Nuns and Purgatory

My discourse on the Pagan Baby cans made me think about the whole nun thing, a phenomenon that only those who were forced to attend Catholic school can identify with.  In the 1950's, there were a lot of nuns teaching elementary school and as I think about it, I wonder if any of them actually had any kind of teaching degree. One would have to think they didn't.  What else were Brides of Christ (oh, what a title that is!) going to do besides teach the impressionable little Catholic kids?  And they probably didn't get paid, so that's an even better use for them!  I can't think the Brides of Christ had a lot of other options. Shine the chalice?  Iron vestments? Create new fish recipes for Friday dinners?  So they were tossed into classrooms and told to teach.  As a kid, of course, you have no idea if you are being taught well.  You show up, they show up, you spend your 7 hours there and go home and do homework, which is what they were supposed to teach you while you were sitting in the classroom. I think we basically taught ourselves everything except long division, which is difficult to learn from a book of arithmetic problems.  (By the way, when did "arithmetic" turn into "math"?)

Nuns were good at catechism, of course, because it was their husband's fancy sayings, like some sort of Confucius thing.  So they grilled us on the correct answers from the catechism which probably took up the entire morning.  They were very good at punishment as well, like hitting us on the back of our hands with a yard-stick.  Or making us stand in the corner, facing the wall.  Or making us stay inside the classroom during lunch, laboring over those long division problems.  Nuns were quite talented at belittling us, too.  "Worthless" was a favorite word.  They never actually said we were going to go to hell but they talked about it so much it seemed inevitable that a large percentage of the class was doomed to live for all eternity in fire with a red guy who had pointy ears, a tail and a tall stick.  Satan.  Only they never called him Satan that much, it was always "The Devil" as in "The Devil sees just as much as the Almighty Father, don't you forget that!" Scary stuff when you're seven years old.  

We were well schooled on the differences between heaven and hell, of course, but we all thought purgatory might be an actual possibility.  I don't think there is a purgatory anymore, it probably went the way of Pagan Baby cans, but as a kid it was a real option.  The thinking was something like "well, I know I will never be good enough to go to heaven (especially according to Sister Annunciata,  my first grade teacher and her name did not do her justice) and I hope I won't be thrown into hell, but maybe purgatory wouldn't be too bad."  Purgatory was sort of a half-way house between heaven and hell.  (Limbo, on the other hand, was where babies (not the pagan ones, those went to hell) went who hadn't yet been baptized but who probably WANTED to be baptized.  They still had that Original Sin on their little, tiny souls, which is what gets erased when they pour that holy water over your head during baptism. I never thought the sin was that original, Adam eating the apple and getting kicked out of that cool garden, but I guess listening to and agreeing with a snake does have some originality to it.)  Anyway, purgatory seemed sort of like a Club Med for wayward people, where all your needs would be met except you wouldn't get into heaven but you didn't have to worry about hell and the worst thing was that you might have a hangover all the time.  (We had no idea about Club Med, of course, that was a hell of a different kind that would be invented in the 1970's.) Purgatory seemed alright, not great, like going to your Gramma's for the rest of eternity; you could stay up late, goof off, all the while knowing you wouldn't burn to death in hell but you would be incredibly bored and you would never really be totally happy either because no one could ever be totally happy unless they landed in heaven and collected their $200 and "get out of hell" free card. Metaphorically speaking. 

Many of us were resigned to purgatory. I was, that's for sure. Since mortal sins (the deadly kind, unlike venial sins, the smaller version) abounded, and if you died with one on your soul you went straight to hell; it was almost impossible to live a pure life.  Even if you went to confession and told all your terrible deeds (at seven years old) to the sleeping concerned priest behind the curtain and did your penance, you could think something really bad like a curse word and oops!  Another mortal sin blotch on  your soul, off to hell with you!  So it was almost impossible to ever think you would go to heaven unless it was in that 3 minute window after saying the penance and getting outside the church, when you hadn't yet thought the nasty word and sinned again.  Purgatory was pretty much all we hoped for.

And the nuns were happy to reinforce this depressing dogma.  Granted, it was a long, long time ago but I cannot ever remember one nun (or one Catholic School teacher, for that matter) who every said anything like "hey, you might have a chance for salvation after all!"  Ever.  It was a religion of fear, no doubt about it.  Oh, you could eventually get out of purgatory if you had a lot of friends on earth who prayed for you, night and day, but otherwise you were there forever.

After all these years, I wonder what happened to those nuns.  I wonder if they got to heaven or purgatory.  I wonder if anyone still believes in purgatory. I wonder if it ever existed at all.  And what happened to all those little babies' souls in limbo?  When they erased limbo from the stairway to heaven, did they remember to jump those souls up to purgatory? And if they have erased purgatory, what about all those souls?  Heaven and hell, the only two options left.  Sigh.


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