You got the part about how this is a NOVEL, right?
Yes. That’s kind of my point.
OK, poor choice of words on my part.
Even so, I look at that scene as it’s been described in this thread, and knowing what I know, I have a hard time agreeing that, as the woman in the OP’s book group insisted, “it must be only a literary device, because a Catholic priest would never do something like that.” No, a classroom is not Mass, but if a priest happens to be a horrible, abusive person (and we know that some were, and are), the fact that he is in the middle of Mass does not necessarily mean that there is some mystical limit being placed on his behavior, in that place, in that time.
You disagree. I understand.
I witnessed, many times, a nun and my schoolteacher, who was laity but hyper-religious, hitting kids who slightly misbehaved (a bit of talking) during mass . The teacher was especially perfidious: he always sat one or two rows behind the children’s pews (the small children always sat in the front pews, the girls left and the boys right, with the nun as a guard for the girls and the teacher for the boys), and whenever he saw someone who got a bit distracted, he shot like a hawk from his seat and whacked the victim over the head with his hymnbook. The nun I’m talking about also assisted the priest and altar boys in the sacristy, so as an altar boy I knew her well, and she was one of the vilest and most misanthropic people I’ve ever met. Gosh, how I hated those hypocrites even back then as a child.
This was in the mid-seventies in Germany, where Catholicism was definitely more liberal than in Ireland.
For the sake of ecumenical balance, in Scottish Presbyterian parishes it wasn’t unknown for unmarried pregnant women to have to make a public confession at the Kirk, naming the father, until well into the nineteenth century, but presumably as a condition of being allowed to remain part of the community, since that would be the only form of social security available. And I don’t know how punitive the atmosphere would have been.
When the kids smelled smoked, instead of herding them out of the building one way or another, the nuns also told the kids to pray that the firefighters arrived quickly.
I’m Christian and I believe in prayer, but that’s not the time of place for it. Many church and parochial schools of the era also had rules about divorced people, or their children, attending.
In short, I completely believe the OP’s story.
Everyone is commenting on whether or not a priest would or wouldn’t do this, but let’s not forget that the congregation in this story went right along with it. The girl’s own family would not speak to her. This suggests that this practice was expected in the world in which this novel was set.
I don’t have knowledge of Ireland in the fifties, but in the US in the mid twentieth century and earlier, there was shunning. A person was publicly preached against, denounced, and not allowed back into the church. This happens tho my great , sometime in the late twenties. The family was ashamed, and the result was that he was not invited to any of the community social events which all centered around the church in that tiny rural community. Hardly as dramatic, but the same sort of WTF.
The scene described seems like a literary exaggeration of the practice of shunning with a little of a seventeenth century witch hunt thrown in and just a suggestion of a biblical stoning in the offing. I would imagine that the real life treatment of pregnant teenage girls in that day and location would also depend very much on the girl’s social status and willingness to be shamed into doing what she was told to do obediently and quietly.
The nuns may have figured there was no safe way out of that old building, and felt their best chance would be to stay in their classrooms and pray for rescue.
Read the summary of the fire. Many of those kids were doomed the moment they stepped into the building that morning.