About your Lebanese Family, Anne…

Comment  on my post dated 9/12/2011,  from David Anthony in America:

To Anne Frandi-Coory: – What a touching note.   [from post: My Father, Joseph Jacob Habib Eleishah Coory]. You mention Aramaic: I have a little story for you:

About 30 years ago, about 1978-1980, my jidoo [grandfather] was visiting my house when a distant cousin from Lebanon visited.  My jidoo’s parents came to America in 1892. He was raised speaking what he and we thought were Arabic. He spoke it fluently- after all, it was what was spoken in his household growing up.

Well, when my cousin, who recently came from Lebanon fleeing the civil war, visited, they (my cousin and my grandfather) both spoke to each other in [what they thought was] Arabic. They couldn’t understand one another. My cousin said my grandfather wasn’t speaking Arabic, but a language much older. He said it was like an Italian listening to Latin.

Come to find out that my jidoo didn’t really speak Arabic. The language he spoke so fluently was Syriac- as you know, a version of Aramaic. The “Arabic” words I picked up as a youth tended much more towards Aramaic. In fact, many years after my jidoo passed away, a very good friend of mine from Zahle told me that the few Lebanese words my dad and I spoke had a strong northern (Ehden) accent.

Just one other note: Anxiety runs rampant in the Lebanese side of the family. For some, the levels of anxiety run so high that it’s disabling. I’m wondering if there’s a similar issue in your family.

Too, as you mention above, [in 'My Father...'] my dad was beaten by the Catholic nuns at his school growing up. Two reasons; 1) Lebanese boys were forced to sit in the back of all classes. Italian and Irish boys sat in front. 2) As my dad had terrible nearsightedness, and he wasn’t allowed to sit in the front of the class because of his skin color, he could never see the blackboard. In order to take any notes, he’d copy notes from the student sitting next to him. When he got caught by a nun, which was often, he’d get sent to the principle for copying notes. The principle would tell him to put out his hand, which would then get beaten pretty badly.

Finally,one day, when he was in 8th or 9th grade or so, he came home with such a beaten hand that my sitoo [grandmother] noticed. After she insisted he tell her what happened, my dad then explained what happened. Right away they went and bought him his first pair of glasses. After that, he could see the blackboard better- and his grades went sky high.

But the damage was done. By tenth grade, he left school to work in a factory, partly driven, I’m sure, but the beatings.- David Anthony.

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A very old photo of my grandmother, Eva Coory's mother and brother, taken in Bcharre, Lebanon.

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Dear David

How wonderful to hear your story. Yes, Aramaic is derived from an ancient form of Syriac and is now spoken only by small pockets of Syrian peasants. It was also the language that Jesus spoke. I did much research into my grandparents’ history and the history of Lebanon in general. My grandfather’s ancestors moved to the hills of Lebanon (Bcharre) around the 14th Century, from Iraq.

You may be interested in my book ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’ A personal story, but which also delves deeply into the ancient history of my ancestors and the Aramaic language, which was eventually swamped by the advance of Islam and Arabic, which became the lingua franca of Arabia. BTW, Zahle is a name that pops up in my grandfather, Jacob Habib Fahkrey’s family history.

Anxiety runs deep in my family tree as well.  In both the Lebanese and Italian sides of my family, volatile personalities reign.  My children have inherited the tendency to anxiety, although nowhere near as intense as preceding generations. Of course, both Lebanese and Italian peoples express the whole range of emotions vividly, which can sometimes be quite intimidating to others.

I agree with you about the blatant racism that thrived in those times. Once again, both my Lebanese and Italian ancestors experienced this.

I would love to hear more of your story.

Best wishes,
Anne

Nuns: An Endangered Species?

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The Abbess was of noble blood

Catholic Sisters of Mercy; four biological sisters.The nun on the right was the closest I came to a mother figure; her face is the one I remember as an infant in a Catholic Orphanage nursery. (see 'Whatever Happened To Ishtar?')

But early took the veil and hood

Ere upon life she cast a look

Or knew the world that she forsook

Fair too she was, and kind had been

As she was fair, but ne’er had seen

For her a timid lover sigh

Nor knew the influence of her eye

Love, to her ear, was but a name

Combined with vanity and shame

Her hopes, her fears, her joys, were all

Bounded within the cloister wall:

The deadliest sin her mind could reach

Was of monastic rule the breach;

And her ambition’s highest aim

To emulate St Hilda’s fame

For this she gave her ample dower,

To raise the convent’s eastern tower;

For this, with carving rare and quaint,

She decked the chapel of the saint,

And gave the relic-shrine of cost,

With ivories and gems embost.

The poor her convent’s bounty blest,

The pilgrim in its halls found rest.

