The roots of catholicism are nothing more than a wrapper on Mithraism, a militant all-male religion.
My mother was born in Quebec. In years past, the people were taxed on a percentage of their income based on their religion. Catholics paid the least as they were the majority. My mother’s father was a chef for the federal prisons, he taught the prisoners how to cook He also taught the prisoners how to brew moonshine for him in a maintenance building on federal property. My mother used to say that he was a generous man. He filled his car with food taken from the prison and would give it to the neighbors during the great depression. He also brewed moonshine at home. The stench would upset my grandmother as it could be smelled throughout the apartment building.
My aunt, Francis was the firstborn, and being the firstborn was earmarked to be a nun, my mother was second born, and like a good catholic family was earmarked for a bride, as long as it wasn’t to a Jewish family. My aunt was given a bedroom and my mother a couch to sleep on. Both were sent to an all-girls catholic boarding school as soon as they were old enough to be indoctrinated. My mother would describe beatings by the nuns if anyone were to challenge them.
They were done in front of all the students. My mother was terrified of authorities and confrontation.
My mother would describe that her sister, Francis would be caught eating some extra food and be taken in front of the class, her hands on the wall and being beaten with a leather strap, repeatedly. Francis would turn around after a brutal beating, in which all the other girls were in terror and fear watching, and say, “Is that the best you got?”
Polio was epidemic and my mother got it. She said that it was horrible, her mother would massage her legs and she had to wear braces to walk. At school, the girls would taunt her because of her illness and disability. She always disliked girls, and it even scared me how aggressive she would get. I remember a neighbor had grabbed me by the throat in a misunderstanding. My mother had grabbed a kitchen carving knife and was going to have a word with her. My father had to just about tackle her. She let the attorney handle it. I think that if the attorney had not intervened, she would have opened her up. I tell people that I learned how to use a blade from my mom. Saw her put it up to my father’s throat a few times.
In Catholicism, we are taught to use diplomacy to come to an agreement and it doesn’t work, then it’s ok to reach the mind through the body. If someone harmed a woman or a child, it was ok to use violence.
When my mother was baptized, the priest told my grandfather that he was starting a good catholic family. My grandfather told the priest that he was not going to have any more children as he could don’t afford any more. The priest told my grandfather that the lord feeds the little birds. My grandfather told him that the little birds eat shit as well.
Abortion was forbidden as women did not have the right to their own bodies or reproductive rights. My grandmother would use a coat hanger to terminate one of her pregnancies. I cry when I think of this. A woman alone, trying to survive in male-dominated world in which she has no rights to even her body, the vessel of life itself. A be forced to suffer so, because of the sexual irresponsible dictates of a god damn religion that has nothing to do with life.
My Body! My mind!
My mother, as a teen used to visit with two of her friends at a summer cottage. A priest used to go there as well. Her female friend became pregnant by the priest and he abandoned her and the baby.
Another friend of my mother became a prostitute and provided services to the Bishops in Montreal. I remember going to visit her in a penthouse as a child. My mother used to tell me that she worked for the catholic church. Years later I was told that she was a prostitute and would charge a small fee for services to the bishops and a huge sum to keep her mouth shut.
My mother had a 6th-grade education and Francis became a nun. She was used by the convent to teach at the catholic college, having no training or degree. Francis was being starved by the convent. My mother would sneak in chocolate to her. My mother worked in a Jewish-owned dessert shop and the owner would give her chocolate to sneak in. Francis became so thin and emaciated that my mother and grandparents felt that she was going to die.
My grandfather at this time went to the convent and talked with the nun in charge. He said that he was bringing Francis home because that we’re using her as a slave and starving her to death. My grandfather told her to get her street clothes and he was taking her home. The head nun told him that they had burned her clothes. My grandfather said that he would rip off her nun clothes and she would leave naked with him then. The head nun returned with her clothes. My grandfather brought her home.
Francis was emaciated from being starved, and it took a long time for her to recover. She had been abused for so long that she was in very poor shape and brainwashed by the Catholics. Later working for the school system as a French teacher in Ontario. I always like my aunt, she was feisty, but also easily shamed, which is how catholicism brainwashes. Dr. Hughes would shame her that her sister was ‘mentally ill,’ and it was important that my mother take the medications as this was genetic. My aunt was shamed, she did not want anyone to know this, and would force the increased dosage of Elavil onto my mother which was causing the psychosis, the anticholinergic delirium/hallucinations.
I kept telling my parents and my aunt that the Elavil, was toxic to her. My aunt’s fear of shame gave her the strength to fight with me even though my mother was getting more psychotic each day with the drug. My mother would slash her wrists open. I was the one who had to take point and hold her arms/wrists apart as she was pulling the flesh back to kill herself. Francis would leave with the comment,
“I have done all that I could here.” I responded, “if my mother was not in a drug-induced psychosis, I am sure that she would thank you for all that you have done. Can I help you to pack your bags?”
Why do people not stand up for others? It comes back to haunt all of us. Instead of societies becoming more cohesive and productive, and healthy, things sink deeper into misery, despair, and suffering.
I would rather hear the laughter of children and see the joy of happiness in people than suffering and injustice.
The first few days at Bishop Guertin, my gut sense told me that the brothers were ‘odd.’ I remember a brother looking at me and undressing me with their eyes. No child should be exposed to these individuals/environment.
They had ‘hazing,’ at the school for all the freshman. Everyone had to wear a beanie and do whatever a senior told them to do. Brother John, the principal had told me that since I came to the school later, I would not have to wear the beanie. I remember sitting on the heater in the senior/junior area and waiting for a new friend. Then I walked into the men’s rooms. Several seniors were pushing a freshman’s head in the toilet. I left, and a student told a brother and he went in. A senior was dragged out and smacked around a bit.
