Catholic Nun Quotes

Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

Religious freedom doesn't include the freedom to disregard the law and restrict another's freedom to believe and act differently. No one's forcing Catholic nuns to practice birth control, or priests to wear condoms (good idea tho). If you really feel your religious beliefs conflict with the mandates of running a business, the solution is simple: Get your ass out of the boardroom and back to the pulpit (where it belongs).

I'll bet the Catholic Church lost out on a lot of would-be nuns when they started dressing like ordinary meter maids.

[There is a] kind of all-embracing universality evident in Mother Teresa’s prayer: “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” Not just fellow nuns, Catholics, Calcuttans, Indians. The whole world. It gives me pause to realize that, were such a prayer said by me and answered by God, I would afterward possess a heart so open that even hate-driven zealots would fall inside... [My] sense of the world as a gift, my sense of a grace operative in this world despite its terrors, propels me to allow the world to open my heart still wider, even if the openness comes by breaking—for I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful.

In the words of Pope John Paul II at the canonization of St. Edith Stein—a Catholic Carmelite nun who died in Auschwitz because of her Catholic faith and her Jewish descent—“Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.

I remember my mother telling me that, when she was a little girl in Catholic school, the nuns used to hit her left hand every time she wrote with it. Nowadays, if a teacher did that, she'd probably be arrested for child abuse. The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually be like handwriting: there's no right or wrong way to do it. We're all just wired differently. It's also worth noting that, when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he's right or left handed. After all, does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

People always ask me if I hate the nuns. Do I make my movies extra dirty to piss them off? I always say no, that's not the point. To a Catholic, a movie is only dirty if it makes you want to have sex more. If it makes you feel sick, disgusted, ashamed of your own body, then it's not a dirty movie at all. It's a Catholic movie. And I make very Catholic movies.

Unfortunately, in America, babies are not found in cola cans. I asked my mother when I was four, and she said they came from eggs laid by rabbis. If you aren't Jewish, they're laid by Catholic nuns. If you're an atheist, they're laid by dirty, lonely prostitutes.

The former Catholic nun (who oughtta know about guilt, after all) wouldn’t hear of it. “Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress. Don’t fall for it, my dear.

I didn't play practical jokes at home. I had a strict upbringing, which is part of my rebellion. I was raised Catholic and went to parochial school, which is why priests and nuns appear in my movies a lot, and I don't have very much nice to say about them.

He was the epitome of perfection in his six-foot-two, incredibly toned, smells-good-even-when-he-sweats, senior body and he was off limits. If Dad even got a hint that I liked Tyson, I’d be sent off to Catholic school where I’d be forced to become a nun.

Dorothy Day, the Catholic nun and social activist, admonished herself much the same. “Turn off your radio,” she wrote, “put away your daily paper. Read one review of events and spend time reading.” Books, spend time reading books—that’s what she meant. Books full of wisdom.

I'd heard a Catholic nun on TV once saying that bearing suffering was the route to grace. I remembered Fluff saying: If there's a God he's addicted to faith. Because without evil there's no need for faith. I can't get excited about a God who's divinity depends on a drug habit.

But are you glad you went to college? Was it a good experience?” I suppose it was. Althought I can’t remember a single thing I learned. Except for Latin, and that’s only because the nuns literally beat it into us and I use it sometimes for the crossword.” There were nuns at Radcliffe?” Yes, it was all nuns.” Are you sure? At Radcliffe?” Maybe it was high school.” But you aren’t Catholic,” I said. “I don’t think you ever went to a parochial school.” Well, I distinctly remember nuns with sticks walking up and down the aisles as we recited Latin. Maybe it was a show I was in, but I doubt it because nuns don’t beat children in musicals.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

But for all his suicide gestures, the fact was that Charlie wouldn’t kill himself, not really; the nuns in Catholic school had taught him that suicide was a sin, and Charlie didn’t want to end up in purgatory.10 But he could make himself sick, and in many ways, sick was better. Nobody loves you the way they do when you’re dying.

New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.

When you're a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you "offer it up", as a sacrificial gift.

I was sent out of county to Mater Misericordiæ, an orphanage run by Catholic nuns in Phoenix.

It was at that moment that something bizarrely divine happened. Something I could have almost blown off if it hadn’t happened before my eyes. Two nuns walked in the door with their arms loaded down with packages. I’d never seen shopping nuns before, but it was all the sign I needed. “I want to go to school at Saint Catherine’s.” Mom gasped. “That all girls school?” “Yes.” “That Catholic school?” “Yes!” I continued looking at the nuns. One of them caught my eye, and she smiled. I returned her smile. Mom glanced over her shoulder. “Are you trying to tell me you want to become a nun? Because if you are, I’m taking you to the fucking hospital right now!

