What I Learned in Catholic School

By Roger A. "Pete" Peterson

The secrets of the universe are hidden in the details of our experience.  -Pete

When I turned five, I started attending school associated with a Catholic Church (Holy Family) in Lewiston, Maine. The first class of the day was catechism, or religious instruction. The elderly nun teaching the class discussed the story of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As the story unfolds Adam and Eve, beguiled by a snake, take a bite from an apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil against God's wishes. To punish them, God banishes them from Eden to fend for themselves. According to the nun, "by eating an apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil against God's explicit instructions, Adam and Eve have committed a mortal sin." She went on to say that "since Adam and Eve committed a sin, all of their children are born in sin, which makes us all sinful or basically evil. In addition", she went on, "we cannot trust our bodies (the flesh of our being) because they are corrupt and will betray us always."

Wow, I couldn't believe my ears, what an awful condemnation! My jaw dropped open and my eyes widened in disbelief as I looked around the room at the faces of the other children to see how they reacted to this awful news. Until this moment all I had seen in the faces of my classmates was beauty, joy, and innocence. How could this old churchwoman* say such terrible things about us? I was outraged and voiced my objection angrily. She told me to be quiet, so I turned my back on her in protest for the rest of the class, in effect, telling her I didn't want to hear anything else she had to say.

The next morning, as we stood in line outside her classroom, she stiffly walked up to me and asked, "Are you going to learn your catechism today?" Looking her straight in the eye, I said, "No!" As if expecting this response, she grabbed my right wrist with her left hand and pulled a heavy wooden ruler out of the folds of her Habit (black robe). I knew what was coming so I tried to pull my hand away. Swinging the ruler down as hard as she could, she beat my knuckles repeatedly, until I cried in pain. It was as if she was trying to destroy my resistance to the church's beliefs through the application of pain. I didn't want to cry but I couldn't help myself. Turning my head to look at my classmates through tear-filled eyes, I felt a great boiling anger rise up in me at the church and this nun for the pain and humiliation I now felt.

The next day, when my eight year old brother Dicky and I arrived at school, I knew I couldn't go back inside. I told him, I'd meet him after school for the two mile walk home, and headed into the woods behind the church. I remained hidden  until school ended, scared all the while because Dicky and his friends had told me there was quicksand in the woods, and I knew what quicksand did to people from watching movies. My mother often made Dicky take me with him to get us both out of the house. That was fine with me because it was always an adventure to go places with him, even though he didn't like having me around and was often mean to me, like telling me there was quicksand in the woods.

(One day, when I was three or four, Dicky and I were headed home through the woods behind our house, We heard some strange metallic sounds coming from above our heads, just behind us. The sounds were followed by a thump as something heavy hit the ground. Turning around, we saw a full grown man dressed in a very realistic devil's costume standing about ten feet from us. About ten feet bove his head was a narrow metal bed frame tied between two trees. There, he could lie in wait for little kids like Dicky and me. He held a trident in one hand and his tail in the other as he spread his arms, made an awful sounds as he prepared to chase us. Even though my brother and I knew it was only a man dressed in a devil's costume we both screamed in terror and ran like hell. As I ran, I wished I was big enough to turn around and kick this guy's ass for scaring us so much. Years later, my oldest brother, Rudy, told me it was a seventeen-year-old high school student in the neighborhood who liked to scare little kids for a laugh.)

When school let out, I walked home with Dicky and told my mother what happened the day before. I also told her I was never going back to that school again, and meant it! When school officials corroborated my story the next day, she gave them a piece of her mind and immediately transferred Dicky and me to Garcelin, the nearest public elementary school. This wasn't much better because the message we got there was almost as bad. While the church school tried to convince us we were bad and couldn't trust ourselves, the public school told us we were a blank slate that needed to be written on. In response to my question about student/teacher roles, my new teacher literally said, "Sit down, shut up, and do as I tell you because I'm the teacher and I know what's best for you." Yikes, what was school, a prison camp run by bullies? Fortunately, I met several teachers along the way who were people too, and one in particular who was unconditionally loving. She treated everyone as though they possessed intrinsic value. Needless to say, she was my favorite and I worked hard to earn her respect even though I didn't have to.

After quitting high school in my senior year (being defined as a "High School Dropout" was another negative definition I had to learn to cope with), I entered the Air Force. After almost five years of thought and healing, I was ready to go back to school. I was going back to study and pick people's brains. I didn't care what authoritarian games people wanted to play, I wasn't going to let it affect me. I was on a journey of self discovery and no one was going to get in my way. I wanted to live in a world that is more loving, empowering, forgiving, and freeing. I knew it lay hidden within us, all I had to do was find it and figure out how to actualize it. To some degree most of us are stuck in a negative world view, one that saddles most of us with fear, limitation, conflict, and suffering. The only way to change our collective world view is for each of us to change our personal world view. No one can do a better job of creating our reality than us! What we are is good and we need to realize that.

* Is it possible this church woman was an angel in disguise, a messenger? If it was not for her comments and behavior I would probably not be so consciously aware of this negative aspect of church and public school teachings. Frankly, I can't think of anything more "evil" than telling someone, especially a child, that they're basically bad and they can't trust themselves because the truth is, we get what we concentrate on. If we seriously look for evidence to support ideas like "you're basically evil and you can't trust yourself" we'll find it, if not in ourselves, in others.

When we accept ideas without question, we're creating our reality by default. To consciously create our reality, we need to take full responsibility for what we choose to believe. In other words, we need to see things for what they really are if we want to change ourselves, and the world, for the better.