I sat again on the heater and a few seniors came over and asked me why I wasn’t wearing a beanie, so I told them that I didn’t have to.
One senior told me to carry his books. I told him to go fuck himself. Two other seniors stood up for me and told him to leave me alone.
He told me that by the time I left the school that I would hate it and that flushing M-80’s in the toilets would destroy the pipes and flood the building. I walked into the freshman/sophomore area.
Two weeks into the freshman year was approached by students selling cannabis and other drugs. Students smoking and drinking next to the tennis court adjacent to the brothers quarters in the mornings before class. The brothers did nothing. The difference from Nashua High was that when students that did infractions at Bishop Guertin, the police were not called.
When the grades came out but had not been registered, the students would gather around the teachers asking to have their scores adjusted a few points so as to make an ‘honor role.’ It was pathetic.
And the teachers would do this. I had one of the pedophiles give me an A. I calculated my scores and I was supposed to get a B. I was a sophomore at the time. I told a few students about it and they were saying that the brother ‘liked me’. My parents were impressed by appearances vs content like many trusting parents, they thought that I looked good in a sports coat and tie, like some dress up doll.
Nashua High was on split sessions. The busses from the junior high school (middle school) would pull up and take the high school students home. The high school students were having relationships with the junior high students and getting them pregnant. I was confused, by the pedophile religion, grown men wearing robes, placing high school students, who were in puberty with children. The bright lights of the florescent lights in the school, the noise of the students and always having to step back as the brothers were always getting too close in my personal space. I developed migraines and was hospitalized. Overload.
Sex education was a brother who said, “I can’t tell you guys to wear a prophylactic to prevent conception as I am a catholic, but I can tell you to wear one not to get the disease.”
There was a brother, from CT who came to the school to give a talk to the students. The other brothers told the students that all the kids loved him. He came into the class and was using buzz words like he wanted to ‘one of the guys.’ He mentioned that marijuana was a very dangerous drug and that no one should ever take it. He described that he was called to come to an emergency scene. A student had smoked marijuana and had cut off his penis. He further mentioned that he was all set up now to be one of the brothers at the Sacred Heart.
And good friends of mixed orientations and relationship styles, commenting suicide, either directly or indirectly and the school writing up bogus causes of death. High functioning, sensitive, creative, athletic, and DOA. Students making problems to get kicked out, as the environment was so toxic sexually.
In senior year, student, John P., had tossed poison in the principles fish tank and poisoned his bird, I would later find out. He had thrown fireworks from a second-story window and into a window on the first floor. The windows opened in such a way that the fireworks were captured in the window below. All of us who saw this thought he was tossing in a few firecrackers, not. When we went to the first floor, skyrockets were flying through the room, and students were running out.
Brother John did not call the police and just kicked him out. Wouldn’t want a bad image for the gender segregationist parochial school, where sports jackets, ties, and short hair were mandatory.
John P. would later make a bomb and attempt to throw it into a Nashua High School classroom. We drove our cars over and Brian McArdle slapped the bomb out of his hand, it hit a puddle and went out. We called John a psycho and left. I would find out later that he put a new fuse in it and tossed it in a classroom. It rolled into the classroom and did not go off, probably because some water got into it. Brian was never thanked for this. John P. would later toss a bomb near the Nashua Mall next to a gas line that came up out of the ground, drugged and raped two women, did an armed robbery in Boston, escaped, and was buried alive with a knife in his chest outside of Lake Tahoe.
Bishop Guertin and the gender segregationist women’s high school Mount St. Mary had a raffle. A dozen males were sent to Mount St Mary and a dozen females were sent to Bishop Guertin for a few days. It was strange. I got the feeling it was like seeing go-go dancers in cages during the ’60s because males were afraid, of the ‘wild animals.’ I am not sure what this exchange was about.
Three students from Bishop Guertin went over to Mount St Mary’s. Took all their clothes off and walked into the HS. The nun in charge
yelled to all the ladies to cover their eyes. “What do you want,” she screamed at the naked males. One of the students sarcastically responded, “we are here to rape and ravage sister.” They walked naked through the school, walked outside, put their clothes on, and drove away. No law enforcement was called. The school was closed years later.
I see their cruelty, the abuse of children, disregard of women’s rights to their own reproduction, the torture of women, and everyone who sees this says nothing, bystanders. It’s all about sexual perversion, control, and money. The ‘religion,’ has nothing to do with austerity or autonomy for women, men, or anyone’s sexual orientation which is used in their ‘shame game.’ It’s called discrimination. A ‘religion,’ of dogma, with the meanings of rituals lost, Charlatans.
When we are shattered, we ask for validation, justice, compensation and to be held so our shaking doesn’t break down into tears that flood our world with pain…. In Florida, the isolated would run to be held, and it’s everywhere as the world becomes more detached and impersonal. Women latch on to abusive males and only until recently were just dismissed and discarded. We all need advocates. We need to be loved, appreciated, and respected.
Someday maybe the dismissives and by-standers will be attacked, be in an explosion, witness someone being burned alive, or a family member assaulted and crippled. Gunmen coming into their homes or establishments like what was done to my family and me. And people ‘wonder,’ why the world is coming apart.
It is so horrible… so much suffering…
Love, kindness, patience, understanding, heal more than all the dismissive lip service, and pills to silence our cries to be acknowledged as being human. We are not cattle to be processed for maximum profit for the shareholders of corporate and corporate under the guise of ‘religion.’
