I turn to telling you what it was like to grow up Catholic, attending a parochial school in the fifties and early sixties. It was very different from your experience at an Episcopal school for girls in the eighties, nineties, and aughts of the twenty-first century.
First Grade
In the fall of 1955, I entered first grade (there was no kindergarten available at the time). I had just turned six years of age. I remember the first time we gathered outside the little (and old) building that housed the first grade, second grade, and the school cafeteria. Because the school had limited space (remember, this was during the famous post-war baby boom), there were five classrooms on the second story of the parish church building. Another building on the "church block" housed the sixth grade. This is a picture of the church today. The exterior hasn't changed much in sixty years.
My first grade teacher was Sister Mary Gemma, S.M. (Sisters of Mercy). The Sisters of Mercy were an order of nuns, founded by an Irish Catholic woman. The nuns who taught at the school lived in a convent building across the street from the little first/second grade building. At the time they wore a "habit", kind of a nun uniform. This is a picture of nuns wearing the habit. They never showed their hair and wore a large rosary around their waist. There were about five who lived in the convent and taught at the school, including the principal.
As intimidating as the habit made them appear, Sister Gemma was a wonderful teacher. She taught me arithmetic, reading, spelling, and religion. The lay teacher in the second grade next door, Mrs. Lowery, would teach us phonics while Sister Gemma taught the second grade religion.
I think it's important to pause here and explain about phonics. I'm sure a later version of phonics was taught in your school, but the subject matter involves the sounds letters make in the English language. Although English can be a quirky language phonetically (e.g., though, tough, thought), you can get by pretty well the majority of the time by knowing the sounds the letters represent in the language. I believe phonics is the reason I became skilled at spelling and reading, in fact developing a lifelong love of reading.
I didn't attend kindergarten (our school didn't have one) so one of the first things Sister Gemma had to teach was the alphabet.
The interplay of phonics, spelling, and reading provided a tremendous foundation for later learning. I think your grandmother, Mildred Stevens, would have had a lot in common with Sister Gemma and Mrs. Lowery.
Religion and arithmetic were taught by rote, memorizing the Baltimore Catechism and number facts.
The Baltimore Catechism was developed by the Catholic Church during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a means of helping Catholic students learn about their church and their beliefs. I think it was likely motivated by the influx of Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants and the children who were their offspring.
The Book of Common Prayer of your Episcopal upbringing has a Catechism.
At the age of six, first graders were not ready for more complex questions and answers, so the question-response nature of the catechism was watered down. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" translated to "You shall not lie". "Thou shalt not kill" became "You shall not become angry." "Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's wife " transformed to "You shall not have impure thoughts." (Although, frankly, I can't imagine what impure thoughts a six-year-old could have.)
This will give you a hint as to what it was like.
Arithmetic was basically memorizing many number facts. Having not attended kindergarten, arithmetic first meant learning how to count. Then we had to memorize "addition tables" (one plus one equals two). The relationships between numbers was not, to my recollection, a part of this early training. We learned which numbers were odd and which were even. Once we learned how to add, constant drill occupied our class hours and homework.
Our day started, every day, with 8 am Mass. The entire school was expected to be in the pews at 8:00. Mass usually ended around 8:30 when we were marched to our classrooms. Mass in those days was conducted entirely in Latin, without homily or sermon, the priest at the altar with his back to the congregation. We first graders were not permitted to receive communion (more on that later). In fact a stern rule of silence was in place. Apparently, I must have broken that rule once.
One day, Sister Gemma called me to the front of the classroom where she waited with my friend Russell Caccamisi. Sister looked at me and asked, "Were you and Russell talking during Mass? He says you were." Flustered, I frankly couldn't remember whether I had been talking or not. Of course, I confessed and received a punishment to write from 1 to 200. (I don't know what she was thinking. I didn't know what 200 was. So, I wrote from 1 to 102 and gave it to her and she asked that I do it again.) Later in my school days, a similar event took place with more dire consequences.
