Doing time in Catholic school

So I was 70's-80's, not 50's-60's, and I didn't have Latin Mass. BUT the rest of this is oddly funny/cringe-inducing/flashback-worthy. Only the vets of the Nun wars get this, but it's worth the read.

One thought: I've met people who went to Catholic school who never saw corporal punishment, but the exception doesn't disprove the thesis. Second thought: any chance that the laissez-faire oversight that the schools received from the 50's to the early-80's is also showing up in the scandals plaguing the church in the last decade?

A Catholic-School Veteran Tells All
(David Noonan - Newsweek)

Every once in a while I run into someone who, like me, attended Catholic school in the '50s and '60s. These encounters usually follow a pattern. We establish terms of service—I put in 13 years, including kindergarten—test our memories of the Baltimore Catechism and the Latin mass, and recall things like meatless Fridays, the scourge of "impure thoughts" and Limbo, the nice but God-free place where babies who died before baptism spent eternity (and which the church essentially did away with in 2007). There is an odd charm to much of this, a quaint and funny weirdness that only another Catholic from that era can truly appreciate.

But the conversations inevitably turn to a decidedly less charming subject—getting smacked by nuns. I have no idea whether slapping kids across the face was officially sanctioned by the church in those days. I only know it happened, to me and plenty of other kids. The nuns who smacked me and my friends at our small elementary school in New Jersey were Sisters of Charity, a cheap bit of irony that always draws a chuckle when I talk about being on the receiving end of those holy rights and lefts.

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