Dear Skeptics, Truthseekers, Agnostics, Athiests, etc..

I honestly appreciate what each and every one of you had to contribute to exchristian.org.

I am not yet an atheist (probably more of an agnostic, or at least leaning that way), though probably still believe in a "Higher Being", and that "Higher Being" definitely isn't absolutely male.

Below is my own story. Patience, please, it is long.

My message will probably pertain more to U.S. citizens than to others in the world, but I know that many Australians have been through the same ordeals as I have endured,

otherwise, there would not be web sites on the "Forgotten Australians"

(many disenfranchised and hurt Australian citizens, due to abusive religious "caretakers" in their youth.)

I was locked in a room "for hours" by nuns, and wrote about that in my own book.

I too, had a brief, Catholic upbringing, in a French-Catholic school in Jaffa, Israel, where I was punished.

Pensionnat Saint-Joseph or l’ecole de terre sainte was the name of my school...(I'm fairly sure it was Pensionnat Saint-Joseph. I was age 7 and 8 when I attended.)

A picture of it is on these web sites: http://www.davidpride.com/Israel/IL_Jaffa036.htm

(better picture:)

http://www.greatmirror.com/index.cfm?navid=202&picid=8&picturesize=medium

In my book, I write about the school and the harshness of the nuns.

I was punished in that school, so much that my parents had to withdraw me and have me tutored privately.

I recall feeling kept apart from my Catholic school mates, and feeling "different" because of it. I wasn't Catholic. (My father was Catholic, my mother was Christian Scientist.)

The Mother Superior... the one who punished me...locked me in a dark tower for hours.....offshoot of the "retenue", among other things,

like hitting me with a ruler, and humiliating me in front of all my classmates,

and made me stand for one hour, with chewing gum between my nose and the blackboard, before all of my peers. She died of cancer in 1968.

Apparently that Mother superior was a Jewess who had lost every member of her family during the second world war. She then came to Israel and converted.

I do not know if the Mother Superior's severe punishment of me (and possibly of others) was a form of "taking it out" on others later (as in Why should they have a happy childhood? Mine wasn't!)

My book (still unpublished) is highly political, discusses the disadvantages women have that worsen when they turn 40, particularly if they are not the progeny of "elitists".

One recurrent them in my memoir is about how universal (widespread) misogyny still is, and discuss the Catholic connection to it all.

One other story I found, about nun-abuse of children, appears on

www.gentletouchsweb.com/Stories/Sisters.html, titled “Sisters of Cruelty”, by “Leesa”.

Leesa wrote about how she was forced to kiss a dead priest, about how nuns force-fed her meals until she vomited, and chained to her cot, when she was orphaned in The Nazareth House.

Leesa wrote how the nuns routinely checked the derrieres of the orphans, to make sure they had wiped their behinds properly.

These nuns also beat Leesa with a switch until she bled and locked her in rooms “for hours at a time” (which reminded me of what the nuns at St. Joseph had done to me.)

Below are excerpts from Volume II of my memoir:

In Volume I of my book (not yet published), I wrote about my Catholic school in Jaffa, Israel, a school, also known as Saint-Joseph.

According to Orit Ichilov and André Elias Mazawi, in their book Between State and Church (1996), and the book’s back cover, my school was founded in 1882, and “has historically served all religions and had produced an illustrious list of graduates”

[Excerpt I quoted above is copyright © 1996 Peter Lang GmbH. Reprinted within fair use, based on the less-than-200-words rule.]

Perhaps when Saint-Joseph became a college it turned out illustrious graduates, but when it was a Catholic elementary school, it did not always produce confident children.

The text cover explained that Ichilov’s and Mazawi’s study of Saint-Joseph focused on three main issues,

“social origins of educational systems and their transformation over the ears; the relationships between education and social stratification, and the conditions that enable rival groups to co-exist peacefully in the school.”

[Excerpt I quote above is copyright © 1996 Peter Lang GmbH, and cited within fair use, based on the less-than-200-words rule.]

The authors sourced from Saint-Joseph’s logbooks and students’ personal files, among other documents, to complete their study.

Oh, to be a fly on that wall…to access those logbooks and students’ personal files, from that school…

..read what the nuns back then actually had to say about me, a seven-year-old…

..see what was their reason behind locking me in a tower for more than an hour, left in the dark.

