This is reminiscent of the Night Gallery episode Hell’s Bells in which John Astin plays Randy Miller, a hippie who dies and ends up in a parlor room with a hick couple who are endlessly showing slides from their vacation, accompanied by a gramophone playing corny music. Then a devil shows up and explains to Randy that he’s stuck here for eternity, but that he’s in hell while the hicks are in heaven. It ends with Randy banging his head on the floor yelling, “Bummer! Bummer! Bummer!”Eternal boredom is far more terrifying than fire and brimstone.
Okay, I can believe that nuns would be on Satan’s payroll. Nepotism works fine for some people. But what’s this about having a clear list of rules on the wall? Where I went you didn’t learn the rules until after you were punished for breaking them.
Having been taught by the Sisters of Charity in the fifties, I’ve often wondered which ones were actually former ex-German SS agents….on the run….‘splains a lot….3 Hail Marys and 3 Our Fathers…..Solves all of a 10 year old’s problems with the system…Like spelling tests….
Wow! An actual black board! Can I clean the erasures?….I promise not to wack ’em against the wall….I have now taught with three types of “blackboards”….Black board/green board, felt board and Smart Board….Hope I live long enough to wrtite in the air….
or, that sister mary margaret did some things that violated her vows like doing stuff to kids and that is why she is in hell. there is no forgiveness for what many of the clergy of what they have done to kids. boston, la, milwaukee, chicago, belgium, australia, uk, ireland, canada, etc…but, the pope says that gays are the worst people on the face of the earth? what can expect from someone who was in the hitler youth?
If you messed up in class, my fifth grade teacher/nun would collect all the rulers in the row in which you were seated – and no one had those wimpy plastic ones – and smote you about the knuckles with what resembled a 2 × 4.Yes, I do believe they were formerly employed at Dachau.
Very few nuns were sadists. It’s the way children remember them, I suppose. The ones you seem to be recalling here came from another era when discipline was implicitly supported by parents and neighborhoods. They might have been mainly one nationality, too. A kid messed up at school, and he not only shamed his parents but also his neighborhood. The nuns administered only the first stage of punishment. And it was often corporal, as was the current style..After WWII, neighborhoods became more diverse but these same nuns continued to teach. But their disciplinary methods were obsolete. Gradually, they were considered brutal and unfair. It must have bewildered them. Instead of children being ponies to be broken, human puppies to be trained, they were miniature citizens to be respected by default. .Societal attitudes changed, and who’s to say what is the correct way? Personally, I think corporal punishment was never the correct method. But for most of history it was acceptable..And also, were these older nuns trained to handle the mental illnesses that we now diagnose in children? If Johnny can’t read, now we check if he is dyslexic or autistic or is abused at home. I had seen certain nuns cajole and badger kids to shamed tears, probably not aware it wasn’t properly a discipline problem..I know some of you have amusing memories, some bad. But I hope you also have some respectful ones, too. Non-catholics in my neighborhood said very rude things, as for instance telling their children that nuns were witches. It made me sick, as some of my favorite people were nuns. And then there was that nasty remark that they were lesbians or couldn’t find real men to marry so they “married Jesus.”.Having worked in a parish in later life I knew these women as human beings. Some were saintly, some were smart and would have succeeded in “the real world.” They were often brilliant administrators, more so than the parish priests who got the glory. They were never fully appreciated. But once vocations in the teaching orders declined, that was pretty much the end of so many parochial schools. Nuns worked for room and board, and God..Sorry to be so serious. It’s a fun cartoon, and I sometimes talk with people who survived the “atrocities” of our grade-school nuns..I, too, remember some nuns with amusement. There was “Sr. Louise Grinchen,” who was a dead shot at 30 feet with an eraser. “Sister Mary Larry,” twenty-five-cubic-feet of fury who looked like Spring Byington but could be scathingly sarcastic. My seventh-grade nun who was unqualified to teach science and whose mistakes I gently corrected; but she took that badly.. But then there was my first grade nun who comforted a boy who had just been told his mother died. Sr. Barbara Ann (bless you, wherever you are) who gave me fifty cents to rent real shoe skates at the class outing at the roller rink..They taught me to read and write! And, I hope, to be a decent person in society’s eyes and the eyes of God.
