Memories of a Catholic Boarding School: St. Albert's Hall Revisited

Buckdog sent me off on a tangent with this statement, "I am a recovering Catholic and have spent years undoing the idiocy and fear they infused in my life when I was a child."

Coming from a long line of Catholics that I can trace back to at least the 16th century I could easily understand his statement. Nope, this isn't going to be a long rant against Catholics in general, it has more to do with the way many people blindly put their faith and trust in churches and their official representatives in general.

Now I was probably a whole lot less traumatized by the Catholic church than he was, where I grew up it was the Baptist church that specialized in tormenting the local population. My parents were respectively, a (psychotic) agnostic who thought Billy Graham was an intellectual giant and collected books on "Black Magic" and a confused Catholic who barely got over believing in the Easter Bunny. Both were highly prone to "magical thinking" but were not exactly "regular churchgoing folks" so our churchgoing was limited to occasional forays in the company of schoolfriends from more traditional families.

Those visits were usually limited to about one visit after which we would decide that whatever church it was we had visited was as nutty as our parents. I've personally attended at least one service at nearly every Christian denomination in existence in the US including Mormon, Jehovah's Witness and even Pentecostal where I observed the phenomena known as "speaking in tongues". That was freaky but that's another story.

Anyhow, that's just some background. When I was 11 my parents in their infinite wisdom decided to send me to Catholic boarding school. No, it wasn't some sudden religious rebirth on their part...it simply seemed like a good place to stash an inconvenient child.

So off I went to St. Albert's located in beautiful Boerne, Texas. They don't keep a website regarding their secondary school program and I believe the average school shopper would have to find them via a referral from the church.

I wasn't there long but in the short time I was here are just a few of the highlights of things I saw:

Frequent, regular "discipline" in the form of whippings with a wooden paddle on bare bottoms in full view of other students.

A girl forced to stand in front of the entire student body and eat a full carton of cigarettes after being caught smoking.

A girl who was used as "slave labor" who had to scrub the communal bathrooms, floors, classrooms, etc. before and after school and on weekends and was not allowed to participate in after-school recreation to pay her tuition. She was 13.

The worst incident I was a witness to: a girl (age 13 or 14) who was caught in some infraction that I never found out the exact details of who was expelled. The expulsion was certainly within the schools' rights however prior to being escorted to the airport for her flight home the good sisters tied her to a bed, spread-eagled, with a rag stuffed in her mouth to prevent her from talking or screaming and then escorted the entire student body single file past her to "see what happens to bad girls".

Um, yeah, that one did it for me. I ran away less than a week after that sideshow.

My point is, parents either did not care what happened to their children or in many cases....blindly trusted the religious "authorities". No one believed us. Matter of fact, both the local police department and the nearby San Antonio police department staunchly defended the school and the Benedictine sisters who ran it.

Ok, its ancient history now. I'm not interested in trying to get some payback for 30 year old wrongs. What horrified me when I looked them up was discovering this.

The good sisters are now operating a federally funded Head Start program. Somehow this strikes me as not exactly a great idea. Maybe they've changed, I don't know but if it were your child....would you just assume that?