Nunsense

Sr. MM, instead of giving up something for lent perhaps you could watch that soap every day. It sounds penitential enough! And in defense of the nuns for their rotten fact checking - I suspect they are in the same boat as most mothers (at least the teaching nuns) and have answered too many questions. Once I have reached my limit I just make up the answers and they get more and more absurd. It's the brains defense mechanism.

I'm happy to report that my mother is very much improved and I will be returning home next week. I'm sure I will have some penitential hunks of time on the way, between having to leave and what happens when I return. Sometimes I think perhaps if we had Sister St. Aloysius' eyes checked, the house would be in better shape. Maybe I'll just take off my own glasses and have a nap.

Meanwhile, I am watching that soap opera every day. Yesterday the main Irish Catholic family's mother (not the mooder that dropped dead) was strolling around in the park with the man she had had an affair with years ago, a union that produced a son that she apparently passed off as her Irish Catholics husband's until one day the son, who was a cop, was about to shoot his real father, who is a wealthy criminal mastermind of some type, and the Irish Catholic mother had to shout, "Don't shoot him! He's your father!" No one was happy.

We can all relate.

As painful as it was to hear this story, it was made all the more cringy bad by the fact that it was all being told to the couple's grand daughter, who was chirpily asking how her father came to be. She was hanging on every word of the sordid tale like the child in "Princess Bride". At least she was not a child, this girl. I'm not sure what happened to her, if she was in a prison camp or something, to be so thin. I'll have to ask my mother what happened to her.

WHAT AM I SAYING!!!???? I don't want to know. The rest of the soap opera family is on an airplane that is about to crash because it is "February sweeps", according to my mother, so hopefully they'll all be gone by the end of the week, into the briny deep, as they are now over the Atlantic Ocean.

I had to comment about this reader's other comment:
...And in defense of the nuns for their rotten fact checking - I suspect they are in the same boat as most mothers (at least the teaching nuns) and have answered too many questions. Once I have reached my limit I just make up the answers...
Yes.

But it's not that simple. It would be one thing if the nun just blew her cork and told the kids that lions live in the park and that's why they shouldn't walk there at night. That wouldn't be good, but the kids would be safer. The problem comes in when the nun is telling the kids about the tenets of the Catholic Church and blows her cork and makes things up.

1. Parents who give their children up to the clergy or religious life get a free pass to heaven.

I would have sworn that was true.

2. Your Confirmation name is the name you'll be called in heaven.

This one makes some sense to me. But it's made up.

3. Animals do not go to heaven.
I stand by this one along with St. Thomas Aquinas, but the Church is actually mute on the subject.

The list goes on.

I understand how it happens.

I've often heard people complain that the Catholic Church has so many rules and so many things to remember. But the Church doesn't sit around making up rules for the fun of it. We just have to answer so many questions.

We used to get this type of thing:
"Sister, I have to fast before Communion. Say I am playing with a blade of grass bewteen my thumbs, making it into a whistle and I accidently swallow it and then I go to Communion. Is that a sin?"

Do you think the Church has a Canon Law for the accidental swallowing of grass whistles before Communion? Should I just put my fingers in my ears and sing, "La! La! La! La!" until you go away?

No. I have to come up with an answer. There is an answer. (Hint: sin is about intent.)

But if I snap and give you an absurd answer (Jesus loves grass whistles, why, when He was a child He often played with grass whistles and was thinking about them on Palm Sunday, like Orson Wells at the end of "Citizen Kane"), how can you tell that answer from when I tell you it is a mortal sin to miss Mass on Sunday? Purgatory for me.

Some of you may have noticed that from time to time a nun simply disappeared from her post without explanation. Maybe you heard vague whispers that she went 'back to the Motherhouse'. Sometimes she would return with equal mystery. I can tell you, that nun had had to deal with one too many grass whistles. Or Tuberculosis. One of the two.