@emptc12 – No, no, my memory is very clear: I still have the scar under my chin from Sister Francis when she upper cut me with a fist full of keys, all for talking to a friend while standing in line to exit church after the daily morning mass. I bled profusely, was not allowed to seek treatment, and the bleeding finally stopped when the blood coagulated with the tissues, stuck there until the scab fell off.Talk all you want to about the sociological implications, it was still pure evil. I would have thought Sister Mary Margaret’s “heaven” would have been a few floors further down.
@ emptc12: True words. I know there have been abusive nuns and priests out there and thankfully I’ve never experienced any of them. I am saddened by the hatred for and ignorance of the Catholic faith.
A Father was my teacher, and we had to pull our pants and undershorts down before he would spank us with his bare hand gently, I wonder if he is in Hell?
so, the priests who have sex with boys would then be “gay” pedophiles and be twice as bad as regular gays… The pope needs to STFU, convert all the gold and jewels they are hoarding, and actually help the poor as they were established to do. At least that is what Peter and Paul set out to do. But then again, what are you going to do with fantasy stories
Not going to comment on the strip per se…was never Catholic. My wife went to Holy Roman Catholic school and she recounts nuns who were terrors and others who were angels.-But, just for rebuttal…There is a God, there is a Devil, there is a heaven, and hell is not a place of torment, it’s just a symbolic place we go when we die. No fairy tale, but fact.
I went to a public school, but one of my teachers had gone to Catholic schools. She carried a ruler with the metal edge and used the edge on the boys. Sometimes it drew blood. She is the reason that I am so set against religion and prayer in school. Each of her classes started with the Lord’s Prayer. If you didn’t say it loud enough, you got your knuckles busted. One girl who refused to say it because her church did not use that prayer, had her head banged against the blackboard until the board broke.
My only continuing encounter with teaching nuns back when they still wore medieval habits. I was surprised they weren’t Klan hoods. Interestingly, I was working my way through Methodist seminary teaching square dancing at a black high school. The nuns were all white and as vicious as legend.
Racism is rife in Catholic schools. The teaching is great in the affluent (white) areas, but in the poor areas, they teach to kneel down and accept your fate. In the 70s in New Orleans, they had white Catholic schools and black Catholic schools, complete with all black nuns.
Communism or being a Protestant were the worst thing of which you could accuse someone.
and you just stood there and watched (not sure which punctuation to use ? or ! or .) no matter what behavior is considered acceptable relative to the era and/or location – that behavior was not acceptable. no job or grade is worth allowing something like that to occur. perhaps i’m just insubordinate by nature.11 hours later and i’m the first to comment as such?
not Irish. Just someone who is thankful to be in the Catholic faith. I think too many people are so busy focusing on the forest that they don’t see the tree.
To be fair, when I transferred to the public school in 9th grade, I was two years ahead of all the other students in all subjects,,,,…Kinda made me look smart…At St. Helen, I was a C student. At North Junior High I was an A – B student, without even trying……It helped a lot because girls were becoming a distraction big time…
@emptc12The ones you seem to be recalling here came from another era when discipline was implicitly supported by parents and neighborhoods. They might have been mainly one nationality, too. A kid messed up at school, and he not only shamed his parents but also his neighborhood. The nuns administered only the first stage of punishment. And it was often corporal, as was the current style..
I read all the comments and had to come back to yours, as being the most prescient.I was a product of Catholic schools from Grammar School through College ( including a couple of years in a minor Seminary ).Yes, the good sisters were not afraid of sparing the rod – or yardstick,or pointer,or huge rosary beads or leather straps. But as kids, we knew we were guilty until proved innocent. If I went home and complained that Sister Mary of the Winding Sheet had hit me, I’d get it twice as hard at home.For all the Bubble Parents and the " Political Correct" out there, let me say that, in the opinion of an old ( agnostic ) curmudgeon, painful to me that those days were , on more than one occasion, it was a positive learning experience – crazy as that may sound !!