In volume I of my book, I explain how nuns punished me there/

I also explain, how, consequently, my parents withdrew me from the school, to have me tutored by a Danish woman who lived near Lod airport.

I discovered Ichilov’s and Mazawi’s book about Pensionnat St. Joseph, my school, and ordered it from Joppa Books.

In it, I found one page that confirmed my experience in that French-Catholic school:

“Throughout the years, Catholic students were taught separately during religious instruction alone. All other educational activities were provided to all students within integrated classrooms.

In the early years the Catholic Church, and the Latin Patriarch, its representative in Jerusalem, strongly objected to the mingling of Catholic students with students of other Christian denominations or other religions.

In 1891 the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, instructed the Order of the Brothers to isolate Catholics from all other students in their schools.

To ensure separation the headmasters were advised that Catholic students should be seated apart from students of other faiths and Christian denominations.

Intermissions should be scheduled at different times, and Catholic students should not leave the school together with the other students.

The Brothers objected to these regulations because they feared losing the support of France, and because they were concerned about their image as educators within the communities in which their schools operated.

France put pressure on the Vatican which finally retracted these segregative regulations.” (154,155) [Excerpt is copyright © 1996 Peter Lang GmbH, and cited within fair use.]

Everything about what Ichilov and Mazawi wrote was correct…up until that last sentence.

The nuns were still segregating Catholics from non-Catholics, in the way Ichilov and Mazawi described above, when I attended Saint-Joseph, in 1957-1958.

To me, that segregation was a form of shunning.

Only on weekends, non-school hours, did I socialize with Catholics…

..in Sunday school, once or twice (probably before the nuns discovered that I was not Catholic.)

I remembered the little pictures of Jesus they would give out, as rewards for good grades.

I was not Catholic, but raised in the Christian Science faith.

A photo of that school is viewable on the web site, www.davidpride.com/Israel/IL_Jaffa036.htm

A better image can be found on: www.greatmirror.com/index.cfm?navid=202&picid=8&picturesize=medium

I knew well what shunning by Catholics had done to other women, and I was contacting other women, raised in the Catholic faith, who were subjected to Catholic shaming.

I began a brief correspondence with Marea Hannah Whitley, an advocate in Australia who’s book promoted awareness of Tourette Syndrome…her own disability.

Her e-mail to me, from April 11, 2005, told me about her harsh experience in the hands of Catholics:

“I self published my book to help promote awareness of Tourette Syndrome and remind the world of the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church during the fifties and sixties.

Surprisingly, as a result of the book, I am now in contact with some wonderful nuns who have expressed their sympathy and voiced their anger at the brutality that went unchecked all those years ago.

They have read and congratulated me on the book, and are now my good friends.

I agree misogyny is universal and believe it is major drawback to the advancement of humankind, economically and culturally.

Religions that promote misogyny are morally flawed, their doctrines merely a device to control women.”

An acquaintance of mine wrote in her e-mail to me, in 2005:

“I met my husband, [ ] (an athiest), when I was 17 and he 19. I’d just given up a child for adoption, (not his) and he was completely accepting and

understanding of the torment I was going through - and he fell in love with the person I am.

As a 16 yr old teenage Catholic girl, my pregnancy was a shocking thing and society at the time demanded I give my little boy up to respectable couple who could give him everything I couldn't.

[ ]

The only Catholics I dated were a couple of boys I used to see at church functions when I was 14.

I fell pregnant to an atheist at 16, then went on to meet another atheist at 17 with whom I would spend the rest of my life.”

I responded, explaining about two women in my family, both Catholics, who had had the same demoralizing experience:

“I well know about the Catholic ‘shunning’ system for women who get pregnant out of wedlock.”

First, my one woman in my family...the daughter of the Catholic woman that one of my male relatives lives with...has been with her for more than 26 years...he is not married to her (even though they are both Republicans),

because her mother would have to give up her military retirement package from her ex-military, abusive husband) had a baby out of wedlock that she felt forced to give up.

Consequently, I think, out of pain, [for some time] she became a junkie (and a hooker, so support the junkie habit...trying to hid the pain with drugs, also, I think).

Fortunately, she was rehabilitated and because a career woman (when rehab programs worked).

