Millions of middle-aged and older Catholics remember Sister Mary Margaret, their third-grade teacher. She told gory stories about the martyrs, lived and breathed The Baltimore Catechism, and made you hold your nose to the blackboard if you didn\u2019t do your homework.<\/p>\n
Fuel for some funny stories, yes. But noted Catholic scholar Robert Orsi says that Sister provided fervent religious formation and helped transform Catholics into one of the most educated, most successful segments of American society.<\/p>\n
Teaching nuns in 1960 were \u201cthe most educated sisters in all Catholic history,\u201d he said in a lecture at Purdue University Feb. 8. \u201cThey had been going to summer schools since the 1920s \u2026 The idea that these were ignorant women who knew nothing about the world was simply not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Orsi, who earned a doctorate from Yale, holds the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University. His talk, titled \u201cGrowing Up Catholic: A Case Study of Catholic Children in Mid-20th Century America,\u201d drew a crowd of approximately 150. It was based on the research he did for a book on the social and cultural history of 20th-century Catholic childhoods, which will be published by Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n
The lecture was sponsored by the Aquinas Education Foundation and the Religious Studies Program at Purdue.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad is Irish-Catholic, so it\u2019s interesting to hear how he grew up,\u201d said Michael O\u2019Neill, a Purdue economics major from Indianapolis. \u201cI grew up in Catholic schools, too. Our sisters said they would pray for us students.\u201d<\/p>\n
Orsi previously taught at Fordham, Indiana University and the Harvard Divinity School. He is past-president of the American Academy of Religion. The author of several books, he is an expert on Catholicism in the United States.<\/p>\n
His research focused on Catholic children between 1925 and 1975. During that 50-year period, Catholics caught up with Protestants and Jews educationally, and by the 1970s they were more educated, and earning more, than either group, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese children were prepared for the world and did very well in it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Catholic children, especially those taught in Catholic schools, tended to be disciplined and extremely well-versed in their faith, Orsi said. To them, supernatural things were real. Guardian angels were real. Souls in purgatory were really released. The saints depicted on religious cards shed real blood.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore World War II, if the crayon makers made colors just for Catholic children, they would come mostly in shades of red,\u201d said Orsi, whose study involved interviewing adults across the country about their Catholic childhoods. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Check the lik for the rest. Ah, memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some will remember the mid-20th century as the “brick-and-mortar” era of the American Church — parishes going up, vocations booming, schools clogged with children in uniforms. And nuns. Lots of ’em. I can still see them: the starched habits, the massive wooden rosaries, the worn hands dusty with chalk, the wire-rimmed glasses that, miraculously, never…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-r-us","category-this-and-that","category-vocations"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Prior to that, Deacon Greg worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News, where he contributed to \"The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,\" \"60 Minutes II,\" \"48 Hours,\" (Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Award) and \"Sunday Morning.\" He was co-writer for the acclaimed documentary \"9\/11,\" hosted by Robert DeNiro. (Emmy Award, Christopher Award, Peabody Award, Writers Guild of America Award.) His radio essays were featured in the bestselling book \"Deadlines and Datelines\" by Dan Rather. He's also a two-time winner of the Catholic Press Association Award. Other places you may find him: AMERICA, U.S. CATHOLIC, CATHOLIC DIGEST, REALITY (Redemptorist Communications) and THE BROOKLYN TABLET. He also contributes homiletic reflections to the parish resource CONNECT!, published by Liturgical Publications. In November 2009, he began serving a three-year term as a consultant to the Communications Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Deacon Greg grew up in Maryland (Go Terps!) but he and his wife today live in the beautiful borough of Queens, New York. You can contact Deacon Greg at dcngreg@gmail.com.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/gkandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}