“You intrigue me….like that matters to you.”-You seem easily intrigued, because I don’t think of myself as being very intriguing. Flattering, though. Does it matter to me? Some. Most of my comments are not meant to be taken as self-righteous/egotistical trumpeting, but the commenters cannot see me, my face, my demeanor, attitude, smile, twinkling mischievous eyes, etc, so they assume I am spoiling for a fight. Not so.-To make it easy for you, here’s the deal: I am a spiritual person who sees that most religions do a lot of bad things. So, if someone wants to bash religion, fine with me. I might demure out of respect, or might add historical facts to the mix. I study the Bible daily and in great detail. So, when someone makes false assertions about it, I try to take into consideration what I know about that commenter, or how agregious the misunderstanding might be…often I will defend the Bible. When people state “there is no god” (not, “I believe there is no god”), then I am always ready to aver the opposite.-I am really not political, but most political commenters believe otherwise. My motivation for most issues is a moral one, not a political one. For instance: I don’t like guns. This is not political; it merely underlines that killing and hurting people is morally wrong to me and guns are the most common weapon of choice to do just that.-It’s really very simple, and hardly intriguing at all. What about you? Tell a little about yourself. This understanding can, and should IMHO, be mutual.
As a recovering Catholic, I realize that the abuse I received from nuns was only a result of their sexual frustration. Just as priests molest altar boys. God, the universe, he/she, did not design the human body as non-sexual. Most religions take nature and attempt to twist it into something it is not. The great female/male energy that exists in all living things doesn’t claim right or wrong, only the egoic mind does as well as religions fanatics.
pouncingtiger over 11 years ago
One man’s heaven is another man’s hell.
runar over 11 years ago
Ex-Catholicism is the world’s fastest-growing non-religion. NeoPagans say the ex-Catholics make the best Wiccans because they understand ritual.
x_Tech over 11 years ago
runar over 11 years ago
This is reminiscent of the Night Gallery episode Hell’s Bells in which John Astin plays Randy Miller, a hippie who dies and ends up in a parlor room with a hick couple who are endlessly showing slides from their vacation, accompanied by a gramophone playing corny music. Then a devil shows up and explains to Randy that he’s stuck here for eternity, but that he’s in hell while the hicks are in heaven. It ends with Randy banging his head on the floor yelling, “Bummer! Bummer! Bummer!”Eternal boredom is far more terrifying than fire and brimstone.
Bill Thompson over 11 years ago
Okay, I can believe that nuns would be on Satan’s payroll. Nepotism works fine for some people. But what’s this about having a clear list of rules on the wall? Where I went you didn’t learn the rules until after you were punished for breaking them.
el8 over 11 years ago
I’ve applied for “Greeter” at the gates of Hell just to smile at those who thought they weren’t going to end up there.
Varnes over 11 years ago
K thru 8, St. Helen, ……………flunk a math test, purgatory…But fortunately you could go to confession to get the grade changed….
Varnes over 11 years ago
Having been taught by the Sisters of Charity in the fifties, I’ve often wondered which ones were actually former ex-German SS agents….on the run….‘splains a lot….3 Hail Marys and 3 Our Fathers…..Solves all of a 10 year old’s problems with the system…Like spelling tests….
Varnes over 11 years ago
Wow! An actual black board! Can I clean the erasures?….I promise not to wack ’em against the wall….I have now taught with three types of “blackboards”….Black board/green board, felt board and Smart Board….Hope I live long enough to wrtite in the air….
vwdualnomand over 11 years ago
or, that sister mary margaret did some things that violated her vows like doing stuff to kids and that is why she is in hell. there is no forgiveness for what many of the clergy of what they have done to kids. boston, la, milwaukee, chicago, belgium, australia, uk, ireland, canada, etc…but, the pope says that gays are the worst people on the face of the earth? what can expect from someone who was in the hitler youth?
roctor over 11 years ago
For those unpublished laws,there was always the letter of understanding.
flyertom over 11 years ago
If you messed up in class, my fifth grade teacher/nun would collect all the rulers in the row in which you were seated – and no one had those wimpy plastic ones – and smote you about the knuckles with what resembled a 2 × 4.Yes, I do believe they were formerly employed at Dachau.
griffon8 over 11 years ago
Reminds me how it’s said that dog heaven is squirrel hell.