She has two beautiful children but divorced her husband much later (who worked for a military-contractor, when he abused her), for being too controlling.

He was a Catholic too, that husband. Also, another female in my biological family thought that her husband, ...another Catholic...was ‘too controlling’ and was why she divorced him.)

Then there’s someone in my family, another Catholic woman, who I love dearly. She refused to give her child up for adoption but was shunned by her whole family (mostly by her own father).

One of my male relatives married her, adopted her son, and she had another with him. She and he are both lawyers (she was able to rise above her circumstances, too.)”

I directed Marea to a secular humanist web site, the web site for the publication Free Inquiry magazine, and to the article, “Mother Teresa’s House of Illusions”, by Susan Shields, a former nun, who also wrote about Catholic abuse.

Marea thanked me for the information.

One other story I found, about nun-abuse of children, appears on

www.gentletouchsweb.com/Stories/Sisters.html, titled “Sisters of Cruelty”, by “Leesa”, an Australian citizen. She wrote about how she was forced to kiss a dead priest, about how nuns force-fed her meals until she vomited, and chained to her cot, when she was orphaned in The Nazareth House. Leesa wrote how the nuns routinely checked the derrieres of the orphans, to make sure they had wiped their behinds properly. These nuns also beat Leesa with a switch until she bled and locked her in rooms “for hours at a time” (which reminded me of what the nuns at St. Joseph had done to me.)

Leesa, apparently, was involved with an advocacy project, The Forgotten Australians, that exposed the (allegedly) widespread child sexual abuse in many of Australia’s Catholic institutions.

She granted me gratis permission to quote her.

Below is another excerpt from my book:

The Internet source, greatmirror.com, that “sells” the book containing the photo of my former school, explained:

“illustrations of cultural geography [ ] are intended to illuminate the peoples who have shaped the landscapes and whose values are reflected in them”

I will tell you what values were reflected in that school.

I counted three boys who were also students in the school. One was Jewish. His name was Geoffrey.

We became fast friends. He even stole from his mother a beautiful inlaid guitar pin, a broach encrusted with mother of pearl and millefiore designs, from Venice, Italy.

That gift foreshadowed, I think, what would become one of my musical instruments in life, later. He gave it to me. The pin.

The nuns, of course, made me return it. As punishment, they gave me my embroidery and told me to sew in the dark until school let out.

The nuns broke my young confidence, locked me up in one of those white towers with my girlfriend, to do our embroidery, deprived of any light.

My parents withdrew me the very next week. I wondered how I was expected to sew without light.

Geoffrey and I cried together because we couldn’t understand why we did not believe the same way.

I was raised a Christian Scientist. Geoffrey was Jewish. Imagine...children not yet capable of understanding the depth of any religious dogma, already forced to concentrate on others’ different beliefs...(taught to ostracize others, not like us, later, maybe?)

We cried together because we had different religions. I did not know that Purim wasn’t Halloween. For both holidays, people dressed in costumes.

I was a little Christian, back then. I cried because, at age 7, I could not understand why Geoffrey didn’t believe in Jesus, and he cried because he couldn’t understand why I believed in Jesus. We were fast friends.

From that tearful point, on the steps of that school with Geoffrey, I decided that I’d inquire ever after, if my beliefs were different than someone else’s, to question my own beliefs and prejudices.

Many of us have been ill-affected, disenfranchised, displaced, or even murdered, in the name of religion.

What a thing for young children to have to experience!

My experience with Geoffrey reminded me of a film noire, Hand in Hand, that I’d seen on the rooftop of the Neoth (the apartment complex in Tel Aviv, that housed my family), where films were shown to the embassy officials’ families.

I think that experience with Geoffrey molded my thoughts about morals and religious openness, for life.

Another time, the nuns made me write 100 times, on the school blackboard, I will not talk in the library. My mother wrote to the nuns, asking why they couldn’t have created a better lesson for me, like having me write a paper on the use of the library, instead.

One of the nuns caught me chewing gum, she made me stand with the gum between my nose and the blackboard, before all of my classmates, until the end of the class.

Another nun struck the back of my knuckles with a ruler, until my knuckles were red. I don’t recall their names.

If you pay attention to the news about the Iraqi prisoner abuses U.S. Army guards, at Abu Grahib and Guantanemo Bay, two of the forms of abuses carried out in those prisons included

1) forcing the prisoner to stand in one place for hours at a time, and

2) confining them and depriving them of any light.