The rules about communion at Friday mass, for example, made absolutely no sense. We’d be in there for an hour of kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, and by the end of it I’d be starving, but I was never allowed to take communion, because I wasn’t Catholic. The other kids could eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, but I couldn’t. And Jesus’s blood was grape juice. I loved grape juice. Grape juice and crackers—what more could a kid want? And they wouldn’t let me have any. I’d argue with the nuns and the priest all the time. “Only Catholics can eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, right?” “Yes.” “But Jesus wasn’t Catholic.” “No.” “Jesus was Jewish.” “Well, yes.” “So you’re telling me that if Jesus walked into your church right now, Jesus would not be allowed to have the body and blood of Jesus?” “Well…uh…um…” They never had a satisfactory reply. One morning before mass I decided, I’m going to get me some Jesus blood and Jesus body. I snuck behind the altar and I drank the entire bottle of grape juice and I ate the entire bag of Eucharist to make up for all the other times that I couldn’t. In

I knew this one Catholic boy, Louis Shaney, when I was at the Whooton School. Then, after a while, right in the middle of the goddam conversation, he asked me, "Did you happen to notice where the Catholic church is in town, by any chance?" The thing was, you could tell by the way he asked me that he was trying to find out if I was a Catholic. He really was. Not that he was prejudiced or anything, but he just wanted to know. He was enjoying the conversation about tennis and all, but you could tell he would've enjoyed it more if I was a Catholic and all. That kind of stuff drives me crazy. I'm not saying it ruined our conversation or anything—it didn't—but it sure as hell didn't do it any good. That's why I was glad those two nuns didn't ask me if I was a Catholic. It wouldn't have spoiled the conversation if they had, but it would've been different, probably. I'm not saying I blame Catholics. I don't. I'd be the same way, probably, if I was a Catholic. It's just like those suitcases I was telling you about, in a way. All I'm saying is that it's no good for a nice conversation. That's all I'm saying.

I hear what they're saying about faith, about the priests at our church and how they relate to women, about the bishops and cardinals above the priests and how they ignore women, about the things they are reading and thinking about. And I realize several things in rapid succession: you can be Catholic and feminist. You can be Catholic and lesbian. You can be Catholic and a straight female and not have kids. You can be Catholic and have children but wonder if they should be Catholic. You can be Catholic and believe in better access to birth control, especially in impoverished and AIDS-ravaged communities. You can be Catholic and female and not be a nun and still be a leader in the church. Women, as it turns out, are part of the priestly class. It's just that they aren't allowed to minister publicly. They do it in places like here, and in hospitals, classrooms, homeless shelters, and in any room, really, where there is someone who needs healing.

I wasn't too good at playing games, but I did love reading very much and would have spent my life at it. I had human angels, fortunately for me, to guide me in the choice of the books which, while being entertaining, nourished both my heart and my mind.

Catholic Church—with a few regrettable exceptions—has almost always been on the side of the poor, which has gained it enormous respect and sympathy. During the dictatorship, many priests and nuns took on the task of helping the victims of repression, and they paid dearly for it. As Pinochet said in 1979, “the only persons going around crying for democracy to be restored in Chile are the politicians and one or two priests.” That was the period when the generals posited that Chile was blessed with “a totalitarian democracy.

To most Westerners, the Philippines suffers from a lack of exoticism. Simply put, Philippine culture is just too accessible. To a young Western backpacker, sharing a bus ride with a saffron-robed Buddhist monk reading the sacred Pali texts is exotic. Sitting next to a Catholic nun reading the Bible is a lot less so. When the Buddhist monk takes out his prayer beads, closes his eyes, and chants under his breath, the Westerner swoons. When the Catholic nun pulls out her rosary and says her Hail Marys, the backpacker squirms.

