Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Confessions of St. Agnes, Chapter One – The Prequel

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Mike Peterson Published: August 20, 2010 1 minute 2 comments

Agnes is apparently channeling St. Augustine.*

I like the idea of "playing the holy card." In the good old days of meatless Fridays, holy cards were like baseball cards for Catholics, only there would be a prayer on the back instead of statistics about the saint pictured on the front. They were also printed on paper instead of sturdy cardboard, which was too bad because they had the status of flags in that you had to treat them with extreme care and could probably pile up a few hundred more years in Purgatory for abusing them. While I know how to properly dispose of a flag, I don't even know if there was a way to dispose of a holy card without getting in big fat trouble with God. Mostly, you tucked them into your missal**, so that, by the time you were old, your missal would be an inch thicker than when you got it at Confirmation. 

I should say, in all fairness, that today's nuns devote a whole lot less energy to telling kids all the ways they are pissing God off and a whole lot more energy to suggesting ways to get on His good side, and those ways tend to involve actual acts of charity in the greater world rather than things you can do while kneeling straight up in a pew with your hands properly folded and not with your fingers intertwined so that the angels can't figure out how to pluck the prayers from your fingertips and fly them up to God.

I should also add that I had two great-aunts who were nuns and that I have labored much of my life to reconcile my memory of those bright, kind women with the scars left by my first grade teacher. But it's only been half a century and I haven't sorted it all out yet.

Which is probably why I find today's Agnes so funny. The Good Little Girls in my class would have been thrilled to be told they had stigmata and bitterly disappointed to learn that they were merely astigmatic. Misere nobis.

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* ("Lord, give me chastity and temperance, but not now." This is, of course, a Sherroded quote.)

** A missal is the thick little book with soft leatherette covers that contained all the prayers and texts for Mass, not only on Sundays but on the other days as well, with information on the saints and their holy days. We used to point out the introduction at the front and say that it meant we had "a guided missal." We were going to Hell.