“They’re rats and they’re wimps.”
That’s what William Brennan, a lawyer representing a local priest who allegedly abused a 14-year-old in the 1990s while receiving monthly church stipends despite having already been accused of abuse, recently called the nuns who ratted out his client.
The nuns in question, if you can imagine such a thing, turned on the priest, who was living in a church residence with young men and throwing loud parties.
The nuns ratted him out to the archdiocese. But they also made it clear they didn’t want it disclosed that they were the informants.
Which means not only were they rats. They were wimps too.
And that’s the very point the priest’s lawyer was making. Nuns or no nuns, you can’t trust anyone who’s a rat and a wimp.
The logic employed by the lawyer was as flawed as the character of the priests who we see dragged into court every day.
But to those of us who were verbally and physically abused by nuns every day in school, that’s all kind of beside the point.
The point is that the script was flipped for once. At long last, fair or not, it was nuns on the receiving end of nasty name-calling.
If you went to Catholic school, you know that nuns were the queens of mean and that calling students nasty names was de rigueur. At my parochial school, two favorites were “demon” and “rascal.” One nun, whose use of clever wordplay you had to appreciate, would point her finger at a misbehaving kid in our class and call him “a lazy lump of protoplasm.”
If name-calling was the worst thing nuns did to us, all this might make for a cute reminiscence.
But name-calling was the least of their offenses.
The nuns would smack you for talking, for laughing, for being a kid. I once saw a kid get smacked to the floor when a nun found a half an M&M on his pencil ledge and he proclaimed he couldn’t finish it for lunch. (He’d been breaking up M&Ms and using them as ammunition in a pea shooting fight.)
I saw another nun almost bust a kid’s nose because he drew a mustache on George Washington in his Picture Study book.
But the worst beating I ever saw a nun give a kid came in eighth grade when Jimmy Roberts (not his real name) took a ruler and proudly measured his penis through his pants for the class while Sister Maria Andrew (not her real name) was writing on the blackboard.
Sister Maria Andrew turned around to the class just in time to catch Jimmy Roberts mouthing the words: “And. That’s. Not. A. Hard. On.”
That nun almost sent poor not-so-little Jimmy Roberts to the E.R.
But I digress.
Point is, the tentacles of the horrific priest scandal have caused pain not only to the victims and their families, but to some sadistic nuns who were actually trying to do the right thing for once. I refer, of course, to the rats and wimps.
January 26th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
January 26th, 2012 at 1:30 pm
January 29th, 2012 at 7:30 pm
I went to a catholic school in a Philadelphia suburb. The nun who was our principal in the 80s had a Jekyll and Hyde personality. She had to be over 6 feet tall and over 300 pounds. I look back and think, “Just because you’re a nun doesn’t mean you are entitled to rip someone else a new a**hole.”
The examples they set convinced every little girl that being a nun would only make you mean, miserable and hated. I knew by third grade, I would NEVER be a nun. They tried to encourage the vocation within us but they sabotaged any interest in the convent by the way they behaved. Then the Catholic Church wonders why no one goes into the convent or the priesthood anymore.
I got my first glimpse of what it was like a) to be set-up and then yelled at, b) accused of something I didn’t do without an apology later on, or c) the sneakiness of punishing a student for “something” when really the nuns were just embarrassed by her. So they had to find a reason to take away her solo at graduation. Picking on the same kid over and over again led to that kid having no friends…and we later find out that kid wasn’t sick all those days he was absent. He ran the thermometer under hot water to make it look like it so he didn’t have to go to school and be bullied. The nun was the reason the bullying happened. She made that kid become the target in the first place!
Not very Christian like behavior from the nuns who supposedly received a calling and consider themselves married to God. It wasn’t just the kids they screwed with; it was the pretty lay teachers who they tried to exploit. They would do this by going into her classroom and snarling at all her students saying things like, “You’re the worst class I have ever seen. You all should fail or go to summer school.” Then she’d grab a kid and smack him around. Or she’d lick her thumb and wipe off the mascara a girl was wearing. Disgusting!
We would hear the principal screaming her head off in another classroom. Our teacher gathered all of us and opened the door to the classroom across the hall and had us file in. We witnessed a very seasoned lay teacher, sobbing at her desk because she couldn’t take this nun harassing her students, disrupting class, and creating havoc for no reason. We saw new lay teachers start at that school. They would stay a year and then they were gone. They would get out of there!
Other nuns followed the principal’s example. They would barge into a lay teacher’s class and say things like, “Why are you helping her with her grammar? She should do it herself.” In other words, they all jumped on the bandwagon and started telling lay teachers how to do their jobs.
Later they would clarify a situation and say that our teacher is getting her masters by going to school in the evening. They would go on to say, “I already have my masters and in fact, it’s my notes that she’s borrowing to study for it.” I could see it was becoming a competition between the nuns and the lay teachers. The lay teachers were working on Plan B so they could get the hell out of there and move onto something that made them happy. This explains the nuns barging into the lay teacher’s class and ripping apart the students she taught as a means of getting back at her. They were envious of her and shocked that she was working on furthering her education should a better offer come her way. Who could blame her?
Almost every nun in that school was overweight, miserable, bossy and incredibly difficult to warm up to. I overheard a group of teachers in the hallway trying to figure out how to broach the subject with a nun because it was like walking on eggshells around her.
I met my 8th grade classmates for a reunion a couple of years ago. We sat at the table talking about the crap that went on in that school. It was like group therapy in a round-table discussion. One pattern we noticed was that the nun never seemed to have an issue with the older kids. We figured it was because the nun’s housemates in the convent were the homeroom teachers for those classes. They all stuck together and went after the lay teachers’ students. The principal would remark and tell us how (the older girls) are becoming such beautiful young women and our class should follow their example. Blah…blah…blah.
These “beautiful young women” were bossy, bullying, overweight, husky, beastie types that certainly were not destined for anything great. Trust me, I’ve Googled them and they haven’t made any wonderful contributions to society. They carried out the examples the nuns set and pushed us around too. In fact, that’s probably why the nun liked them so much. They were just like her!!!
Every time I post something about nuns on the Catholic Standard and Times Facebook page, they delete my comments. No one made them go into the convent. They probably did it back in those days because they were “unmarriable.” This way, they could live together as a sisterhood. They had a roof over their head, clothes on their back, food on the table, and training for their jobs…” I shake my head and think, “What vow of poverty?” It sounds like welfare for the religious.
The Catholic Church will fire a kindergarten teacher for getting pregnant out of wedlock. She could have kept her job by having an abortion and no one would have ever known. But she chose to carry to term and her job was terminated. But if you’re a priest that diddles with little boys, you are transferred around to parishes over and over again.
January 31st, 2012 at 7:54 pm