Doubt

[Guest thaiworthy]

This is an offshoot from the Hindsight thread. In thinking of past memories, there is one institution that stands out among all others concerning growing up gay: parochial school. They were staffed by nuns and lay people. These teachers behaved in some of the most horrific ways I can ever remember. One lay teacher threw chalk at students, her high heel shoes, and her purse sometimes from across the room to exert discipline. Certainly, the wrong way to do it. Some others who were the nuns seemed to hate men, hated sex, and hated themselves having shrouded their identity in a religious vocation. They held some students up to ridicule for their manners, appearance and presumed sexual identity.

 

I have included a clip from the movie, "Doubt," which highlights the character of this kind of person. There are some good nuns. But some, not. They betray with their sick attitudes the very principles Christian faith teaches. The mother in this scene is played by Viola Davis, who was nominated for a best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2008 for her portrayal of Mrs. Miller. Meryl Streep plays Sister Aloysius. This scene epitomizes the character of the nuns I grew up with and applauds the character of the woman in this scene as the gay boy's mother. The words are well-written, the scene fine-crafted, and the whole movie beautifully woven as a masterpiece of tortured parochial life as a student in these schools.

 

Needless to say, I drank altar wine, too. Please see the movie, which I highly recommend.

 

This clip, unfortunately is hosted by a bigot and has a few disrespectful titles superimposed at the beginning and especially at the end. Please disregard it.

 

 

 

[Guest fountainhall]

Surely one of the best and most horrific movies about 'bad' nuns - based on a true story - was "The Magdalene Sisters" with the wonderful Geraldine McEwan as the twisted Sister Bridget. She was one of the few great British actors to have turned down any national honour - including the offer a Damehood.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhXKI9tAI_M

[Bob]

Surely one of the best and most horrific movies about 'bad' nuns

 

In that category, I just replay elementary school memories in my brain.  Yea, there were some good nuns, I think....but I don't remember them as much as the discipline-exacting gorillas that I normally encountered.  But, to be somewhat fair,  I suppose my ability to attract that category of beast was likely somewhat related to my behavior....haha. 

[Rogie]

Am I right in assuming Thaiworthy and Bob went to Catholic-run elementary school's in the US? (an elementary school is the same as a British primary school? so what ages 5 or 6 to 11 or 12?). I think i have heard of parochial school, but it would help to know a bit more about what that involved.

 

I went to a Protestant school in Montreal, Canada until the age of 10. It was a pretty ordinary school. No nuns obviously, and my recollection of all my female teachers is very positive. There were no sadists and no need for strict disciplinarians. This was in the late 50's when kids were brought up properly to respect their parents, teachers (and others in authority) as well as other kids. It was a benign environment and I was happy living in it.

[Bob]

Am I right in assuming Thaiworthy and Bob went to Catholic-run elementary school's in the US? (an elementary school is the same as a British primary school? so what ages 5 or 6 to 11 or 12?). I think i have heard of parochial school, but it would help to know a bit more about what that involved.

 

Yep, went to a Catholic elementary (grades one through eight) school.  The term "parochial" school typically refers to any church-run school but it wouldn't necessarily have to be a "Catholic" school.  In my elementary school (sometimes just called "grade" school and less often called "primary" school), most of the staff and teachers were nuns, Sisters of Mercy (kinda hard to say that last word without heavy sarcasm). A rather authortarian affair.  For example only, the cafeteria held about 500 kids and we were not allowed to talk while we ate the sometimes questionable slop they fed us, the gorilla nuns walking up and down the aisles with their rulers waiting to smack you if you even looked like you wanted to talk.  That's the way it pretty much was all day long excepting only when we had a brief recess out on the playground.  

 

Since I went to school, I think most primary or elementary schools in the US are now grades 1 through 6 and now they have middle schools (or "junior high" schools) that cover grades 7 through 9.  Our highschools typically now handle grades 10 through 12 (but, back in my day, our parochial high school was 9th grade through 12th grade). 

[Rogie]

Thanks for explaining Bob. So if I understand correctly your whole schooling was in Catholic-run schools. I hope the parochial high school wasn't more of the same!

 

As a matter of interest what was the nun's attitude towards Valentine's Day? In my school it was a big thing. Each kid had a large open envelope allocated place at the back of the classroom and you stuck the valentine's cards (if memory serves I think we made them ourselves) into those. Clearly the more popular kids got more than those less popular. I think I was about low to average! Nowadays I expect some busybodies would ban that practice just in case it hurt the feelings of those getting few cards.

 

I don't understand something Bob (and TW): why the need for such a disciplinarian approach? I know you alluded to some naughtiness in your schoolboy days Bob, but even so I can't imagine the necessity of what to me seems an overly-zealous way to school kids. 