Russian bolshevism, replacing eastern Christendom by the grim religiosity of Marx, produced a caricature of the evangelical counsels with many a diabolical aspect. There is a good deal of “communism” in monasteries and convents, yet this is based upon a voluntary renunciation of perfect human rights. On account of our free will we can make supreme sacrifices which ennobles our very existence. Bolshevism on the other hand forces us brutally into a parody of monastic life amidst fellow monks and fellow nuns who hate their habit and sigh under the ferocious tyranny of their pseudo-abbot. This evil distortion of an otherwise Christian ideal is more satanic than wanton, a thoroughly pagan and diabolic opposition to Christian existence. This explains also the reason why the Vatican has found stronger words against “altruistic” bolshevism than against egoistic capitalism

Each simplest act, each hidden intention, had to be cut to the Rule and polished and perfected like the tiny stones of a mysterious mosaic which had no meaning when looked at one by one, except that one by one they fitted together and suggested a pattern. The pattern was the formation of the nun but she was too close to see it.

Marie Thereze, a Catholic nun, wrote in her church’s paper: ‘Here is what the Israelis do not want us to see. Three villages destroyed systematically by TNT and bulldozers.’22 She noted that the villagers were forced to leave in a hurry, unable to take anything with them. Their fields were deserted in the middle of work and she could see ‘tractors from nearby Kibbutzim that were quick to cultivate the villages’ lands’. An Israeli journalist, Amos Kenan, had also witnessed the expulsion, but his report was only published thirty years later in Haaretz. Kenan was one of the soldiers who took part in the demolition of Beit Nuba, and he wrote: ‘We were told the three villages have to be destroyed for strategic reasons.

We lit candles. Hema fell to her knees, the flame throwing a flickering light on her face. Her lips moved. She believed in every kind of deity, and in reincarnation and resurrection–she knew no contradictions in these areas. How I admired her faith, her lack of self-consciousness—a Hindu lighting candles to a Carmelite nun in a Catholic church. I knelt, too. I addressed God and sister Mary Joseph Praise and Shiva and Ghosh—all the beings I carried with me in the flesh and in spirit. Thank you for letting me be alive, letting me see this marble dream. I felt a great peace, a sense that coming to this spot had completed the circuit, and now a blocked current would flow and I could rest. If ecstasy meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me

Sister Boom Boom—a half-Catholic, half-Jewish drag queen named Jack Fertig, who wore a whore’s makeup and a nun’s habit and vamped it up with the other political pranksters in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was an especially aggravating thorn in Feinstein’s side. Boom Boom ran a remarkably aggressive campaign against Feinstein during her 1983 reelection bid, under the slogan “Nun of the Above,” eventually winning twenty-three thousand votes.

I wonder has Harry still got his gold piece,’ Spareribs said. ‘What gold piece?’ ‘When a Jew boy is born they put a gold piece in the bank for him. That’s what Jews do.’ ‘Shucks. You got it mixed up,’ she said (Mick). ‘It’s Catholics you’re thinking about. Catholics buy a pistol for a baby soon as it’s born. Some day the Catholics mean to start a war and kill everybody else.’ ‘Nuns give me a funny feeling,’ Spareribs said. ‘It scares me when I see one on the street.

When there is abuse by itself it's scary enough. When there is abuse within a religious setting it is so terrifying to people. Look how long its taken the Ryan report of 2009 took till then to talk about ritualistic kinds of abuse children in Ireland went through at the hands of nuns and priests, so nobody can bear it when its linked to religion, but when it's linked to religion that is not mainstream it seems to frighten people more. As if yes, abuse exists, Satanism exists, but you can't have Satanist abuse.

I flipped through one story after another until finally I came to a story about a fig tree. This fig grew on a green lawn between the house of a Jewish man and a convent, and the Jewish man and a beautiful dark nun kept meeting at the tree to pick the ripe figs, until one day they saw an egg hatching in a bird's nest on a branch of the tree, and as they watched the little bird peck its way out of the egg, they touched the backs of their hands together, and then the nun didn't come out to pick figs with the Jewish man any more but a mean-faced Catholic kitchen maid came to pick them instead and counted up the figs the man picked after they were both through to be sure he hadn't picked any more than she had, and the man was furious. I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig tree in winter under the snow and then the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.

to express my differences with the Church. Contraceptives save the lives of millions of women and children. That’s a medical fact. And that’s why I believe all women everywhere, and of any faith, should have information on the healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies, and access to contraceptives if they want them. But there is a big difference between believing in family planning and taking a lead advocacy role for a cause that goes against a teaching of my church. That is not something I was eager to do. When I was trying to decide if I should go ahead, I talked it over with my parents, with priests and nuns I’ve known since childhood, with some Catholic scholars, and with Bill and the kids. One of my questions was “Can you take actions in conflict with a teaching of the Church and still be part of the Church?” That depends, I was told, on whether you are true to your conscience, and whether your conscience is informed by the Church. In my case, the teachings of the Catholic Church helped form my conscience and led me into this work in the first place. Faith in action to me means going to the margins of society, seeking out those who are isolated, and bringing them back in. I was putting my faith into action when I went into the field and met the women who asked me about contraceptives. So, yes, there is a Church teaching against contraceptives—but there is another Church teaching, which is love of neighbor.

