During one of the weekday masses our class attended we all got to sit up front as usual. Boys in the front row to the left of the main aisle, girls to the right.
For most of the church your kneeler/hand rest in front of you was attached to the back of the pew in front of you. Except for the front row where it was attached to a shortened wall held up with a couple supports. So of course during mass if everyone had their hands on the wall you could shake it and everyone could feel it.
So during one mass us boys collectively started silently pushing and pulling on this wall in unison while father was giving his sermon. Sort of an unspoken ‘heave…ho’ so we all sort of were swaying foward and back with the wall maybe an inch or so. Well, we really started to get that wall swaying when
CRRRAAAAACCCKKK!!! it broke off it’s supports and BOOM!! fell to the floor in front of us.
The church went silent and we all froze standing in front of the now broken wall.
We all thought we would be innocent with everyone thinking the wall just broke and we were lucky we weren’t hurt. Unfortunately Father knew exactly what we were up to and we all got in trouble.
St. Michael’s in Livermore, CA. I actually have pretty good memories if that place. We lived across the street from the school and shared a back fence with the convent. Whenever any of the sister’s needed help with anything, they would yell over the fence until my dad or my brother or I came out to see what they needed. Good times.
We had quite the scandal in the early '80s with the arrival of Sister Christina. She was fairly young (maybe 30 or so) and had the audacity to dress in street clothes when she went out. Although the other nuns had been allowed to for some time (I think since Vatican II), they were absolutely mortified as well as many members of the community!
In 6th grade, we got separated (boys and girls) for the infamous “talk.” The girls got to go with Mrs. Suico, the PE teacher, and watch a film on something that we (the boys) couldn’t quite figure out. Monsignor Adams came in to give us our talk. It consisted of
“Ummmm, don’t touch yourselves because god doesn’t like that.”
As god as my witness, I had absolutely no idea what on earth he was talking about. Thankfully, I soon figured it out and have since given god a jizzillion (ba-dum-DUM) reasons to be upset with me.
We only went to mass on Holy Days and for occasional special events (such as the Bishop visiting). When I was in the middle grades (6-8th), the most interesting thing I remember is that the pastor from the school’s associated church would randomly come into a classroom and preempt whatever class was in session to give a lesson on some bible section or Catholic doctrine. It didn’t matter what class we were in - all were equally likely to be interrupted. Though the Monsignor was elderly, I think the visits were more due to cluelessness about how he was interrupting lessons rather than senility.
I don’t remember much of grade school. We wore uniforms and the girls were allowed to wear skirts or pants. Mass was once a week - I think friday, and all of the students were Catholic.
High School… ah, High School was much different. I went to a private, all-girl Catholic High School from 1996-2000 which was known as Ursuline Academy in Blue Ash, Ohio. If it tells you anything about the school, their motto was “Boys to High School, Girls to College.” The school was one story and basically had no walls except for important rooms. Instead, bookcases and shelves seperated classrooms. The scheduling was the most confusing system I have seen in a school. It was a college prep High School and they did a very good job of immitating the freedom that comes with college. During our free periods which were varied throughout the day, we could do whatever we wanted. It was up to us to decide if we wanted to use our free period for eating, studying, sleeping, etc. Creativity and independence were encouraged in sharp contrast to my grade school experience.
Cincinnati is a very conservative, Christian place but my school was far more liberal than the local public schools. The priest used to bless gay marriages (not officially of course) and many girls were openly lesbian and bisexual. I went in there Catholic and Conservative and left a bisexual, atheist, independent. In my Senior year I took another girl to one of our dances. Because we weren’t allowed to take girls from other schools, I dressed her up like a boy. She wasn’t very passable as a guy, but no one said anything.
We weren’t allowed to wear pants except during winter, something which drove me crazy. I have a picture of me in my catholic schoolgirl uniform. It’s not as sexy as most people imagine it being. 
I think we had mass once a month and on holidays. There were plenty of non-Catholic and even non-Christian students. In religious classes we were taught meditation and spiritual awareness techniques commonly found in other religions. I learned about Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism from my classmates and we took field trips to the local Hindu temple and learned about feminism in Islam.
If I ever pop out kids I’d want my daughters to go to a school like Ursuline.
I remember when we had sex ed starting in fourth grade, they told us how babies were made. All about the sperm meeting the egg and growing and blah blah blah…
…they never told us how the sperm GOT there, so nine-year-old me is thinking, “WTF, does it just magically transport itself there?”
I remember this also. The logical analytical me at the time came to the conclusion that it was through saliva. That’s right, saliva. Make out passionately with a girl and you may get her pregnant.
Holy cr@p! I also had the same problem, in Texas - w/ explanation and conclusion. I can’t believe so many others encountered the same problem.
Parochial school, grades 1-8, with the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Jesuit high school. We had an all-school mass once a week, and of course my family went to mass on Sunday. More masses when I served as an altar boy. Favorite parts about being an altar boy: wearing the cassock and surplice, lighting (and later snuffing) the altar candles, ringing a four-in-one bell during the consecration, and the trip to a local amusement park the altar boys got at the end of the year.
The nuns were a mixed bunch: sweet and elderly, butch and mean, young and fun. The priests ranged from the humorless one who had the disposition of a Marine drill instructor, to the Spencer Tracy-ish loveable old Irish priest.
I would definitely send my own kids to Catholic schools. High expectations, high discipline, high values.
Kyla, next time you’re in a Catholic church for a wedding or a funeral, look around the walls. Almost every Catholic church will have the stations of the cross along the walls, seven to your left and seven to your right, in the form of bas reliefs, sculptures, mosaics, paintings, or mixed media.
