My Soul According to Sister Simeon

My Soul According to Sister Simeon

Catholic School Confessions – Part 2

By John Ceccon

Suggested reading –  Part 1 of this rant Priests Nuns and Lil Bambinos. 

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. – 2 Peter 2:1

In 1971, Massachusetts became the 2nd state to ban corporal punishment. In 1973 the Stubborn Children law was repealed – a law, dating back to 1646 that allowed parents, and school teachers, to brutalize their children when they misbehaved. The Catholic church, and schools,  soon embraced this tactic and it made its way into the school system. How convenient. Translation – we can do whatever we want to these kids, it’s the law. How convenient.

I really do believe that the seeds of my 40 year battle with drugs, alcoholism, atheism, and self hating, were planted by this man hating penguin monster masquerading as a nun and the institution known as the Catholic school system. My therapists would agree with that assessment too, although they would probably leave out the penguin moniker. Yes, I just called a Catholic nun a monster, but I’m just try to be nice. She was actually a high level assistant to Satan, or possibly an adviser left over from the 3rd Reich. Of all the penguin monsters I encountered at Cathedral Grammar School in Boston, sister Simeon was the worst, with sister Isabella coming in second. I’ll get to her in my next diatribe. Open hand slaps to the face and wooden pointers across the back and butt were Sister Simeon’s specialty. I received plenty of them as did the rest of her chosen group of child endangerment victims.

Yeah, soccer moms, welcome to 1964 in the Catholic school system. There were no time outs in Sister Simeons classroom, but there were plenty of child endangerment felonies.

To her credit, she was versatile. In addition to her mastery of violence against small children, the good sister was also skilled in the fine art of turning words into flaming arrows which were targeted at our innocence. She verbally humiliated her chosen few in front of the class with destructive pinpoint emotional precision. I’m sure quite a few of those kids are now either alcoholics, drug addicted, or highly dysfunctional on a number of levels or all of the above – trust me on that one. It was as if she was teaching a class on felonious assault against small children, especially boys. If you went to Catholic school in the sixties, then you probably knew a few of these holy criminals by different names and you were probably a victim or witness to this Catholic school brutality. Most of her antics, if carried out today, would land her in federal prison.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. Matthew 7:15

Sister Simeon and the Cathedral Grammar School in Boston were my introduction to life and the world outside of my home life, which was stable and violence-free. Back then, if Father Pedo-feel ya didn’t get to you, then Sister “I’m-Gonna-Beat-And-Humiliate-The-Living-Krap-Out-Of-You” was waiting in the wings with various foreign objects that she wielded like one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Penguins. She was the first person to tell me I was a “bad apple” and would never amount to anything. She was the person that convinced me I was a bad boy – eventually, I began to believe her and accepted that Johnny was a bad boy. Bad boys do bad things – right?

One lovely day Sister Simeon was lecturing us about the technical aspects of the soul, venial sins, and mortal sins – according to the Catholic Church. It was kinda-sorta like a science class where the teacher talks to the kids about the moon and the sun – you know, real stuff. 

Factoid – Nowhere in the Bible will you find the concept of venial and mortal sins. Go ahead – Google it. 

This would have been fine if not for the fact that she was talking to a room full of seven-year-old kids and not the senior philosophy class at Boston friggin University. How about teaching us to read and write before you scare the krap out of us with all this Catholic mumbo-jumbo. The soul? You’re going to teach us about the soul? James Brown had soul. Aretha Franklin had soul. I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I was pretty sure soul had more to do with black people playing really good music on Soul Train and nothing to do with venial or mortal sins. I grew up in a Motown neighborhood sucka, don’t tell ME about soul.

She started her brainwashing session by drawing a big circle on the blackboard, then turned around and said “this is your soul”. In hindsight, it would have been cool if next she took some colored chalks and drew a rainbow in the circle and said to us “this is your soul on drugs”, but she didn’t.

She proceeded to draw what looked like corona rays emanating from the sun, radiating out from the circumference of the soul circle. It was like one of those pictures of the sun you see in the astrology magazines where they block out the sun and all you see is a black circle and the brilliant corona sun-rays.

“This is your soul”, she said again as she jabbed her finger repeatedly at the black hole and looked sternly at us. She always had that stern angry gangsta rapper look on her mug.

Next she reached for her trusty wooden pointer, which my ass and back had come to have an intimate relationship with, and pointed to the corona ray looking stuff “this is grace, and when you commit a venial sin, you lose some of your grace”, as she erased some of the corona rays from the circle. All the kids were really paying attention now, we’re talking about grace daddy-o, this is some serious stuff……right? I’m thinking, “what the hell is grace”, she hasn’t told us what grace is, what the hell is grace”? My grandmother had a friend named Grace who used to bring us these awful fruitcakes during the holidays, but other than that, I had no idea what grace was. Apparently losing your grace was a bad thing.

She sat the pointer down and repeated, with a growl, “when you commit a venial sin, you lose some of your grace”. Then she erased some of the corona stuff emanating from the circle. “When you commit a mortal sin, you lose all your grace and when you die, you go to hell”, she said as she erased the rest of the corona looking stuff in one swoop leaving behind the circle she started with. She turned to the class and made eye contact with me for what seemed like 5 minutes, but it was more like 5 seconds. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t have to, the scowl on her face said it all. Fear is an amazingly destructive thing, especially to a seven year old. 

Sister Simeon is one of the reasons I ran away from Christ as fast as I could, sending me into a 40 year period of atheism, alcoholism, and self-hating. I spent 14 of my 19 years in sobriety as a spiritually bankrupt atheist. I finally made it back to Christ at the age of 55. That was a close call. I almost went to my grave without ever knowing Him. 

Copyright 2017 John Ceccon. All rights reserved