When Abbess Ebba received tidings of the near approach of the pagan hordes, who had already wrecked vengeance upon ecclesiastics, monks, and consecrated virgins, she summoned her nuns to Chapter, and in a moving discourse exhorted them to preserve at any cost the treasure of their chastity. Then seizing a razor, and calling upon her daughters to follow her heroic example, she mutilated her face in order to inspire the barbarian invaders with horror at the sight. The nuns without exception courageously followed the example of their abbess. When the Danes broke into the cloister and saw the nuns with faces thus disfigured, they fled in panic. Their leaders, burning with rage, sent back some of their number to set fire to the monastery, and thus the heroic martyrs perished in the common ruin of their house.

the setting in the rectory was stunning. We sat down to a fully set table, with fine china and crisp, white linen. Whenever the monsignor wanted anything, he would ring a little silver bell and this old housekeeper would come shuffling in, like a servant. Every time I tried to engage the monsignor in some serious discussion, he would pick up that bell and ring it, and the little old woman would come in to deal with his every whim. And so I’m sitting there, not only stunned at the level, the position in life, that they held themselves at, but how we in the Church allowed them to do this, that no one was saying, ‘Hey, this is wrong. These guys shouldn’t be living like this while the nuns don’t have health insurance.’ But what I realized that day, as the monsignor kept ringing that bell, was how distant, how aloof, how detached the hierarchy of the Church had become. They lived separate lives, completely disconnected from the lives of the laity, and we had allowed it to happen.” Eventually,

Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?” “He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.” “No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.” “Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.” “Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.” “The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!” “Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.” “How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!” “Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.” “All Christians must perish! Such is our code.” “Your code is miscoded.” “What of the Unforgettable Hate?” “Forget about it.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

As a sexually active teen in a Catholic family, I was given no sex information other than the nun who advised our 8th grade class to “think of a hamburger when you have impure thoughts.

Much water has flown under Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass simpler and generally better than the Tridentine; but the banality and vulgarity of the translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and little Greek are of a super-market quality which is quite unacceptable. Hand-shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older courtesies; kneeling is out, queueing is in, and the general tone is rather like a BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots (so however will they learn to put away childish things?) The clouds of incense have dispersed, together with many hidebound, blinkered and repressive attitudes, and we are left with social messages of an almost over-whelming progressiveness. The Church has proved she is not moribund. ‘All shall be well,’ I feel, ‘and all manner of things shall be well,’ so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.

Twelve secret presses printed the text in Germany. A clandestine network of couriers carried copies to every parish. Catholic youth used backpack caravans and hiked through the Bavarian Alps, the Black Forest, and along the Rhine. Altar boys pedaled bicycles at night. High school athletes ran across barley farms. Nuns rode motorcycles to remote villages. In church confessional booths, the couriers delivered their cargo to priests. The priests locked the text in their tabernacles, and on Palm Sunday, they read it from every pulpit in the Reich.29

Tony glanced over at Jade’s expression and laid a hand on his shoulder. “All right. This nun gets into a cab, and the cabdriver asks her what’s up with the celibacy vow thing, right? So the nun says, ‘Well, maybe I’d consider having an affair, but the man would have to be Catholic, unmarried, and not have any children.’ So the cabbie says, ‘Well that describes me perfectly. Why don’t you come on up here?’ And the nun goes in the front seat and gives him a blow job.” “That was quick.” “Indeed. So she finishes up and the guy starts laughing, and she asks him, ‘What’s so funny?’ And he says, ‘Well, I’m Protestant, and I’m married with two kids.’ And the nun looks at him for a moment, then shrugs and says, ‘Well, that’s okay, my name’s Fred and I’m on my way to a costume party.’ 

The Catholic Church wants to see child abuse by priests and nuns as simply an issue of some very bad priests and nuns. What it needs to understand is that the nature of religion compounded the problem. It allowed priests to have a status that placed them above suspicion. It fostered a myth that celibacy meant purity. It had schools that enforced authority by beating children and taught that authority figures should not be questioned. Men like Smyth and Steele will have understood the esteem in which priests were held and seen themselves as untouchable. They had every reason to, as the Catholic Church did a great deal to defend and enable them.