I disagree. My Catholic school education offered no different academic expectations or discipline from regular public schools in the area. And I’d say they failed badly in terms of transmitting values, unless you highly value secrecy for secrecy’s sake.
I try to live by few stupid, hard-and-fast-knee-jerk rules, but I have one that I absolutely cherish: no child of mine will attend a Catholic school.
What you’ve said pretty much summarises the reasons that Catholics schools here are experiencing significant growth in enrolments.
My guess is that in Australia, that would have more to do with the funding of Catholic schools than with their religious affiliation.
Especially when the guy you’re serving with is trying to make you laugh. Fucker.
I’d often serve with my best friend, Dave. He would try his best to make me laugh. All you’d hear is a bunch of grunts and snot noises coming from our general area.
I got him back once, real good. I made him laugh when his mom was sitting in the front pew, glaring at him intensely.
We had a Priest that would burp after drinking from the Chalise, just loud enough for us to hear. Delirium ensued.
Funding may possibly be part of the parents’ decision to enrol their children in Catholic schools. But from what I’ve been told (and my sources are the enrolment people at several Catholic schools here in Sydney) the reasons that parents generally give are almost word for word the same as those that **Walloon ** stated.
My point is that “high expectations, high discipline, and high values” are more likely to be attributable to private funding and the desire to keep one’s funding stream viable than they are to be attributable to Catholicism per se. All parents, not just the RC ones, tend to want these things for their children at school.
That’s probably true and it’s no doubt one reason why many parents are happy to pay the extra school fees and why the independent, non-government schools (Catholic and non-Catholic alike) are experiencing such growth. But I don’t think it’s the only reason. A large proportion of the people seeking enrolment at Catholic schools are in fact **not ** Catholics. They’re seeking enrolment for the high **moral ** values that they feel their children will be taught at Catholic schools (or so I’ve been told). No doubt parents applying to private non-Catholic schools say much the same thing. I’m merely trying to suggest that, in Australia, many parents consider that the independent schools (including the Catholic schools) will provide a stronger values framework for their children.
Ah, yes. I remember when I was on the Solemn Crew we were going through a rehearsal for Easter Midnight Mass. We heard that at one point, the priest would prostrate himself before the tabernacle, and that this was just a sign of…
“Sleepiness,” my friend Greg said, under his breath. I smiled, yeah haha that’s kind of funny. You know, at quarter to one in the morning, in front of 500 people, that’s the kind of thing that can bring tears to your eyes. I mean a stream of tears with a few minor convulsions.
BTW, altar wine sucks. It comes from Delaware.
hmm…well I went to Catholic School, kindergarten to grade 12. It wasn’t terribly strict, and there were no nuns. Monthly mass and weekly prayer service was compulsory, as was daily prayer, the stations of the cross, and daily decades of the rosary during lent. In elementary there was a class called “Religion”, and essentially the same class went right on through highschool in greater depth under the name of “Christian Ethics”. I think on the whole I’d prefer to block out the entire experience seeing as religion teachers hated me. Reason being I was the kid always asking the questions they could only answer with “just because”, “because it’s in the Bible”, “because it’s a sin”, and my personal fav that only made it’s appearance when they were extremely flustered “because I say so” What can I say, I’m incorrigable.
ps: Being a pint sized gay rights activist while in a Catholic school system isn’t easy. Also, proving teachers wrong with historical evidence and hauling history texts around all day to do so will not put a person on the good side of the school system.
–Bursting peoples bubbles since 1995
Inclusive.
By the Catholic Church’s own admission, the majority of their high school graduates in Australia have rejected catholicism by the time they leave school or in the first two years after leaving school. To be fair, my suspicion here is that this probably has something to do with the australian tendency to abdicate responsibility for the discussion and teaching of “high values” in the home in favour of acceptance of immovable social mores. And there’s nothing the Catholic Church loves more than lack of questioning.
Fact remains, choosing an RC school in Australia isn’t likely to get your kids much more than a better education than that offered by the public system with the added bonus of screwing them up spiritually for life.
St Thomas Aquinas grades 1-8 from 1974 to 1982. We had 8 nuns out of 16 teachers, and always two priests, and one or two brothers at any given time. Our school mascot was a “Friar”. We actually had a cheer that went:
We are the Friars!
The mighty, mighty Friars!
The high school, which my sibling attended were the “Crusaders”. I wonder if that would even be allowed now.
Anyway, we wore paid uniforms, jumpers until 4th grade (or maybe it was 6th) and then skirts of the same plaid with yellow or white collared shirts, yellow or white knee socks, and black or brown dress shoes. We could wear brown or black corduroys in the winter.
Since the church was across the parking lot from the school, we went to church twice a week; once a week with our class and again on Friday with the entire school. The only weird thing I remember was in 3rd or 4th grade, when my class of 25 students was pulled out to go to the funeral of a child who had been killed in a car accident. We were the only ones there except for a couple of adults. I still don’t know what that was about.
My favorite was anything that had to do with St Francis, and since our priest were Franciscans, there was a lot. I still can’t hear the “Prayer of St. Francis”, or sing the hymn without getting teary-eyed. I also like the Crowining of Mary in May,
We blamed everything on CCD. I mean everything. From missing homework to writing on the desk, CCD probably did it.
I got a fantastic education from my school. When I transferred to public school in 9th grade I was way ahead of the other students. My school was pretty liberal. I didn’t even know the difference between Catholic and Christian until I was in like 5th grade.
I have only good memories, got a really good education, and wouldn’t hesitate to send my child to Catholic school despite the fact that I am no longer a practicing Catholic.