Like seemingly all Irish Catholics I did three years in parochial school. Notice how parochial school is always counted like a jail sentence.
For two of those years the principal and several teachers were Sisters of Saint Joseph. Honestly, when the nuns left in the third year the quality of the school went right down the shitter: which says something nice about the SSJ’s. Nuns are funny critters, very tough old birds but filled with an absolute, unequivocal love of their charges.
Oddly enough, I have some very happy memories of my time at Corpus Christi. Many of the stranger moments come courtesy of the Sisters. Can you imagine the impact on a young kid heading home and seeing the nuns heading into the convent with a stack of pizzas and beer? Or the first time you see a sister out of her habit buying Christmas presents for her nieces and nephews? If you’re not careful you might start to think nuns and priests were just human beings with particular gifts. Boy, that would ruin all the juicy anti-papist scandalmongering wouldn’t it?
I read today that Sunday was the one-hundred fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in the Diocese of Harrisburg. The sisters I knew have probably all gone back to the mother house in Philadelphia but some of them are probably still out there, demanding that kids straighten up and fly right.
So, to Sisters Mary, Perpetua, Margaret, Loretta, Vincent and anybody else I forgot, thanks for teaching me math and english, thanks for teaching me a little bit of responsibility and thanks for being patient. If there’s ever been a person who demands patience in others; I’m the guy.
Looking forward to the Septaquintaquinquecentennial.
That’d be 175 years for the undereducated Protestants among us.