Just become a nun. You can be a doctor nun. A nun doctor. You will be married to the Lord, have renewed virginity, and your precious guilt. A catholic nun doctor...a new dream. “Dr.

Even the most perfidious plot to destroy the Church from within will not succeed. Hence, our Mother the Church will answer with the voice of her innocent children, of her pure young men and virgins, of her fathers and mothers of families, of her courageous and knightly lay apostles and apologists, of her chaste and zealous priests and bishops, of her religious sisters and especially of her cloistered nuns, the spiritual gems of the Church: “They could not prevail over me!” Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!

Dirty stick. That’s what Sister Muriel, one of the nuns at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage, used to call the male penis. She always made that distinction - the ‘male’ penis, as if it was necessary.

Two weeks ago we learned about the "cephalophore" saints like St. Denis here who carry their own heads... if you love the kind of stuff I do, being Catholic is the way to go... that is... if you can overlook the nuns.

They said I could leave if you came and picked me up." He dropped his voice to a whisper and pulled the camera closer. His pupils were blown wide, almost touching the rims of his irises. "The angry penguins scare me." Jane pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ward off a headache. "They've given you pain medicine, haven't they?" "My state of medication does not make them any less scary. Tiny, angry, little birds." He was talking about the ancient Catholic nuns of Mercy Hospital. They were one of the few things on the planet that actually frightened Hal. She suspected he would be even more cavalier about getting hurt if there was a hospital other than Mercy to go to in Pittsburgh. "Please, please, please, please, please, please." Hal whimpered. "You've got the Fortress of Solitude. All those empty beds! Please!" "Fine. You can stay at my place. I'll come get you." She slapped down her hand, cutting the feed. The two men were staring at the display with surprise and amusement. "Who was that unfortunate fellow?" Nigel asked. "That's – that's the host of Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden, Hal Rogers. We had a rough shoot this morning." Taggart was clearly confused by the answer. Obviously he thought PB&G was a simple landscape show.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

as Barbara Tuchman, author of Distant Mirror, put it, “clerical celibacy was a joke.” Despite the previous ban on clerical marriages, nuns, monks, cardinals, priests, and other representatives of the holy cloth were frequently fraternizing in impious ways.

The following story is a little different from the usual stories concerning gold…. In 1599, Don Francisco Manzo de Contreras was sent to Cuba as King Phillip II’s Chief Justice, with a directive to stop the smuggling of gold and other valuables. He settled in the town of Remedios in Villa Clara Province, near the northern coast seaport town of Caibarién, and over time, he became very wealthy doing exactly what he had been sent to stop! He filled his chests with gold bullion, but the heavy, bulky gold is not something that can easily be taken with you! In 1776, his heirs were three Catholic nuns, who had stashed six chests of gold into the walls of the Santa Clara Convent. Being afraid of pirates, they commissioned their nephew Joseph Manzo de Contreras to take the gold across the Atlantic to be deposited in the Bank of England in London. Being an obedient nephew, according to him, he took the gold to England and followed his aunts’ instructions to the letter. Many years later, the half-forgotten fortune was handed down to Angel Contreras, who claimed that his great-grandfather, Joseph Manzo, once had a receipt for it. The receipt was handed down through the family and when his uncle took possession of this valuable paper, he hid it, attempting to protect the family treasure. Ultimately, he was murdered when he refused to tell the thieves where it was. Unfortunately, the receipt is now lost, and although the family has searched high and low for it, it has never been found. Angel lived in Majagua, Cuba, where his family worked at a candy factory. He claimed they looked everywhere for it, but the receipt was definitely gone! With almost six decades of communistic control, the family decided to lay low and do nothing more to find it. They feared that the State would take whatever inheritance was rightfully theirs, and they probably would be right. Some of the Manzo family have since left Cuba and now live in Florida. They staged protests at the British Consulate in Miami, accusing the Queen of having reached a deal with the Cuban government. They stated that what should have been their money, was sent to Fidel Castro. During these demonstrations, nine members of the family were arrested for causing disturbances but not much else came of their claim. The Bank of England stated that the story of lost gold is just a myth, and that they have no record of it. Although this is the sad ending to the story for now, the family is continuing with their claim. However without a receipt, it seems unlikely that they have much of a case! "They put him in a madhouse," Angel said, "and then they killed him. All for greed... they wanted the money." Angel Contreras, referring to what had happened to his uncle….

Petre, a British Roman Catholic nun and prolific author,

Nuns evidently did not evoke the same primitive angry dread as monks.