emptc12 over 11 years ago
Very few nuns were sadists. It’s the way children remember them, I suppose. The ones you seem to be recalling here came from another era when discipline was implicitly supported by parents and neighborhoods. They might have been mainly one nationality, too. A kid messed up at school, and he not only shamed his parents but also his neighborhood. The nuns administered only the first stage of punishment. And it was often corporal, as was the current style..After WWII, neighborhoods became more diverse but these same nuns continued to teach. But their disciplinary methods were obsolete. Gradually, they were considered brutal and unfair. It must have bewildered them. Instead of children being ponies to be broken, human puppies to be trained, they were miniature citizens to be respected by default. .Societal attitudes changed, and who’s to say what is the correct way? Personally, I think corporal punishment was never the correct method. But for most of history it was acceptable..And also, were these older nuns trained to handle the mental illnesses that we now diagnose in children? If Johnny can’t read, now we check if he is dyslexic or autistic or is abused at home. I had seen certain nuns cajole and badger kids to shamed tears, probably not aware it wasn’t properly a discipline problem..I know some of you have amusing memories, some bad. But I hope you also have some respectful ones, too. Non-catholics in my neighborhood said very rude things, as for instance telling their children that nuns were witches. It made me sick, as some of my favorite people were nuns. And then there was that nasty remark that they were lesbians or couldn’t find real men to marry so they “married Jesus.”.Having worked in a parish in later life I knew these women as human beings. Some were saintly, some were smart and would have succeeded in “the real world.” They were often brilliant administrators, more so than the parish priests who got the glory. They were never fully appreciated. But once vocations in the teaching orders declined, that was pretty much the end of so many parochial schools. Nuns worked for room and board, and God..Sorry to be so serious. It’s a fun cartoon, and I sometimes talk with people who survived the “atrocities” of our grade-school nuns..I, too, remember some nuns with amusement. There was “Sr. Louise Grinchen,” who was a dead shot at 30 feet with an eraser. “Sister Mary Larry,” twenty-five-cubic-feet of fury who looked like Spring Byington but could be scathingly sarcastic. My seventh-grade nun who was unqualified to teach science and whose mistakes I gently corrected; but she took that badly.. But then there was my first grade nun who comforted a boy who had just been told his mother died. Sr. Barbara Ann (bless you, wherever you are) who gave me fifty cents to rent real shoe skates at the class outing at the roller rink..They taught me to read and write! And, I hope, to be a decent person in society’s eyes and the eyes of God.
elbeck over 11 years ago
@emptc12 – No, no, my memory is very clear: I still have the scar under my chin from Sister Francis when she upper cut me with a fist full of keys, all for talking to a friend while standing in line to exit church after the daily morning mass. I bled profusely, was not allowed to seek treatment, and the bleeding finally stopped when the blood coagulated with the tissues, stuck there until the scab fell off.Talk all you want to about the sociological implications, it was still pure evil. I would have thought Sister Mary Margaret’s “heaven” would have been a few floors further down.
dabugger over 11 years ago
oh how true……
Lefty2 over 11 years ago
@ emptc12: True words. I know there have been abusive nuns and priests out there and thankfully I’ve never experienced any of them. I am saddened by the hatred for and ignorance of the Catholic faith.
puddlesplatt over 11 years ago
A Father was my teacher, and we had to pull our pants and undershorts down before he would spank us with his bare hand gently, I wonder if he is in Hell?
tedunn5453 over 11 years ago
so, the priests who have sex with boys would then be “gay” pedophiles and be twice as bad as regular gays… The pope needs to STFU, convert all the gold and jewels they are hoarding, and actually help the poor as they were established to do. At least that is what Peter and Paul set out to do. But then again, what are you going to do with fantasy stories
Vonne Anton over 11 years ago
Not going to comment on the strip per se…was never Catholic. My wife went to Holy Roman Catholic school and she recounts nuns who were terrors and others who were angels.-But, just for rebuttal…There is a God, there is a Devil, there is a heaven, and hell is not a place of torment, it’s just a symbolic place we go when we die. No fairy tale, but fact.
Justice22 over 11 years ago
I went to a public school, but one of my teachers had gone to Catholic schools. She carried a ruler with the metal edge and used the edge on the boys. Sometimes it drew blood. She is the reason that I am so set against religion and prayer in school. Each of her classes started with the Lord’s Prayer. If you didn’t say it loud enough, you got your knuckles busted. One girl who refused to say it because her church did not use that prayer, had her head banged against the blackboard until the board broke.
hippogriff over 11 years ago
My only continuing encounter with teaching nuns back when they still wore medieval habits. I was surprised they weren’t Klan hoods. Interestingly, I was working my way through Methodist seminary teaching square dancing at a black high school. The nuns were all white and as vicious as legend.
pcolli over 11 years ago
I believe Italy didn’t get rid of the Inquisition until WELL into the 20th century.
