This nun/sister dichotomy sounds like the pedantic stuff like you hear when someone gets on you for calling strawberries a …, well, “berry”. It’s a “aggregate accessory fruit”. C’mon.
This was back about 1985 so “refugee” might have been a better descriptor than “immigrant.” In any event, I’d say his schooling was well before the fall. Wiki says the Catholic church is still active in Vietnam, although not always with smooth relations with the current regime.
Or even in every dialect of English, or in every Order.
In general, “nun” would never be used as a form of address: depending on the order, you address a nun called Mary Joseph as “Sister Mary Joseph” no matter what job/rank she holds, as “Mother Mary Joseph” no matter what job/rank she holds, or as “Mother Mary Joseph” if she’s the Mother Superior and “Sister Mary Joseph” otherwise. You’d never say “good morning, Nun Mary Joseph”.
I went to a parochial school in the Sixties taught by the Sisters of St. Joseph. One nun I had was truly cruel–I think of her as the Twisted Sister. But all the nuns, mean or not, were very strict, in large part because the classes were so large: 40 or 45 kids, one nun, no aides. (In some schools, classes were even larger–60 or more.) Many teachers, nuns or lay, resorted to physical punishment. Worse, in my book, was the combo of religion, fear, and guilt used to keep us in line. Most Catholic school kids of that era heard plenty of holy horror stories like the one about the girl who chewed the Communion Host (a no-no then), and it spurted blood.
Kids who went to Catholic schools later on don’t have horror stories because class sizes shrank post-Boomers. Older nuns retired. More and younger lay teachers had to be hired. My town was near Chicago and many residents were first- or second-generation Americans. Mayne that was a factor, too.
Thanks for info. One tends to think, rule-of-thumb, “Communist revolution = religious types will be in bad bother”; but things are apt to change over time.
When one thinks on it: I suppose, conditions half a century and more ago were often such that teachers – religious, lay, secular – had to take what appears by current standards, to be a pretty strict and harsh line.
I – lifelong Brit (citizen and resident), aged 70 – experienced a basically gentle teaching scene throughout my schooldays, ages 5 to 17. (Started at a Church of England primary school; but the teachers – all lay-persons – were extremely sweet ladies.) Likely connection here, I feel, with my coming from a relatively privileged background.
I must confess that I didn’t begin taking my job (of embarrassing her to distraction) seriously until she became a teenager; when I finally started, she was already so jaded by Grandpa humor that dad humor barely left a mark.
So, yeah, I’ve been doing the dad humor thing for about ten years; OTOH, she hasn’t been “unwilling” so much as “resigned to it”…
I don’t know anything about Sisters of Charity. This particular order wasn’t just called Grey Nuns, they were the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart.
The other Grey Nun congreagations
Maybe it was the SSND nuns who were particularly vile - mine were SSND as well. In fact at first I wondered if you and I went to the same school, but I am an East Coast girl.
What is really horrifying in retrospect is that these “teachers” never faced any consequences for their action. Your first grade teacher should frankly have been charged with criminal assault - but the teachers saw nothing wrong in their behavior, and the parents didn’t stand up for their children.
I was chatting with my older brother this weekend - and I mentioned that my first grade classroom had 50 kids in it (with Sister Reptile). He said that in his year (6 years earlier) there were 90 in that classroom. a) I can’t figure out how they fit, and b) If you’re teaching a class that large, I guess the only thing you can think of is to terrorize them into puddles of goo to keep control.
My mother went to a parochial middle school in the Sixties. One of the sisters told her that every sin she committed drove the nails a little deeper into Jesus’ hands.
That’s clever, in a really sick, twisted way.
While, despite everything, I see some positive aspects to Catholicism – both “ancient and modern” – the more I read in this thread; the more thankful I feel, that I was not born into that particular variant of Christianity.