Given the devoutly Catholic household in which the family was raised, it is not especially surprising that two of Philip’s daughters became nuns: Mary, who entered St. Mary’s convent in Monroe and took the name Sister Christina, and Martha, later known as Sister Clementine.5 More unusual was the path followed by Philip’s daughter Frances. After finishing high school in two years, this brilliant young woman went on to the Detroit College of Law—this when only 5 percent of all American youths went to college.6 After graduating, she became a practicing attorney—one of only two hundred female lawyers in the entire country at the time—and, later, a founding member of the Women Lawyers Association of Michigan.7

He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease.

Aside from the base Christian norm, which we must all follow, modesty, prudence, decency, and proper decorum can vary in our state in life. God calls all to work for the same goal: that of eternity, the salvation of their souls, and the souls entrusted to them. Those called to married life must be holy models for their children and helpmates to their spouse. Those called to the religious life are to be obedient to their superiors and God. A married woman must practice a different form of modesty than a Nun, for example. A nun must obey the order’s rule, wear her habit, and obey her religious superior’s directions.

It is not surprising that what we wear in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament is different from what we wear in our own homes or swimming. This is simply having proper decorum; the Church does not call man to wear a suit and tie to bed or constantly in his own home. Nor would it be sensible for him to swim in such an outfit. Charity, decorum, and Christian decency demand that man appears well dressed for the occasion. The difference here is not simply “cultural” or “situational,” but a call to be charitable in our decorum, decency in our actions and dress, and humility as Catholics. Note how Police Officers are dressed while on duty, or Nuns in their habits and priests in their collar (and cassock, for Traditional priests).

The family who prays together, stays together,” they taught. The Prashaws also fought when we prayed. We learned our catechism at Catholic schools. The stories of saints inspired us. St. Francis, a lover of the poor and animals, was an early favourite of mine. A nun might whack the back of our heads when we slouched while kneeling. Marty endured a rap on the knuckles for writing with his left hand. Lefties were deemed “children of the devil;” in classical Latin, the word left is “sinister.” Still, all in all, it was not a bad thing to be taught one’s life had meaning, a purpose. Being good mattered. Life was about treating one another well.

There were hints of how different it might be for a girl in the Catholic Church. Religious sisters and other women friends would one day become my teachers on this gender schizophrenia. Nuns told girls they better leave room for the Holy Spirit when they danced with a boy. If you had trouble measuring the Holy Spirit, girls heard the instruction to leave room for a telephone book, presumably a Toronto or Montréal-size phone book. Good God, telephone books have all but disappeared. Is it any wonder the sexual revolution happened?

No human being can blindly accept authority in one area of life and become self-reliant in day-to-day decisions in the field of morals, politics and economics. The secular public school trains independent minds for leadership in every area of life; the parochial school trains for obedience to authority.… We must close the door tight against the present attempts of the Catholic hierarchy and reactionary Protestants to force our people to support sectarian schools whose rapid increase would destroy our secular school and tear our nation into irreconcilable factions. The costs of private and parochial education are mounting steadily. Few American girls wish to become nuns.…

I was cast as Agnes in a non-Equity production of Agnes of God and had to wear a nun’s habit. It was itchy black wool and smelled like mothballs. When I saw myself in the mirror with the wimple, I suddenly got it why women like chadors and burkas; they take the ego out of how you look. Then, playing a nun woke up the selfless me, the me who yearns to do good, who believes in the God of Love that Catholics (on my mother’s side) and Sikhs (like my paternal grandfather) believe in. It took me 3 years to get to seminary after Agnes (I had to get the acting bug out of my system), but the day I put on that habit I began moving toward ministry.

If I knew where the good songs were, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

Whereas Julian’s program failed and paganism came to nothing, Christian charity grew—expanding from local parishes to monasteries. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, monasteries had developed a harmonious system whereby the wealthy donated money for the care of the poor and the poor in return prayed for the souls of their benefactors. After the English Reformation, King Henry VIII’s suppression of the Catholic monasteries (1536, 1541) dealt a death blow to this equilibrium. His suppression affected not only the Catholic religious who worked and prayed in the monasteries, but also the poor who depended on the monks and nuns, creating a vacuum that needed to be filled. Edward and Elizabeth I filled that vacuum by enacting the Poor Laws, which taxed local parishes to provide for the poor. The Poor Laws were modified in the nineteenth century, and were eventually replaced by the modern welfare system during World War II.