Caddy57 over 11 years ago
Ahh yes ! the fat penguin from Blues Brothers….I remember that movie well….Ha Ha Ha!
route66paul over 11 years ago
Anyone over 50 who attended Catholic primary school can relate. I still have nightmares.
route66paul over 11 years ago
Racism is rife in Catholic schools. The teaching is great in the affluent (white) areas, but in the poor areas, they teach to kneel down and accept your fate. In the 70s in New Orleans, they had white Catholic schools and black Catholic schools, complete with all black nuns.
Communism or being a Protestant were the worst thing of which you could accuse someone.
Rickapolis over 11 years ago
A nun in hell? I knew our Pastor was right about the Catholics.
ramonesfan over 11 years ago
Sister Mary Elephant (same school Cheech & Chong went to)
Lynda Dahl Premium Member over 11 years ago
I love the sign on her desk!
neeeurothrush over 11 years ago
and you just stood there and watched (not sure which punctuation to use ? or ! or .) no matter what behavior is considered acceptable relative to the era and/or location – that behavior was not acceptable. no job or grade is worth allowing something like that to occur. perhaps i’m just insubordinate by nature.11 hours later and i’m the first to comment as such?
Lefty2 over 11 years ago
not Irish. Just someone who is thankful to be in the Catholic faith. I think too many people are so busy focusing on the forest that they don’t see the tree.
Varnes over 11 years ago
To be fair, when I transferred to the public school in 9th grade, I was two years ahead of all the other students in all subjects,,,,…Kinda made me look smart…At St. Helen, I was a C student. At North Junior High I was an A – B student, without even trying……It helped a lot because girls were becoming a distraction big time…
Linguist over 11 years ago
@emptc12The ones you seem to be recalling here came from another era when discipline was implicitly supported by parents and neighborhoods. They might have been mainly one nationality, too. A kid messed up at school, and he not only shamed his parents but also his neighborhood. The nuns administered only the first stage of punishment. And it was often corporal, as was the current style..
I read all the comments and had to come back to yours, as being the most prescient.I was a product of Catholic schools from Grammar School through College ( including a couple of years in a minor Seminary ).Yes, the good sisters were not afraid of sparing the rod – or yardstick,or pointer,or huge rosary beads or leather straps. But as kids, we knew we were guilty until proved innocent. If I went home and complained that Sister Mary of the Winding Sheet had hit me, I’d get it twice as hard at home.For all the Bubble Parents and the " Political Correct" out there, let me say that, in the opinion of an old ( agnostic ) curmudgeon, painful to me that those days were , on more than one occasion, it was a positive learning experience – crazy as that may sound !!
alviebird over 11 years ago
Why? Because it’s “un-PC” to disagree with minority groups? I know it’s unlikely, but that’s what you seem to be saying.
Vonne Anton over 11 years ago
“You intrigue me….like that matters to you.”-You seem easily intrigued, because I don’t think of myself as being very intriguing. Flattering, though. Does it matter to me? Some. Most of my comments are not meant to be taken as self-righteous/egotistical trumpeting, but the commenters cannot see me, my face, my demeanor, attitude, smile, twinkling mischievous eyes, etc, so they assume I am spoiling for a fight. Not so.-To make it easy for you, here’s the deal: I am a spiritual person who sees that most religions do a lot of bad things. So, if someone wants to bash religion, fine with me. I might demure out of respect, or might add historical facts to the mix. I study the Bible daily and in great detail. So, when someone makes false assertions about it, I try to take into consideration what I know about that commenter, or how agregious the misunderstanding might be…often I will defend the Bible. When people state “there is no god” (not, “I believe there is no god”), then I am always ready to aver the opposite.-I am really not political, but most political commenters believe otherwise. My motivation for most issues is a moral one, not a political one. For instance: I don’t like guns. This is not political; it merely underlines that killing and hurting people is morally wrong to me and guns are the most common weapon of choice to do just that.-It’s really very simple, and hardly intriguing at all. What about you? Tell a little about yourself. This understanding can, and should IMHO, be mutual.
Corey Cohen over 11 years ago
“If Heaven is guilt, no sex and no show Then I’m not sure if I really wanna go, Oh”The Rainmakers
jkhandy over 11 years ago
As a recovering Catholic, I realize that the abuse I received from nuns was only a result of their sexual frustration. Just as priests molest altar boys. God, the universe, he/she, did not design the human body as non-sexual. Most religions take nature and attempt to twist it into something it is not. The great female/male energy that exists in all living things doesn’t claim right or wrong, only the egoic mind does as well as religions fanatics.