The nuns at St. Joseph subjected me to both forms of abuse (torture). I was only age seven at the time.

Not every experience in that school was negative. I admit to loving to learn French while learning Aesop’s Fables.

I loved learning to perfect my cursif by curling my R’s at the top, and creating X’s by juxtaposing my S’s against my C’s, the way French girls did. I loved learning how to embroider the way French women embroidered.

I loved learning from math class to cross my 7’s with horizontal lines, and curling my 9’s, I loved how the teachers said “zed” instead of “zero”.

I loved the wooden pencil boxes that had sliding tops, in which I kept my writing utensils, that I bought at the little corner store in the school.

I loved recess, where children learned the Maim dance (water dance) and the Horah, where learned the songs of Purim and other Jewish holidays, though I was raised as a Christian Scientist.

I loved the tamarind trees that grew in that area, finding the big “beans” that looked like brown snow peas.

And I loved participating in the school play; performing in it built my confidence, directly before that confidence was broken.

When my parents found out that the nuns had locked me in one of those towers for hours, they immediately withdrew me from the school, then had me tutored by a Danish woman, that summer, who lived near Lod airport. I was only seven.

I remember being shocked at the time, since I thought, when called before the Mother Superior, I was going to receive my little light blue pinafore, the uniform I had been waiting for. I was kept in that tower, in the dark, for hours.

My father worked for U.S.O.M., the United States Operation Mission, then. The trauma at the French school must have contributed to my forgetting the names of my girlfriends who attended school with me there.

Imagine...the hospital in D.C. where I was born, was no longer standing in 1973, but in 2005, the Catholic school, where I was punished by nuns, still stood, in Jaffa, Israel, a testament to a firm structure that had abused children.

It was a shame-based school, that contained shame-based nuns. My child’s mind did not know enough, to think then, that maybe my being a protestant might have had something to do with the way I was treated.

For his novel, The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s research confirmed, “the Catholic Church has for centuries repressed both women and the feminine side of early Christianity.

During the Inquisition Those deemed ‘witches’ by the Church included all female scholars priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women ‘suspiciously attuned to the natural world.

During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.”

Brown’s resources confirmed, “the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda—to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.” [©2003 Random House Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted within fair use.]

Admitted homosexual, Andrew Sullivan, submitted, for the June 17, 2002 issue of Time magazine, “Who Says the Church Can’t Change”.

Sullivan was raised in Catholicism. He explained that while his peers had left the church or scorned Catholic structures, he had remained a faithful churchgoer, even when he discovered that he was a homosexual, he would not leave the church.

[The material I just cited, above, is Copyright © 2002, Time-Warner. Excerpts from Time Magazine that appear between my paraphrases are reprinted with gratis permission and confirmation of fair use from TIME-Warner Inc., and appear in italics, as opposed to my paraphrases which are not in italics or within quotes before quoting TIME content.

Since I do not intend to publish them for profit, but am merely using them to educate, I am within fair use.]

It never dawned on Sullivan that he was not a Catholic, only that he was a sinner. Rather, the church taught him that church “was for sinners, not saints.” Despite faults he found with the Catholic institution, he trusted and revered the church, “even when it inflicted real pain” and “callously treated women as second-class Catholics.”

Sullivan loved the church even “when it wounded good people in bad marriages” Even then (he wrote) he knew that the Catholic church “was a human institution on a divine mission.”

Sullivan was right, I thought. The story I had heard about why Spencer Tracy had not married Katheryn Hepburn was that he had told her that his (Catholic) church would not let him divorce his wife.

So, instead, Hepburn and Tracy remained adulterous lovers, for years, until he died, I think. Had it not been encouraged for decades, for homosexuals to remain “in the closet”, perhaps they would not have had to “steal” or “seduce” affections of others, often from children,

“in secrecy”, and perhaps enabling them to be more open than hidden about their lifestyles, would have allowed many more of them to meet potential partners of legitimate age (non-minors rather than minors), rather than grasp at others (whether in reality or merely accused of it) in ways that aren’t or weren’t legitimate.

Perhaps some of you have experienced the same things, so have very good reasons to feel/think as you do, about religious abuse.

Details