I learned about dogma from experts. I started Catholic school in the first grade and got a heavy dose of it. In fourth grade the nuns used to tell us, 'Some of you will abandon the Church.' I always said, 'No, I never will, not me.' I was fanatically Catholic, praying all the time. My brother was even more fanatical; he used to walk around with pebbles in his shoes.

The Roman Catholic Church also suffered heavy losses - 422 Catholic priests, 962 Catholic monks and countless Catholic nuns and laypeople were killed.107

Italians were confined to the district by a combination of illiteracy and the constant tribute demanded by their wayward countrymen. It was a ghetto ruled by the Black Hand, a criminal organization with roots in Sicily. And though the mobsters carried black-handled revolvers as they conducted business in the neighborhood, the name Black Hand originated in the old country. Mob activity flourished during that era. A train of organized corruption ran from Cleveland to Canton to Steubenville. Cherry Street was the center of the Canton action, an avenue where racketeering joints and roving prostitutes vied for the same souls as St. Anthony’s Catholic Church.

Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s was a longtime favorite, along with an appreciation for Ingrid Bergman as a rather fetching nun. Grant tried not to think too deeply about a Lutheran pastor having the hots for a Catholic nun.

They were the daughters of the great Hollywood film noir director John Farrow, a devout Catholic as well as a boozing, brawling, womanizing piece of work. Robert Mitchum (who starred in Farrow’s nastiest and best noirs, Where Danger Lives and His Kind of Woman) said he was the only director who could outdrink him. When he wasn’t hitting the bar, Farrow liked to discuss theology with visiting nuns and priests.

as in the joke about the group of Hasids who show up to the Catholic ceremony of a nun being wed to Christ. They sit in the front row claiming they are relatives on the groom’s side.

Why would you force someone to become a priest or nun when it is rightly written in your holy scriptures that you must multiply?

Of the historic fault lines in Swiss society, the religious one is the least obvious today, mainly because it's the least clear-cut. There are French-speaking Protestants and German-speaking Catholics, and vice versa. [...] For most Swiss people, where you live, how you vote and what you speak are all more important. Having helped create the Switzerland of today, Christianity has moved from conflict to consensus. A Catholic nun walking through Bern as the Protestant cathedral's bells ring would have once been unthinkable; today it's normal. [... It's] a moment to cherish [...] because it shows what a society can achieve if it tries.

It was the unhappy (Protestant) Huguenots, notably after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, who had sought to escape France and settle in England. Now the picture had changed. France was no longer a Catholic enemy, but an enemy representing Unbelief who was thus an enemy of Catholicism. It was a country in which nuns and priests were likely to be murdered, or imprisoned and executed during the Terror of 1792.

The Reformation, which had necessitated the flight of the convents and their treasured nun–teachers from England, was a positive disadvantage to the cause of girls’ education – unless the girls could go abroad.

Graham Greene did not like Franco, but as a Catholic could hardly come out in favour of the Republicans. It is universally acknowledged that the Nationalists were guilty of more atrocities, but the Republicans had on their hands the murders of seven thousand secular priests, monks, and nuns – most of them in the first weeks of fighting.2 Greene’s sympathies were actually with the Basques, who supported the Republicans in exchange for regional autonomy, and in the late spring, at the time of the bombing of Guernica, he had an opportunity to fly into Bilbao as it prepared for a Nationalist assault.

There can be no doubt that the Spanish missionaries in the U.S. were much assisted in their efforts by many miracles, such as the one at Guadalupe. Most spectacular and best known of these is the experience of Venerable Maria de Agreda (1602-1665). At that time, the first Franciscan missionaries reached the tribes of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Much to their surprise, the padres found that a few of the tribes were already aware of Catholicism, knew its doctrines, and asked for Baptism. When asked how they knew, they replied that they had been taught by a lady in blue. Several of the Friars returned to Spain, and found Maria de Agreda, head of a convent of nuns who wore blue habits; she claimed to have bilocated to the New World to instruct Indians there. Questioned in detail about the appearances and customs of those she allegedly had taught, she described to them perfectly the tribes they had just left. The account is commemorated in a picture at the Cathedral of Fort Worth, Texas.

I’m not Catholic, but I read somewhere nuns are, statistically speaking, really happy. And they live super long lives. With other women. Caring for one another, not worrying about boys—well, except for Jesus.