I promise I'm not bragging when I tell you that I was really smart compared to most of my peers in elementary school. For a while, there was always one girl who equaled or exceeded my grades and other accomplishments in school. One was a girl named Linda Pounders. After the first grade she was permitted to skip second and enter the third grade. I was jealous when that happened. We were always the last two standing in spelling bees. We both were selected for a special day at CBC where we were introduced to a different way of teaching arithmetic, a method where you saw the relationships among the numbers. We were both in the top reading group, the Redbirds if I recall correctly.
You would not have been comfortable with class sizes. My class ranged from twenty-five to thirty students in a class supervised by one teacher at a time with no aides. This held true from first through the eighth grades. The more accomplished students sometimes were enlisted to help. For example, Sister Gemma might ask me to hear other students recite their alphabet or their numbers. I do have a distinct memory of being assigned to listen to two or three classmates recite a set of numbers. At the end, Sister asked me how they did and I said, "Alright, I guess." (I had become bored listening to them and lost track of their accuracy.) I think she stopped asking for my help about then.
I had a few friends who went all the way through high school with: Walter "Bubba" Marshall (who also graduated from college with me), Terry Ryan, and Sean Gillespie.
Second Grade
After an endless summer, we returned to the same little separate school building where we spent our first year, this time with Mrs. Lowery as our teacher. Because she was our primary teacher, we of course continued learning phonics, reading, arithmetic, and spelling. I'd lost my academic nemesis, Linda Pounders, to the third grade. However, she was replaced by an equally imposing challenger, Terry Reedy, another blond girl. Neither one, I assure you, contributed to any of the "blond jokes" that were being told a generation ago.
I suppose the highlight of this year was preparation for our First Holy Communion. In the Catholic Church, this is a big deal. Although we continued our memorization of all of the Catechism's answers, after the break for Christmas, our attention swung to the big dual event in the spring, First Confession and First Communion.
First, Sister Gemma (still switching a religion period in Mrs. Lowery's class with a phonics period in her first grade classroom) had to teach us to make our first confession. In the Catholic Church, it was a requirement to confess your sins to a priest regularly.
I guess I should explain the Catholic notion of sin first. In that theology, there are two kinds of sin: venial and mortal. A venial sin is a minor sin: the little white lie, eating all the cookies in the cookie jar, disobeying parents. A mortal sin is a major sin: murder, rape, adultery, robbing a bank, missing church on Sunday (more on that at a later time).
The picture painted for us went like this. Think of your soul as a white canvas. Venial sins spot the canvas. Mortal sins paint the whole thing black.
If you have a mortal sin on your soul, you cannot receive Holy Communion. You must confess the sin to a priest who grants you absolution after you've done a penitential act (a penance). You may receive communion with mere venial sins on your soul, but it's not advised.
The sacrament of penance, also known as confession, was taught in this way. The priest sat in a three piece box known as a confessional. He sat in the middle section. Penitents knelt on either side. There was a curtain providing a certain amount of privacy for the penitent.
For your first confession, you entered the confessional and knelt. There was a small sliding window between the priest and the penitent. When the priest slid the window open, you said, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession and these are my sins." At that point, you told the priest all of the sins that were on your soul and how many times you had committed them. The priest gave you a penance (e.g., say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys). You then recited the act of contrition, a prayer you had committed to memory, "Oh my God. I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee..." Then you left the confessional with you canvas all clean again, provided you "did" the penance.
In subsequent visits, you told the priest how long it had been since your last confession.
We made our First Confessions on the Friday before the Sunday when we made our First Communions, striving to keep our souls pure on Saturday.
At that time, the rule was that you must have fasted for three hours before receiving communion. So no breakfast, no orange juice, no anything. Your body must be as free of food as your soul was free of sin.
On Sunday, we gathered for a special Mass. The boys were dressed in white suits with white shirts and white ties. The girls were dressed in white dresses. We processed into the church slowly and reverently to begin the service. We had a special reserved section of the church for us. In place of a sermon, the pastor quizzed us on the Baltimore Catechism. Of course, I answered perfectly.
I have a picture of my first communion class. See if you can pick me out.
At the time for communion, we processed to the communion rail where we knelt and received our first wafer. We did not receive wine back then. That was true for adults as well as children.
All of that may sound infantile to you, but to us seven-year olds, it was "gospel."
