oooooooooh the good ol’ days of the Sisters of Mercy beating the hell out of us for eight years. Of course the girls got 12 years of nuns with high school.
While us boys graduated to the Christian Brothers beating the hell out of us for four more years in high school!
I remember one of my brothers coming home crying & complaining because one of ths nuns had giving him a paddling...
our mother sent him back to the school and told the nun to “paddle him some more” LOL
Unfortunately, there aren’t many nuns anymore so we Catholics are forced to home school like everyone else.
After I beat the bejeezis out of the leader of the Popular Girls Clique at my public school (thus ending rather decisively the public bullying unremarked by the teacher) I was sent to a Catholic Girls School and I must say that the principal Sister Mary Bernadette (not her real name) and her squad of Nuns with Guns made sure that we understood we were there for an education and The Sixties had no place in her territory at all. Mama was so pleased with this attitude that she worked extra hours to keep all us girls in the same school (the Catholic schools were very good about bursaries for large families in those days). One of the many techniques she had for controlling behaviour was shame. The worst possible punishment was to be compelled to call your mother, in Sister’s presence, and tell her exactly what you had done. In my youngest sister’s case that involved repeating the word she had written in lipstick on the mirror in the washroom. (Her in-school punishment was to write that particular word 1,000 times in her best handwriting; Sister told her that perhaps after that she would have written it often enough that she would not wish to write it again.) And you would not want to be the girl whose mother had to leave work and come to the school to take her home to replace her non-regulation clothing with the complete school uniform.
Of course, that was when our parents’ ideas of right and wrong were the same as those of the Holy Mother Church. These days Sister Principal would probably be arrested if she tried to punish anybody for anything.