LENT!

Lent I went shopping one Wednesday afternoon about 40 days ago and was surprised no one had ashes on their foreheads. It was Ash Wednesday! Lynchburg, Virginia, where I live, doesn’t have a large Catholic population, but still, a lot of Christians observe Ash Wednesday, so I was expecting to see people with ashes on their foreheads to mark the start of Lent. When I got home, I contacted a few friends and asked if they had seen anyone with ashes on their foreheads. All my friends said the same thing. There were no ashes in sight. This surprised me. I grew up in St. Fidelis Parish, a Polish Catholic parish near Humboldt Park in Chicago, and Ash Wednesday was always a major event. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people with ashes on their foreheads. Lent was a major event back in the 1950s when I was growing up. As kids we had to do what the adults did. We were supposed to fast from eating meat on Ash Wednesday, every Friday during Lent, and Holy Saturday morning. There were also church services we had to attend. Every Friday, the nuns marched us to church where we had to kneel for an hour during the Stations of the Cross. If that wasn’t hard enough, the nuns expected each student to give up one thing he loved for Lent. My parents were strict believers in Lent. They didn’t limit my sister Donna and me to one thing. It was like my parents wanted to take all of the fun out of our lives. When I was a kid, I loved reading comic books and watching TV comedies like The Jack Benny Show and Gillian’s Island. All of that disappeared from my life during Lent. But that’s not all! I loved going to Saturday matinees at the local movie theater on Division street. Every Saturday, the theater would show one comedy like Jerry Lewis’s At War with the Army, one horror movie like Invasion of the Saucer Men, and twenty cartoons. During Lent, no matter how much I pleaded with my parents, cried, and banged my head on the floor, I was not allowed to go to the movies. Why were my parents so strict during Lent? It took me years to figure this out, but at 74, I know why they were so demanding. They made us give up what we loved because my parents gave up what they loved most. My mom loved to go dancing on weekends at bars and wedding receptions. During Lent, there was no dancing for her. While my mom loved dancing, my dad loved drinking. An alcoholic, he loved his vodka and pints of beer. During the 40 days of Lent, he was totally sober. If mom couldn’t dance and dad couldn’t drink, you could bet I couldn’t watch Jerry Lewis being stupid.

The Worst Things the Sisters Taught Us

 This last month, a couple of my columns have been about the good things I learned from the Sisters at St. Fidelis, my parish school in the Humboldt Park area.  I think the columns went over well.  In fact, I got my first fan letter ever after that first column about the parish school!

This week I want to complete the picture of what I learned in the Catholic parochial school I attended.  

Like I said in those previous columns, we learned great things.  We learned how to succeed in high school and college, how to be comfortable around people of the opposite sex, how to make and do things that have helped us throughout our lives, and how to develop friendships that have lasted for decades.

But we also learned and saw stuff that we wished we hadn’t.

A couple of the priests were pedophiles, and I’ve written about that here in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy before, and I’ve also written about it in my mystery novel Little Altar Boy.  I don’t think I need to drag that up again.

The other stuff we learned and saw that we wished we hadn’t mainly involves the meanness of some of the Sisters. Generally, the Sisters were good people, people devoted to their vocations, people devoted to teaching us.  There were several nuns, however, who weren’t good people. Some of our worst memories were of seeing kids in the class being punished by some of the nuns.  It didn’t happen often, but those memories stay with you.

We remembered boys kneeling in the front of the class with books balanced on their arms.  We remembered kneeling on a bag of hard peas with our arms reaching for the sky.  We remembered kneeling on our own hands.  

We remembered having our hair pulled by the nuns for laughing about something in class.  We remembered being whacked across the shoulders with a ruler for speaking without raising our hands first. We remembered being struck on our palms with a ruler for getting a math question wrong. 

We remembered being forced to stand at the front of the class sucking on pacifiers because we were acting like babies.  We remembered being told to put our heads on the desk and being hit on the head with a book.  We remembered a boy who did something to annoy a nun, and she punished him by sticking his head out the window and closing the window down on his neck.

There are those memories, memories that are hard to escape.

Today, if a teacher were to do these things, she would be fired, possibly arrested.  It wasn’t like that back then.  We assumed that the sisters had a right to whack us and yell at us and pull our hair and make us feel stupid.  We didn’t complain.

Thankfully, some things have changed in our schools