.....some things should come with a warning so that you don't snort Diet Coke up your nose. Charitable? Probably not. Funny? Absolutely. See Dyspeptic Mutterings (link to the right) for the whole thing:
Alas, because of that Methodism, I don't have any Sister Margaret Flagrum Mean Nun Stories™ to tell you, though I certainly know a few Catholics who claim to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder from The Dark Days Before Vatican II. You know--brutal wrinkled women just off the boat from Slobovia, their teeth filed to points, making the children memorize the Baltimore Catechism and lashing with their six foot rosary belts those poor urchins unable to regurgitate the Canons of the Council of Trent on demand.
Or something like that. Anyway, such stories seem to be the psychological background for Why The Tabernacle Now Belongs In The Maintenance Locker, or Why Middle Aged Women In Spandex Simply Must Flounce About the Altar Like Charo On Crystal Meth During The Singing of The Responsorial Psalm.
It does sometimes seem to me, as another convert, that there is just way too much jumping on the "mean nun bandwagon" by kids who went to Catholic school. It cheapens the actual abuse allegations, and defames a group of women who, on the whole, gave over their whole lives for the education of a bunch of snotty nosed kids.
What gets me is that there is an obligatory sameness to all of these experiences...What is puzzling is that one hears a lot of these stories in comedy acts told by folks who are probably too young to have reactionary-type nuns. I don't doubt, however, that such nuns were around in the past (there must have been huge discipline problems in the old days, with large class sizes full of unruly blue-collar kids) but very few under 40 must have had these experiences.
I, too, am a convert. Finally got around to it around age 32 so it was too late to become the nun that I wanted to be when I was a kid. My friends at the Catholic school had mostly good nun stories (even the talk about strictness and all had a certain love and respect to it) and my experiences with the sisters during a few hospitalizations at the local Catholic hospital were wonderful. I didn't just like them......I wanted to be them.
Firmly ensconced on the geezer side of 50 as I am, I nevertheless missed out on the nuns-from-hell phenomenon. But this was because all the nuns who taught me were wonderful. All of us in our school thought that life had well and truly cheated us in those years when we had a lay teacher instead of a sister.
Some of those same sisters went on to lose their grip on reality all together, or so it seems. Vide the I.H.M. debacle. But the ones who taught me were greatly loved.
Cheers,
-John-
Well I had a "cool" nun. Sister Pat. She wore the habit with the very short veil but regular clothes. She played kick ball with us and had us sing to her guitar. OK, she had us sing George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" for mass, but she was fun!!