Nuns Are “Rats” and “Wimps” for Turning in Accused Priest

“They’re rats and they’re wimps.”

That’s what William Brennan, a lawyer representing a local priest who allegedly abused a 14-year-old in the 1990s while receiving monthly church stipends despite having already been accused of abuse, recently called the nuns who ratted out his client.

The nuns in question, if you can imagine such a thing, turned on the priest, who was living in a church residence with young men and throwing loud parties.

The nuns ratted him out to the archdiocese. But they also made it clear they didn’t want it disclosed that they were the informants.

Which means not only were they rats. They were wimps too.

And that’s the very point the priest’s lawyer was making. Nuns or no nuns, you can’t trust anyone who’s a rat and a wimp.

The logic employed by the lawyer was as flawed as the character of the priests who we see dragged into court every day.

But to those of us who were verbally and physically abused by nuns every day in school, that’s all kind of beside the point.

The point is that the script was flipped for once. At long last, fair or not, it was nuns on the receiving end of nasty name-calling.

If you went to Catholic school, you know that nuns were the queens of mean and that calling students nasty names was de rigueur. At my parochial school, two favorites were “demon” and “rascal.” One nun, whose use of clever wordplay you had to appreciate, would point her finger at a misbehaving kid in our class and call him “a lazy lump of protoplasm.”

If name-calling was the worst thing nuns did to us, all this might make for a cute reminiscence.

But name-calling was the least of their offenses.

The nuns would smack you for talking, for laughing, for being a kid. I once saw a kid get smacked to the floor when a nun found a half an M&M on his pencil ledge and he proclaimed he couldn’t finish it for lunch. (He’d been breaking up M&Ms and using them as ammunition in a pea shooting fight.)

I saw another nun almost bust a kid’s nose because he drew a mustache on George Washington in his Picture Study book.

But the worst beating I ever saw a nun give a kid came in eighth grade when Jimmy Roberts (not his real name) took a ruler and proudly measured his penis through his pants for the class while Sister Maria Andrew (not her real name) was writing on the blackboard.

Sister Maria Andrew turned around to the class just in time to catch Jimmy Roberts mouthing the words: “And. That’s. Not. A. Hard. On.”

That nun almost sent poor not-so-little Jimmy Roberts to the E.R.

But I digress.

Point is, the tentacles of the horrific priest scandal have caused pain not only to the victims and their families, but to some sadistic nuns who were actually trying to do the right thing for once. I refer, of course, to the rats and wimps.