Never fail to try again

I had some difficulties myself, even when I was a pious convent schoolgirl, with the notion of petitionary prayer. I used to pester the old nun, Sister Rita, who took us for Religious Instruction in the Fifth Form, with casuistical questions, like ‘What does God do if a farmer is praying for rain for his crops at the same time we’re praying for fine weather for the School Sports Day?’ Or more boldly, ‘Were German Catholics wasting their time praying for victory in the Second World War?’ ‘These things are mysteries, Helen Driscoll,’ Sister Rita would say, going a little red, ‘and will be revealed to us in the life to come.’ That kind of prayer now seems to me the purest superstition, and yet I miss it. It gave one something positive to do in threatening situations, it gave relief. I hate this state of just waiting helplessly to see how the dice will fall.

My affliction decided to join us, forcing me to push my toes on the floor as though I were trying to eject myself from the chair. I prayed she didn’t notice what the affliction was making me do. I half expected to be eaten alive or murdered and buried out back in the school yard. “I’m not afraid of you, ya know,” I said, although I was terrified of her. The words hurt her, but that wasn’t my intent. She turned her face and looked out the window into North Cliff Street. She knew what her face and twisted body looked like, and she probably knew what the kids said about her. It was probably an open wound for her and I had just tossed salt into it. I was instantly ashamed of what I done and tried to correct myself. I didn’t mean to be hurtful, because I knew what it was like to be ridiculed for something that was beyond one’s control, such as my affliction, and how it made me afraid to touch the chalk because the feel of chalk to people like me is overwhelming. If I had to write on the blackboard, I held the chalk with the cuff of my shirt and the class laughed. “You look good in a nun’s suit,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I meant well by it. She looked down at the black robe as if she were seeing it for the first time.

what are we to say about the Catholic military chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945? Father George Zabelka, chaplain for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb squadrons, later came to repent of his complicity in the bombing of civilians, but his account of that time is a stunning judgment on the church’s acquiescence in violence. To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as 1 see it…. I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best—at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…. Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord. I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point—so far.4 It is difficult to read such accounts without recalling the story of Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem, because “the things that make for peace” were hidden from their eyes (Luke 19:41

The news coverage, depending on who you believe, the last pope to take the name either did nothing about the Holocaust; said nothing about the Holocaust; or was actively responsible for the Holocaust.” Abasi said, “True. Before then, I did not know that every historian who specialized in Catholic history was a reject from the seminary, an ex-priest who married an ex-nun, or ‘Catholics’ who, mysteriously, support none of the teachings of the Catholic Church.” Wilhelmina

He was an indecent man, I told myself - prayerfully - and then I prayed for him to become decent.

[Martin Luther's] understanding of grace-based faith versus works-based faith was more than a personal revelation; it informed his entire rebellion against the church. After all, if human beings couldn't possibly earn salvation by their good works, if human beings had no righteousness of their own and were entirely dependent on Christ for their salvation and hope, where, then, did that leave good works like pilgrimages and fasting? Where did that leave the notion of purgatory? Where did that leave the monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity? Where did that leave the pope, with his sales of indulgences, and the priests, doling out penance in the confessionals? Luther came to believe that the church to which he had dedicated his life was built on sand, and each abuse, each indulgence, added an unsustainable weight to the structure. In his eyes, Romans 1:17 obliterated the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the moral theology of the nineteenth century, kissing with tongues was a mortal sin "in intent and in the deed itself.

More than that was the bottom-line fact that I didn’t want to play a cutesy version of a Catholic nun, wearing nothing but beige with never a thought of sex or a flirt with madness, two things that seemed much more interesting.

The Inside of Sister Linda’s Door In the poorest rural parts of Africa, it is still the nuns who maintain many basic health services. Some of these clever, hardworking, and pragmatic women became my closest colleagues. Sister Linda, whom I worked with in Tanzania, was a devout Catholic nun who dressed all in black and prayed three times a day. The door to her office was always open—she closed it only during health-care consultations—and on its outside, the first thing you saw as you entered, was a glossy poster of the pope. One day, she and I were in her office and started discussing a sensitive matter. Sister Linda stood up and closed the door, and for the first time I saw what was on its inside: another large poster and, attached to it, hundreds of little bags of condoms. When Sister Linda turned back around and saw my surprised face she smiled—as she often did when discovering my countless stereotypes of women like her. “The families need them to stop both AIDS and babies,” she said simply. And then she continued our discussion.

...my father believes when girls get old enough to notice boys, it's good for them to be surrounded by nuns. I'm in either grade. The nuns can't stop me from looking.

...my father believes when girls get old enough to notice boys, it's good for them to be surrounded by nuns. I'm in eighth grade. The nuns can't stop me from looking.