Mari's Journaling Power Blog | Journaling Journeys

Growing Up Old-School Catholic (and daring to write about it!)

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I attended a Catholic grammar school in my hometown of Syracuse, New York. For eight years, the nuns pounded their yardsticks on the classroom floors, drilling their pupils on the Ten Commandments, the Sacraments, and the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. My classmates and I prayed aloud for our Special Intentions at the start of each school day (please help my dog who is sick), braved the terrors of the confessional booth (Father, I lied three times and called my sister a bad word), and egged each other on as we did our best to give up eating candy and watching Laverne and Shirley for Lent. 

My parents were old-school Catholic. My mother came from a church-going clan of Irish immigrants, and my father was raised in a working-class German family that produced several