I Witnessed Others Getting Spankings

A CATHOLIC SCHOOL PADDLING
I attended eight years of Catholic school beginning in 1964. I know that whenever someone says "Catholic school" everyone thinks of the hitting. The nuns were still the old-fashioned kind with the white bibs, head dresses and scowling faces, and although by the time I graduated and went on to public high school they had pretty much toned down their reputation as uncompromising disciplinarians, in their heyday their reputations preceded them, and they seemed eager to live up to them.
Most nuns did not hit girls. I say most because we did have some who did. I noticed that a nun's level of sanity could be gauged by how she disciplined girls. A normal nun did not hit us but sometimes reprimanded us verbally. Sometimes they would pull our hair by our convenient ponytails. A nun who was, shall I say, unbalanced would slap a girl's face for any number of infractions such as talking or not knowing an answer to a question. But a nun who seemed ready for the bin would beat the living crap out of a girl in the same way she would a boy. Those were the dangerous ones.


Face-slapping was the usual method of punishment. The stereotype about the ruler on the hands was rarely done at our school--they went right for your face and flailed, catching noses, ears and eyes.
The boys were shown no mercy. To me it seemed like nuns hated boys for some reason, and appeared almost eager to give them physical discipline. They slapped their faces, pulled their hair, caned them with pointers and maple yardsticks. And all these punishments were done in front of the entire class so that we could all watch. I always got very nervous when I watched a nun beating on a boy, and sometimes I lowered my eyes so that I could not see it.


But the principal, Sister Superior, was by far the worst. She was the one who had what was called "The Paddle." I had not seen it, but it was spoken of with dread by students, even girls who knew they would not be paddled purely because of our gender--but we were never too sure whether that policy would one day change.
I will never forget the paddling that we were all forced to witness one day. We were in Sixth Grade, average age being eleven. Johnny Fitzgibbon was hands down the class clown, who made us laugh with his antics, but who was always getting his face slapped for disrupting the class lesson. Sometimes such an offense got a student a sort of "time-out" by being made to stand outside in the hall. However, this relatively simple solution could become very dangerous if Sister Superior happened to be walking the halls and spotted the boy. Usually she slapped his face a number of times, then brought him into the classroom to ask the teacher what he had done to be put outside. Upon learning why, she gave him a further series of face slaps before dragging him down to her office, to stay as her prisoner for the remainder of the day.
It so happened that our nun was in the middle of a history lesson. She was asking questions about the lead-up to the American Revolution.
"What was the Stamp Act?"
Silence from the class. Nobody seemed to know what the Stamp Act was.
But Johnny Fitzgibbon knew. He half-whispered to the boy in the seat in front of him, "That's when the stamps started acting up."
That's also when the nun lost her temper. "Fitzgibbon, get out!! Get out of this classroom!"
With a good-natured grin, Fitzgibbon left his desk and walked out of the classroom, closing the door behind him. The class laughed until the nun told sharply not to encourage the boy.
After the history lesson the nun decided that Fitzgibbon had been exiled long enough, and opened the classroom door to let him in.
He was not there.
Our teacher appeared puzzled as she came back inside. Maybe she figured he had gone to the bathroom, but students were not allowed to use the lavatory without prior permission. But she didn't speak of Johnny's absence, and prepared for the next lesson of the day.
The classroom door suddenly burst open and banged against the wall, which made us all jump with surprise. The next moment Fitzgibbon was shoved into the classroom by Sister Superior, who pushed him along with one hand, while in the other hand she held the dreaded paddle.
"Get in there!" she yelled with every push. "Get in there!"
Once inside, she tossed the paddle onto the teacher's desk, where it landed with a heavy clunk. It sounded pretty hefty. I noticed that it was the common paddle sold in any souvenir shop and Five and Dime at the time. They usually had funny sayings on them like "Board of Education" or "Heat For the Seat." The two girls sitting in front of me exchanged amused grins, silently acknowledging that a boy was in for a public spanking, much to their delight.
Now that she had a captive audience, Sister Superior began the show with a burning lecture.
"You have been put outside for disruption for the last time!" she hollered. "This time I'm going to do something about it." I looked nervously down at the surface of my desk. I didn't want to witness this.
Now Sister Superior began to badger the boy. "Oh, I'm saving my strength," she told him. "I can't wait to use that paddle on you!" And I bet she couldn't.


When I was in public high school a few years later I received a paddling from my principal, but it was nothing like this. He did not badger, or tell me how he was going to enjoy this. Moreover, in public school the culprit is usually sentenced beforehand to a set number of swats, usually from three to five. Catholic grade school was different. The paddling continued without limit until the nun's arm was tired and the boy was reduced to a sobbing wreck in front of his classmates, and especially in front of the girls to add to his humiliation.
Now came the moment. Sister Superior took up the paddle and gestured with it to a desk in the front row. A girl was sitting in it. She would be able to hear every groan and whimper. I'm sure the principal chose this desk deliberately.
"Get over that desk, Fitzgibbon," she commanded, "because I'm going to give you now what your parents should have given you long ago!"
Johnny Fitzgibbon bent over the front of the desk, laying his upper body down on its flat surface. Sister Superior grabbed the back of his neck with her left hand and bore down on it, effectively holding the boy down and preventing him from rising.
Now she began the paddling. Her right arm worked like the arm of a windmill, going round and round as the paddle slammed over and over across the seat of Johnny's burgundy uniform trousers. The swats sounded loud and terrible as they echoed through the room. I didn't want to look, but in spite of myself I had to see this, wondering how far Sister Superior was willing to go, and how much the boy could take. Mentally I counted the swats. They seemed never-ending.
On the tenth spank we heard a loud "Aaah-HOOO!" from Fitzgibbon as he finally was unable to take any more and broke down sobbing. But Sister Superior did not stop. She continued the rain of swats as the boy cried. Eleven Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Oh, when will she stop this? I thought to myself.
I counted twenty, but she still kept on paddling. This was too cruel. At last she stopped, on number twenty-five. Mercifully the spanking was over.
"Now get up, and go sit down," ordered Sister Superior, "if you can!" Did she have to throw that in?
Fitzgibbon did the tearful walk of shame down the aisle to his own desk, where he angrily sat down hard and cradled his head in his arms, shielding his humiliation from the onlooking gazes of his classmates.
"Let this be a lesson to all of you!" the principal announced to us. "If any of you disrupt this class, you will get the same! And that means all of you!" This sounded like a broad hint that she intended to paddle the girls as well. Then she stormed out of the classroom, clutching the paddle, as we well-trained students all stood in respect whenever a nun exited the room.
I had never seen such a terrible spanking, not even at home where my Mom was considered the uncrowned champion. Even when I received my own paddling as a seventeen-year-old Senior, it was nowhere as vicious as this. In all fairness I have to say that as the years went by and more lay people replaced the dwindling numbers of nuns the corporal punishment appeared to lessen. And to my surprise Catholic schools, who were known for their cruel discipline, actually stopped corporal punishment when public schools were still paddling--and paddling girls as well as boys! Corporal punishment is now forbidden in all schools, public and private, in the State of New York.