Education Quote by Andrew Greeley

A priest confessing “terrible handwriting” should be quaint, even endearing. Greeley makes it something sharper: a miniature indictment of a whole Catholic pedagogical era, delivered with the offhand cadence of someone who’s learned to turn pain into anecdote. The pivot is the slyly modern line, “I now say it’s a learning disability,” which smuggles in a cultural shift from moral judgment to diagnosis. He’s not just updating vocabulary; he’s exposing how institutions reframe difference as defect, then enforce “correction” through humiliation.

The nun arrives not as a stock villain but as a telling detail: “a very troubled woman.” That phrase carries a priest’s instinct to grant interiority, even to the person who harmed him. It softens the accusation without reducing the harm. Greeley is doing two things at once: recalling corporal punishment as normalized discipline, and suggesting it was also displaced trauma, adults handing their own damage down the line with a ruler.

His intent feels less like self-pity than a controlled act of witness. Handwriting becomes a proxy for how Catholic schooling often prized compliance and appearance over comprehension. The subtext is that “bad writing” wasn’t merely an aesthetic problem; it was a moral irritant in systems built around order, legibility, and authority.

Context matters: Greeley lived through the mid-century Church, before reforms and before widespread talk of learning differences. The quote lands as a quiet reminder that the Church’s tenderness in sermons didn’t always reach the classroom.