The whole thing is disgraceful. Really. Is this a normal day in the life of a young RC?
No I wouldn’t say it was a normal day just the threat of it was. Kids aren’t aware of when they are doing natural things, like getting something unstuck or whatever. So you never knew if you were doing something so terrible. Some other nun would not have done what she did - depending on who saw what and the sanity of the nun or brother. So you lived not knowing when the $#*& would fly.
You get over it, grow up and learn not to take any more $*^^ :) I bet he has a lot of ZEAL now!!
I think it WAS far too frequent a few decades back. One of the Friars I enjoy hanging around with has a series of jokes about "Sister Mary Sadistica," He was born in 1942.
I once browsed through a pretty funny book called "Why Catholics Can't Sing." It's not a question that keeps me up at night, so I didn't give the book the attention it might have deserved.
But the authors point was that Irish Catholics, who were a strong influence on US Catholicism generally, were essentially "Jansenists." Jansenism was a quasi-Calvinist heresy that arose after the Reformation, and one of its characteristics was an excessive gloominess and rejection of the goodness of God's creation.
The author's conjecture seemed to be the Ireland was fertile ground for this theological gloominess because of the long persecutions and other bad aspects of British and Protestant rule. (Not saying protestant rule is intrinsically bad, but anti-Catholic rule is kind of hard on the Catholics.)
Anyway that environment lays in one strand to the cable. And the other strand is the foolishness of many bishops who, influenced by this anti-life Jansenism, wanted to produce a stable of clergy and 'religious' who were "unspotted from the world."
Consequently they admitted a lot of very emotionally immature people into seminaries, convents, and monasteries. And one can imagine that there was a kind of self-selection of people who were really conflicted about their sexuality, autonomy, blah blah.
Hence, Sister Mary Sadistica, and her tribe: a group of people who had a gloomy, pseudo-Calvinist distrust of human nature, and a consequent inability to give children what they needed. They were sent out to preach and had never heard the Gospel themselves.
Anyway, that's my account of it. I know I became Catholic because, as I thought of it, I saw beyond this thorny hedge of almost heretics to what Catholicism really is. From my POV those sisters, brothers, and clergy have a LOT of 'splainin' to do.
But no, this is not now the normal experience of the young Catholic,