Comments on: My farewell letter to the Pope

By: Robert Soltau

Robert Soltau — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 18:08:42 +0000

Good riddance to the Catholic Church. I stooped going to church when I graduated from Catholic grade school.

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By: Annie

Annie — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:41:16 +0000

Miss Carolyn;
Always know that there is a very special place in hell for anyone who abuses another living being.

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By: Annie

Annie — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:38:36 +0000

M. Edmunds;
Not to be fractious, but I had to come back to your post. I would have one question for you.
Which formal religion do you belong to that would uphold your usage of superstition while calling our Miss Carolyn a heretic? Might I submit “none” as the requisite answer?

The more appropriate sin, if indeed there need be one, would be to conclude that it is you who are usurping the Golden Rule of loving thy neighbor…

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:44:55 +0000

Shhhh…. don’t tell Pope Francis. But I suspect the inquisition’s pretty well tied up investigating all those evil Catholic nuns these days.

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By: M Edmonds

M Edmonds — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:26:28 +0000

What a scathing article! I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the inquisition doesn’t come after you!

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:41:18 +0000

Hi Kathleen – I love that definition of “radicals”, don’t you? “People who addressed the root of a problem, not the surface”.

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By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:41:53 +0000

Within my education (through postgraduate degrees) the best teacher I have ever had was Sister Lorraine. I had the good fortune to be in her classroom in both 4th and 6th grades. She was young and shared her passionate interest in delving into the roots of systems and things. We had exercises in etomology; the roots of languages. She read to us from the original Beowulf and Canterbury Tales, as well as The Jabberwocky. I now realize that we were playing with algebraic concepts in the 4th grade. In our right-wing suburban parish in the early 1960s (one that resisted Vatican II kicking and screaming, currently the Opus Dei parish of southern Wisconsin) she told us that “radical” meant “root”, and that radicals were people who addressed the root of a problem, not the surface. She told us of her loathing for the mediocrity of “nice” and “lovely” and told us, “Always investigate. Never take anything on faith, even from me.” Remember: that lesson from a nun in a Catholic school. I adored her, but only later understood what an extraordinary gift she had been in my life of bucking authority. Later I hear she left the order, married a former priest, and the two of them were running a school. Lucky kids.

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:34:41 +0000

One wonders how many talented, inspired women have abandoned their religious orders like your 9th grade science teacher did. A 2008 study showed that fewer than 4% of North American Catholic women have even considered becoming a nun (that’s less than half the number from only five years earlier). No wonder . . .

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By: The Accidental Amazon

The Accidental Amazon — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:21:52 +0000

Yes, she was a wonderful young woman, that nun. In my current post, I talk about a few other nuns I had in the 9th grade who objected to a stupid, outdated sexist rule against girls taking mechanical drawing — even though it was taught by a nun! By the 10th grade, the rule was abolished. I was very fortunate that I met so many brave nuns as teachers. One of the nuns who fought against that rule was my 9th grade science teacher. She went on to object as well to the outmoded texts that were used for many subjects throughout the school system. She got so disgusted with the response made by her order, she ended up leaving it, and I think perhaps was asked to do so. She was a brilliant teacher. We students were outraged. It was a lesson — many lessons — to us all.

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:29:36 +0000

Wow – that was some brave nun back in 8th grade. She’d be investigated and possibly excommunicated if that kind of dangerous “secular mentality” were expressed under Benedict. While watching the documentary Deliver Us From Evil recently, we learned that the first official Vatican correspondence regarding the coverup of priests’ sexual abuse of children was in the 4th century. A shameful history indeed. . .

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By: The Accidental Amazon

The Accidental Amazon — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:21:58 +0000

Brava, Carolyn.

I endured 12 years of Catholic education myself, and what began to erode my faith, such as it was, early on were two things: everyday hypocrisy & the history of the church itself.

I was amazed that the nuns actually taught us about the Inquisition & the Crusades, to name merely two examples of the church’s historical excesses and hubris. The everyday hypocrisy was more pedestrian. I simply noticed how many people, including the pastor of our local parish, seemed to think that attending weekly Mass gave them carte-blanche to be unkind, uncharitable, miserable gits the rest of the week.

In the 8th grade, it was actually a nun who pointed out, in a class debate, that perhaps the notion that the Catholic Church was the ‘one true church,’ and that therefore everyone else who believed in some other version of god was condemned to eternal hell, was open to question. And thereby encouraged my lifelong and healthy skepticism.

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