| | Are you still on the mailing list, Bill? I was for quite some time thereafter, believe it or not. I no longer receive anything from them, since I moved. Fortunately, I was never assaulted by this guy, but came close a couple of times, once when he caught me talking in the library. And in one of my classes, the kid sitting next to me was being beaten to a bloody pulp by the same teacher for not paying attention. As I was watching from across the aisle, he turned to me and said, "Oh, you want some of this too?" This guy was also the coach of the baseball team and was held in high esteem by the rest of the faculty.
Nor was he the only Christian brother in the school to resort to physical violence against students. I remember an incident, in which another teacher arrived late to class and caught the students milling around and talking. He promptly walked up to one of the bigger students and smacked him hard across the face, evidently to set an example to the other students. We were supposed to be seated, quietly awaiting his arrival. This was routine stuff, but it was done only by the Christian brothers, never by any of the lay teachers. I guess they felt that God was on their side. God is Great!, after all, and anything is permitted as long as you are one of his chosen emissaries and are doing his work. The radical Muslims have simply extended this attitude to its logical conclusion.
I used to work with a black guy from Nigeria, who told me similar stories about his Catholic schooling in that country. The Irish priests would take the young black kids outside the school for various infractions and physically whip them. Again, this was tolerated, because the priests were men of God who had HIS august authority to back them up. We've all heard stories about Catholic nuns rapping students on the knuckles with a ruler if they misspelled a word. But whipping them?? For some reason, the more extreme forms of physical violence are the ones you never hear about.
- Bill
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