by Liz Daube
Staff Writer
Jacksonville attorney Mike Prendergast has a lot of nun stories. After all, he spent most of his formative years in Catholic school during the 1960s, when habits weren’t so rare and calling a teacher “sister” was the norm.
A few years ago, the partner at Coffman Coleman Andrews & Grogan found himself swapping nun memories with his former classmate, Danielle Schaff – and the beginnings of their book, “Don’t Chew Jesus! A Collection of Memorable Nun Stories,” began to brew.
“The point of the stories is this is a part of our past that needs to be passed on,” said Prendergast, who was president of the Jacksonville Bar Association six years ago. “We’re not saying it was necessarily a superior education, but it was different. It was something that shaped our lives.”
He and Schaff started collecting nun stories from former classmates and then strangers who submitted their tales via a Web site or hotline. As the authors learned more than they’d ever needed to know about nuns, they found the nuns they remembered from childhood were no longer teaching.
“We didn’t realize the void sisters left behind until hearing the recollections of so many others,” they wrote in the book’s introduction. “It hadn’t fully dawned on us the nuns we knew truly were gone. Many are deceased and others are living in retirement. There are fewer nuns today replacing the older sisters and those who do, for the most part, are serving in areas outside the classroom.”
The book compiles about 400 nun stories and is named after a story from Prendergast and Schaff’s school days. Prendergast said the title usually has to be explained to those outside the Catholic faith.
“The first Communion, it’s a big deal,” he said. “Catholics believe the bread and wine during the Mass are the body and the blood of Christ. ...There’s a lot of reverence. If no one’s drinking the wine, you can’t just pour it down the drain. You have to drink it.”
The “Don’t Chew Jesus!” story came from instructions the nuns gave children on consuming the Communion wafers, often having them practice on unblessed wafers. Prendergast said they even had techniques for removing the wafers from the roof of the mouth without letting them touch any teeth. The kids even used Necco wafers to “play Communion” at home.
“Now, I think, our teeth are not considered irreverent,” he said.
Prendergast said the book was intended to be funny and nostalgic. He and Schaff did get one or two upsetting submissions describing abuse, but Prendergast said the vast majority had a lighthearted, if not appreciative, tone.
“The nuns used to teach you how to baptize someone in case you were walking and saw someone dying by the side of the road,” he said with a smile. “And you would just live for the day you could walk on the side of the road and get to baptize somebody.”
Besides humor, “Don’t Chew Jesus!” explores some of the longterm impact of the nuns. For Prendergast, those effects range from volunteering to guilting his children into attending church. (“How much fun do you think it was on the cross?” he said.)
“There was always a big push on not just doing the right thing and not doing wrong, but going out of the way to do things that were right,” he said. “If I come to work here and see a piece of paper on the ground, I have to go pick it up.”
The book serves as a nostalgic trip through the past for those who were taught by nuns, Prendergast said. He hopes the stories will also entertain “publics” and those who attended Catholic school after the nuns’ heyday.
“I hope they have an appreciation for getting an understanding of what our experience has been,” said Prendergast. “To some extent, Catholics are still a big mystery.”
A portion of the book’s proceeds go to Support Our Aging Religious, a national nonprofit organization that aims to provide financial security for elderly and frail members of Catholic religious congregations. There are more than 70,000 nuns nationwide with an average age of 69. Many nuns worked with no pension plans, and the National Religious Retirement Office estimates the retirement liability of the nation’s retired religious is about $6.1 billion.