 

It does seem to me to be associated with Catholic nuns and priests and celibacy, and all that entails, versus a mix of married and unmarried Protestant teachers with possibly kids of their own. Now I know what parochial means I can safely say the school I was at wasn't one. I guess it would be called secular. There was the morning singing of O Canada and God Save the Queen, but no religion. That was dealt with by attendance at Sunday school, which I enjoyed because the teachers there were real human beings. I can still recall my Sunday school teacher from those far off days. He was a warmhearted, sincere man.

 

If I can do my non-PC thing here. I don't know about the US, but in Britain we hear all kinds of tales of classroom indiscipline by disruptive pupils, even in primary schools where there are record numbers being expelled. Might not a return to old-fashioned school discipline be a good idea? No, not petty things like not talking at mealtimes, but by giving individual teachers a lot more flexibility and support (don't take the kid's version of events as gospel, and don't assume the teacher is guilty until proven innocent!) to deal with belligerent youngsters. . .  failing that, being frogmarched to the headmaster's study for the cane or the strap anyone?

[Bob]

I don't understand something Bob (and TW): why the need for such a disciplinarian approach? I know you alluded to some naughtiness in your schoolboy days Bob, but even so I can't imagine the necessity of what to me seems an overly-zealous way to school kids. 

 

The topic is probably boring for most but, what the heck, you asked.  Looking back on it, I simply can't explain (or condone) the authortarian approach back then.  Part of it was simply the times (the 50's), I suppose, but part of likely was upper midwest attitudes at the time.  There were a few of the nuns who were semi-friendly at times but that wasn't the norm.  And everybody was afraid of most of them...they just seemed like mean old bitches.  I can't believe we were bad kids in general but perhaps we didn't like the regimentation.  Every day at school started by all of us going to latin mass.....one of the most boring and tedious things you could ever do to a kid that was 5-12 years old. By the 4th or 5th grade, we could recite the entire mass in our own "latin" (e.g., "Domine vobiscum", meaning in latin "the lord be with you", was altered to "Dominic, go frisk 'em").  Just kid kind of stuff (or self defense to the terminal boredom we experienced every day). 

 

Khun Thaiworthy is a few (very few!) years younger than me and maybe his experiences were slightly different.  A lot of things began to change in the early 60's.

 

As concerns Valentine's Day, I do remember that we did exchange simple "valentimes" at least in the first couple of grades.  But that practice was history by the time we became full fledged smart-asses at age 10-11 or so.  It wasn't "cool" after that...haha.

[Guest fountainhall]

The movie “The Magdalen Sisters” has been in the news this week as the Irish government has just issued a Report on the institutions run by these Sisters. As was known, they were virtually Catholic workhouses, mostly laundries, operating with slave labour. They began to operate ‘commercially’ in 1922 and continued will as late as 1996. Each had contracts with major Irish companies, the government, hotel chains.

The government Report which took 18 months to write found the following –
 

 

Set up in the 19th century as refuges for prostitutes, the Magdalene Laundries became prisons for the 'disappeared'.

Orphans with nowhere else to go, single girls who found themselves pregnant and hence abandoned in a morally repressive state, children whose parents could no longer afford to keep them and those judged by priests or the religious to be in 'moral danger' because they were too pretty or flirtatious.

Women were forced into Magdalene laundries for a crime as minor as not paying for a train ticket, the report found.

The majority of those incarcerated were there for minor offences such as theft and vagrancy as opposed to murder and infanticide.

One of the Magdalen women, Mary Smyth, said –
 

 

she was treated like a slave and had her dignity, identity and life taken from her. ‘My name was changed, my hair was chopped off, all my possessions were taken from me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t eat for three weeks. I wanted to die.’

Miss Smyth has described her time in the Good Shepherd Convent in Sunday’s Well, Cork, as Hell and revealed she was afraid to have children as an adult in case she was locked up.

‘It was horrendous and inhumane. It was worse than any prison,’ she added. ‘It was soul destroying, it will never ever leave me,’ she said.

When girls managed to escape from the Magdalen laundries, government agencies would find and return them.

Despite calls for an inquiry within Ireland, the state waited till it was all but forced to do so in 2011 by a request from the UN Committee Against Torture. Even in the light of the resultant Report's horrific findings, the government has not issued an apology to the 10,000 women who were treated worse than prisoners. The Prime Minister merely expressed his sorrow and “sympathies”, saying the “stigma and conditions were a product of a harsh and uncompromising Ireland.”

That sounds a little bit like successive Japanese Prime Minsters sympathizing for the country’s actions in World War II and resolutely failing to offer a public apology. Perhaps the Irish Parliament will have more guts when it debates the Report in a couple of weeks.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273961/Ireland-says-sorry-10-000-women-slaves-Catholic-workhouses-locked-brutalised-nuns.html#axzz2KBRXLdjx