Churches, Schools, and Getting Even

Then there’s the sub-genre of Catholic art created by artists and writers who attended Catholic school during their youth. Once again I’m forced to extrapolate from such slim evidence as is available to someone whose closest brush with that particular educational environment was strolling past John Carroll High School on Birmingham’s Southside when I was of college age. But judging by works like Christopher Durang‘s 1979 satirical play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All To You, there seems to be an element of bracing, unapologic revenge fantasy in many such works, with ancient psychological hurts once inflicted by tyrannical nuns serving as catalysts for score-settling by their student victims now grown to adulthood. What works best in this circumstance, as Durang has demonstrated in his stage works, is humor.

Of course, I’ve never known any tyrannical nuns personally, so I can’t actually attest from personal experience to their real-world existence. But I have known some quite tyrannical Southern Baptists, and I can only shudder at how even more drunk with power they might have been had their sense of divine anointment been fortified by a uniform proclaiming their holiness whenever they walked through a door. So it doesn’t seem a stretch to conclude that something corporeal keeps prompting one artist after another to look back in anger (or ridicule) at events and personalities they presumably felt scarred by in the Catholic schools of their youth.