how did you keep up Angela?
and why did you get all that indoctrination if your father was so opposed to it?
oh, I see, you saw the light
and then something made you change your mind again
I got some indoctrination too - it just was like that at the time - but not as intense as you
and yes, I hated that and I've forgotten all about it, the deadly sins and the 10 commandments and all that
I don't think I'm a better or worse person because of that
I feel much more free without religion
well I see you're able to put things in perspective
and I appreciate your comments
Had we stayed in Italy it would have been the same. Religion was taught in all the schools, including the public schools, as I'm sure you know. When the time came, and if he were able to afford it, my father would have sent me to a convent school for the superior education, for the discipline, to make sure I became a "lady", with the more refined graces, and to keep me away from boys for as long as possible.
In the town to which we immigrated there was a Catholic girls' high school and one for boys. For both, you had to pass an entrance exam to get in. It's the same in many American towns. Not that the church educates only the middle class. They have a tremendous number of schools in poor inner city areas where even non-Catholic parents flock, because they are an oasis of calm, discipline and rigorous teaching.
Anyway, it was the next best thing, from my parents' perspective, to a convent school. The one for girls was run by an order from Montreal so there was a lot of emphasis on French language, literature, and culture, which my father also liked. The boys' school was run by the Christian Brothers, an Irish order who were very tough, and I mean tough. A boy who was dating one of my friends mouthed off to one of the Brothers, swore at him or something when reprimanded, and the brother punched him in the jaw, knocking him right to the ground. The parents were perfectly ok with it, as was the boy, really. It was a different time. All the nuns had to do was raise their voices or say they were disappointed in us, and most of the girls just dissolved into tears. They were two very separate worlds, meeting only at supervised "dances", with the Brothers and the Mothers ranged all along the walls. I honestly don't know how, given what was going on in the outside world, how other young people our age were behaving, they kept us so innocent.
The theology classes, like all the others, were very rigorous: Biblical archaeology, Church history, the writings of the great theologians of the Church like Augustine and Aquinas, but even delving into people like Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Kung, the Christian Existentialists. The nuns were sometimes out there on the verge of "heresy" from the point of view of the Church hierarchy. We were debating Liberation Theology when most of the world didn't even know what it was. Some of them were also of a more "mystical" turn of mind, so we read Thomas Merton, Hildegard of Bingen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as the Christian apologists like C.S.Lewis.
What my father hadn't reckoned with was that just as I strove to get a perfect score on every test, be the best at every piano or ballet recital, I was the type who would want to please the nuns who so loved and fussed over me, and please my mother too, by being the "best" possible Catholic, and who is a better Catholic than a Carmelite?
However, luckily for his heart, by junior year some of the petty tyrannies of a quasi convent life, the distance between word and deed of some of the "religious", coupled with the lure of boys, put an end to my rather romantic desire to become a Carmelite.

As the nuns would say, the flesh is weak...or powerful, depending on one's outlook.
By the middle of my university days I had left the Church. We had a sort of rapprochement when I had children, partly because of pressure from the community around me, but it didn't last.
Our parting of the ways really had nothing to do with any intellectual disagreements for the most part. If I were to be a believer, I'd be a Roman Catholic, without question. It has to do with the fact, I suppose, that the world offends my sense of justice; I cannot accept the evil in this world, and I mean disease, suffering of all kinds, not just man made evil, and I cannot wrap my head around, or accept, that a loving God could or would permit it. That was both a general perception of the world and a reaction to personal tragedies in my own life. The nuns told me that was the sin of intellectual pride, the sin that got Lucifer booted out of heaven. So be it.
By the way, my father wasn't an atheist. His disagreements with the Church were mostly "political". It was the Church itself with which he had problems, in a way that most Americans don't understand. He wanted me to be a journalist, or a crusading lawyer and judge, righting the wrongs of the world, not some nun locked away in a convent praying and singing.
Oh, and indeed the Carmelites still pay far too little attention to their own physical needs, and that was even in my time, although by then the numbers had dwindled. There was a convent in our town where some of us used to go when I was in my teens, to hear Mass, or to say the Rosary.The sound of their voices singing plain chant from beyond the grate was other worldly. My father used to call them the "Holy Fools", and I understood what he meant, although it made me angry even after I had long given up any desire to join them. When their heating system broke, they didn't tell anyone about it, because they wanted to offer up their discomfort as a sacrifice for the world. They also had gotten much too abstemious in terms of food. It's only when they started getting very ill that the Bishop found out. This is what it was like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HLnjVIE0EY&list=RDSBUbdr5v60k&index=4
To be clear, I don't regret one moment I spent there. I got a top notch education, made wonderful friends, and learned moral precepts which I still hold. They were very good women by and large, even if they weren't perfect, and they imbued us with, in addition to everything else, a belief in ourselves as women, that we were as intelligent, as capable, as good at running the world as any man. Most of us former students stay in touch and hold reunions, and we believe we were very fortunate, in many ways, to have been in their care. If only the world followed the rules of conduct they followed it would be a much better place.