Black was her garb, her rigid rule

Reformed on Benedictine school;

Her cheek was pale, her form was spare;

Vigils, and penitence austere,

Had early quenched the life of youth,

But gentle was the dame in Sooth

From: Sir Walter Scott, ‘Marmion’, The Immolation of Constance De Beverley

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My mother was a defeated nun and a defeated mother. She entered a convent to escape the inescapable: LIFE.  (See ‘My Mother Was  A Catholic Nun‘)

For hundreds of years, young women and girls have been entering convents for various reasons.  Fathers and other patriarchs sent unmarriageable or unmanageable daughters into a cloistered life. Daughters whose mothers had died were also sentenced to life imprisonment, with or without their consent.

"A Drama of Science, Faith and Love"

Even Galileo, that illustrious 17th Century  scientist, and devout Catholic, confined his eldest daughter from the age of thirteen (1616)  to San Matteo convent in Arcetri.  His daughter, Virgina was deemed unmarriageable because her father had never married her mother, the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice. Virginia (Sister Maria Celeste) lived out her life in poverty and seclusion in the convent (Order of St Clare) , as did her younger sister, Livia. Unlike Virginia, very little is heard from, or about, the “silent and strange” Livia.   Virginia  lost all her teeth by age 27  because of her lack of a nutritious diet.  It is worth reading  ‘Galileo’s Daughter’ by Dava Sobel, a gifted author, for more on these remarkable lives.  We know so much about Galileo and Virginia because of the correspondence between the two.  Ms Sobel also covers the horror of Galileo’s life and his banishment to house arrest in Ravenna, at the hands of the Holy Inquisition headed by Pope Paul V.

The Florentine poet, Dante Alighieri, was exiled from his beloved Florence in the early 14th Century by Pope Boniface Vlll (Cardinal Caetani), with support from the French.  Dante’s only daughter, Antonia, was confined to a convent in Ravenna where he was living at the time in 1320.  Antonia took the name Sister Beatrice, the name of Dante’s beloved.

In this day and age, the numbers of young Catholic women wishing to give up their freedom “for God” is dwindling.

What is worrying is that sexual harassment and abuse from priests and bishops continues, particularly in third world countries.  Rape is common because the clergy believe these nuns to be free from aids, unlike prostitutes. If the nuns’ abuse is uncovered, or they become pregnant, they are the ones to be thrown out onto the roads.

(See previous post  ‘Kiss of Betrayal’)

In an extreme case of double standards, always rife in the catholic Church, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Arizona was excommunicated because she approved an emergency abortion last year to save the life of a critically ill young patient.  Imagine the hundreds of  sexually abused girls and boys who could have been spared lives of misery, if paedophile priests had been excommunicated and reported to police, instead of being shifted around from parish to parish?

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From the pen of  The Ethical Nag:  The Vatican has now launched an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of every one of America’s 60,000 religious sisters, accused with having what Vatican spokesman Cardinal Franc Rodé calls “a feminist spirit” and “a secular mentality”. At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for bringing the church to a state of global crisis, even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack from these men.

Not surprisingly, the appeal of joining a Catholic religious order as a career choice is plummeting. Fewer than 4% of North American Catholic women have even considered becoming a nun, according to 2008 data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. And that’s less than half the number compared to just five years earlier.

And no wonder. Dr. Tina Beattie, who teaches Catholic Studies at Roehampton University in the U.K., gives far more disturbing examples of how the Vatican treats its nuns.  For example:

“In 2001, senior leaders of women’s religious orders presented evidence to Rome of the widespread rape and abuse of nuns by priests and bishops, with a particular problem in Africa which has no cultural tradition of celibacy, and where the threat of HIV and Aids means that priests are more likely to prefer sex with nuns than with prostitutes. The Vatican acknowledged the problem and there was a brief flurry of media interest, but this is a scandal which has disappeared without a trace.”

I don’t know whether any Mercy nuns were sexually abused by Catholic clergy when I was a child  in their care, but I well remember the awe and deference the nuns exhibited in the presence of priests, bishops, and cardinals.  Once I understood the hypocrisy and double standard encouraged by the Church’s teachings, I found these displays sickening.

Letter To Elizabeth

Motherhood - The Ideal. Massimo Stanzione, Naples 1640s

Hello Elizabeth,

I do empathise with you although I wasn’t adopted myself, but two of my half siblings were. I wrote about them in my book ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’. See more on my blog about the negatives of mother/child separation, adoption under category Adoption & Separation. I was abandoned by my mother and placed in an orphanage, but I at least knew who my biological parents were. In all the years I have met and spoken with adoptees, I only ever met one man who did not wish to trace his biological parents. What came of my talking to adoptees was that it didn’t matter how good or bad their parents were; what mattered to them was knowing who and what their bio parents were, and why they were given up for adoption. It seems to me that adoption itself isn’t always bad, it is how it is carried out.

