Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in North Calais.
[F]our of us are in the Lighthouse Restaurant, a street corner diner with formica table tops and leatherette booths; it’s early ’60s, Bayonne New Jersey, and we’re doing the previously unthinkable: ditching Sunday Mass and spending our collection money on breakfast. There’s liberation wrapped in ham, over easy eggs and home fries. We’re abandoning a decade of indoctrination, risking eternal damnation, according to the original Twisted Sisters, choosing instead to live out our adolescence free of the daily terrorism meted out by the mid-century Catholic church.
Over 50 years later the identity of my companions that morning is vague. I remember we were in our early teens, not necessarily fast friends, who would soon drift apart, first to different high schools and subsequently to different lives entirely. In that blissfully ignorant shared moment we went AWOL, escaping the horror of our metaphorical war with parochial school, unaware of an actual war defining our generation awaited a few short years down the road.
Those memories remain vivid, emerging with each new revelation of treachery at the hands of Catholic priests, systematically covered up for years by church hierarchy, transferring predators from one parish to another, leaving them free to victimize vulnerable children again and again, often for years. And now, over half a century later, we continue learning how widespread the rot, with a Pennsylvania grand jury reporting hundreds of priests and perhaps thousands of victims, prompting similar investigations in several other Northeast states including Vermont.
Although my friends and I were never sexually molested — that I’m aware of — we were certainly physically and emotionally abused on an almost daily basis by a convent full of angry, middle-aged women who, for whatever reason, focused their collective wrath on children who they perceived as sinful and dangerous.
They took their grim task of visiting humiliation on their students seriously, beating the devil out of us whenever they deemed necessary, which was often. They slapped, punched and screamed. They pinched cheeks and dragged students around by their ears. One withered old witch had the offending boy (it was always a boy) kneel next to her desk while she delivered two-handed, simultaneous face slaps as though she was vigorously applauding Pope John XXIII in Yankee stadium.
My own humbling began in kindergarten when the first — and still tallest — nun I had ever seen apparently sensed my insecurity as I held my mother’s hand and simply came over and grabbed me, tucked me under her arm and walked me into what would be my personal hell for the next nine years. Trapped and abandoned were my initial reactions to this new and loathsome environment but the worst was yet to come. The first incident (of hundreds) that I can recall occurred in first grade. Of all the things I could have remembered from when I was 7 years old, this is the one that sticks out.
What I’d actually done is hazy but I remember the nun taking my cheek between her thumb and index finger and dragging me out of my seat with enough force to leave a small bruise and following it up with a sharp slap across the face. We walked home for lunch in those days and when my father — who worked nights — saw that I’d been crying he asked why and I explained what had happened. He called the parish priest and complained without telling me.
When I returned to school after lunch the Mother Superior pulled me out of class and went full Darth Vader on me, forcing me to call my father from the main office and tell him I lied. Facing my parents who were confused and furious when I got home was awful. None of us was astute enough to realize the implications of what had happened or that it was a pattern that served the criminal church well for years.
In eighth grade a classmate working out a math problem on the chalkboard had made a simple mistake. The nun who was our teacher calmly walked over and gently placed her hand on the back of his neck as if to help him work out the error. My stomach still quivers when I visualize what came next: her smashing his forehead into the board so hard that puffs of chalk dust filled the room as we sat paralyzed for what seemed like hours.
These episodes of violence and countless others in between were hardly unusual. This is what they did. This is who they were. But their facility to deflect criticism and slide into cover-up mode at the expense of small children is telling. While our memories of childhood are compromised, what my classmates and I endured through those years was trivial by comparison, a tiny fraction of the malevolent evil perpetuated by the church over the last half century and beyond.
As our collective outrage with the church and empathy for the victims increases exponentially with each new revelation, we should be demanding answers. Investigators should be following the trail of deceit and conspiracy all the way to the Vatican if necessary. And when the reckoning comes for the monolithic church, the retribution should be grave, as was the depravity they so willingly facilitated on thousands of children.
