to tease our hair. So one day one, I mentioned to a ‘friend’ that I teased it a little and then she reported me to the nun who was particularly severe. Before the beginning of the class, the nun took me down to the basement and drenched my head with cold water and sent me back to my junior high class. I was so humiliated and these awful boys the nuns always put me in to sit by said terrible things and were putting me down. It probably hurt so much because of my mother’s situation.
After that, I hated Catholic schools. In the 9th grade, when I was in high school there, we had officers. And if they saw us downtown with our skirts rolled up – just above our knees – we would get detention tickets. I finally went to our family physician because the place was making me neurotic, and I ended up being locked into an image held by my classmates, because as well, we lived in the poorest place in town.
He called my parents to let me go. I ended up at this incredible high school that still has national recognition. I met Protestant girls who came from very good homes. I came out of my shell. But I had scars that lasted up to the age of 21. And I never wanted to put my kids in Catholic schools if I got married.
Anyway, I went on with my life, things turned around and I worked with Italians who came from one of the most wholesome and humane places on earth…a statement I read a few years ago online about their region. It changed me. I did get married and met this – Irish – priest in town who used to be the chaplain for the orphans. He had daily Mass and no one was forced to go, but with the children, it was like Sunday Mass.
Then in the meantime, I went back to the convent where those nuns lived. The ones there knew of the principal and mother superior…and they said I was an innocent. Then when my mother was sick, I went to the hospital and here came the nun now dressed in lay clothes who remembered me. She said she was not a good educator and switched over to pastoral care. I just looked at her, I had no malice…and last summer I went to a retreat. The nun had been in that convent. She told us they were taught not to even look at each other!
And two years ago, when we went to the Columbia River to see my cousins, we also travelled up to that grade school…It was large, it could have been used for many things, but it was shut down. I told my children that is what happened to it for the abuse it did to us children. And to top this experience off, when I got back home a lady was supposed to check out my home for an adult day care. She said she was from the same town. I showed her a lithograph of my high school. She went to the other girls’ Catholic high school. We sat down and talked. And then I simply said something happened to me at that other school. She said she knew about what had happened to me!! She heard it about. And she and her friends had another congregation of nuns. She said when they heard it, they knew that was wrong, and they never had any abuse or mistreatment by their sisters.
Vatican II was in process when those things happened at that school. And Vatican II also addressed unhealthy devotions for the common people as well as correct any disordered thinking or disciplines in religious orders.
Pepper, it is ironic, but when people come to God SO MUCH they end up in time ignoring their own humanity. They lose sense of Christ not only True God but True Man. And when they lose sense of Christ’s humanity, they lose sense of their own and of other people, and become very uncharitable to the point of being abusive.
Have you ever heard of the Twelve Steps? It helps people regain their own personhood and humanity. It is based on Catholic spirituality. I know this priest. He is of Irish descent.
Check out this site:
www.12-step-review.org/index.html
I can fully understand your situation. May be you should get into the 12 steps and try to bring it to your region. They need to believe in Christ as Man.
)
What we need is some common sense on this. And as many of my fellow Catholics do, comparing an Apostolic successor covering up child abuse with lets say for instance some layperson not obeying and missing Mass on a weekday Nov 1 (decreed in some dioceses in the universal Church but not in others worldwide, not sure about Ireland) as both being on par as mortal sins, I do have to question whether that’s it.
.