DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68288#0067
CHAPTER IV
CONVENT AND CONCORD
Good-bye to my childhood! At fourteen, I went away to
school at the Convent of the Visitation at Georgetown,
where my mother, my aunt, and an older sister had been
before me, and where at the time lived, as a nun, a cousin
of my mother, Sister Mary Blandina.
My girlhood, as I look back upon it, seems to have con-
sisted chiefly of my life at the convent, or in Concord,
Massachusetts, where I visited the summer of my nine-
teenth year. I had been there once or twice as a child, but
it was in this later and longer visit that I came to know
this wonderful place and remember it.
Those years at the convent were very like the years of
most young girls at school, or at least at convent schools,
very vital to me, but certainly of no universal interest. I
loved the nuns and I loved Catholicism, as I saw it there in
all its simple beauty, American nuns, American character,
which I suppose I understood. Later, when I went to
Rome and saw churchmen in their gorgeous robes talking
frankly about the temporal power of the Pope, I was
shocked. The very suggestion of an idea that any one could
in this late day of the world’s history consider a possibility
of religious domination was something that quite took
away from the charm which Catholicism in America, or at
least among my American friends, had held for me. I felt
as if I wanted to go right back to my convent and tell
those dear unworldly nuns about it. I knew they would
dislike it quite as much as I.
CONVENT AND CONCORD
Good-bye to my childhood! At fourteen, I went away to
school at the Convent of the Visitation at Georgetown,
where my mother, my aunt, and an older sister had been
before me, and where at the time lived, as a nun, a cousin
of my mother, Sister Mary Blandina.
My girlhood, as I look back upon it, seems to have con-
sisted chiefly of my life at the convent, or in Concord,
Massachusetts, where I visited the summer of my nine-
teenth year. I had been there once or twice as a child, but
it was in this later and longer visit that I came to know
this wonderful place and remember it.
Those years at the convent were very like the years of
most young girls at school, or at least at convent schools,
very vital to me, but certainly of no universal interest. I
loved the nuns and I loved Catholicism, as I saw it there in
all its simple beauty, American nuns, American character,
which I suppose I understood. Later, when I went to
Rome and saw churchmen in their gorgeous robes talking
frankly about the temporal power of the Pope, I was
shocked. The very suggestion of an idea that any one could
in this late day of the world’s history consider a possibility
of religious domination was something that quite took
away from the charm which Catholicism in America, or at
least among my American friends, had held for me. I felt
as if I wanted to go right back to my convent and tell
those dear unworldly nuns about it. I knew they would
dislike it quite as much as I.