In the past, women like my mother, were forced by Catholic nuns to give up their new born babies, and most of these mothers never recovered from their loss. See Philomena’s and Sheldon Lea’s stories on my blog. The nuns never allowed these mothers to contact their lost children; refused to pass on information about the adoptions or the mothers’ names. The suffering in these cases, for mothers, and children,  was  life-destroying.

I understand what you are saying when you talk about your dad’s spirit being with you. The father you didn’t get to meet. I feel the same about my mother. The emotional pain she transmitted to me, persisted until I finished writing the book and she finally was at peace. Take care. Anne.

Visit Adoption Critic for ‘Dear Incubator‘ letter and comments…….

The Kiss of Betrayal

Kiss of Betrayal

This photo is disgusting in light of the Vatican’s cover up of the sexual abuse of thousands of children and the protection of paedophile priests. Just wait for the time bomb of huge numbers of abused children to explode over the next few years in countries such as Africa and parts of Asia.  Children are now being abused in developing countries where these rapist priests have free reign after being exiled from America, Australia, Canada, Ireland etc, to escape conviction.  But not only children suffer from this insidious clerical abuse.  It was revealed in 2001 that predator priests sent to Africa, forced themselves on nuns, because they were free from Aids/Hiv virus.  Convents stripped the abused nuns of their vows and evicted them from the convent with no means of support.  Of course, the offending priests were free to continue their abuse.  Anyone like me who was indoctrinated into the Catholic faith from infancy, will know first hand the adoration which nuns bestow on priests.  So, like children, they are powerless and vulnerable in the hands of a  priest intent on his own sexual gratification.

The Vatican has a priority list when in damage control and spin: Protect its wealth, priests and reputation. Women and Children’s welfare is not considered! The hypocrisy is sickening.

Catholicism’s Fall From Grace

God's Callgirl-a memoir

My childhood was spent in Roman Catholic institutions and my mother was a novice nun before her marriage (see ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’), so  these two books were of personal interest to me.   But of course they are both well written and interesting books in their own right, well worth the reading.

Carla Van Raay’s book God’s Callgirl is a perspective of the depths, in my opinion,  of how far Catholicism has sunk since the beginnings of Christianity and the teachings of Jesus.  Carla tells us  about her life from her upbringing within a strict Catholic family,  sexual and physical abuse by her father,  to her entry into a convent as a teenager and her later life as a sex worker. Her life in the convent was spent in prayer and unpaid drudgery, such as cleaning, teaching and needlework (which the convent sold) and when she finally leaves the convent she discovers her parents, who were not well off, were charged by the nuns for Carla’s board and keep!  She re-enters the real world as an innocent in every sense of the word. The convent was run by spiteful and cruel nuns within a strict hierarchy.  The convent’s inhabitants were called ‘The Faithful Companions of Jesus’, ironic to say the least.  Carla triumphs despite the best efforts of her parents and Catholicism.

My mother’s life was also one of hardship and emotional abuse in her convent which was called the ‘Home Of Compassion’.  My mother and I,  like Carla,  never experienced or witnessed any real and heart-felt compassion in any Catholic institutions!  In light of what is being exposed within the Catholic Church in recent times, it brings to my mind that saying  ‘The higher you fly, the further you fall’.

A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening - a novel

Mario De Carvalho’s book A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening is well researched which is apparent when he takes the reader back to Rome around the time of Jesus.  The narrator is a Roman provincial official with whom we travel on  his rounds of duties in the township where he lives, in amongst slaves and the rest of the populace.  We learn how Roman officials spent their days and how they treated their women and their slaves.  He describes in detail his living quarters and official buildings and how governing decisions of the time were reached.  The book is  set in the era of Jesus’ preaching and that of his ragtag bands of followers.  Rome was then suspicious of their motives, before the time when Rome would eventually embrace this new religion as their state’s own.  Added to that, many felt threatened and alarmed by the way these ‘new sect’  devotees dressed and behaved.  It just wasn’t the Roman way.  Persecutions and killings of Jesus’  followers was rife but in spite of this, the bands grew in number and they willingly became martyrs for their new beliefs; they felt close to Jesus  spiritually, copied his  acts of compassion for the poor.  His God seemed a more humane one than the various Roman gods.  Rome and her officials were sinking into corruption and the poor suffered greatly at their hands.  For a Roman Official to speak out for a pleb or a slave, was not self-serving; demotion or  exile from one’s town , often both,   would be the outcome.