Lyrics I Used To Be Irish Catholic - George Carlin

I Used To Be Irish Catholic

I used to be Irish Catholic- now I'm an American.
Y'know, you grow....yeah.
I was from one of those Irish neighborhoods in New York.
One of those kind of parish schools.
Wasn't typical.
It
was, Corpus Christi was the name of it.
Could have been any Catholic church, right?
"Our Lady of
Great Agony" ..."St.
Rita Moreno" ..."Our Lady of Perpetual Motion"- What's the difference what
you call it?
The church part and the neighborhood part were typical but the school was not.
It
wasn't one of those old fashioned parish kinda prison schools with a lot of corporal punishment
and Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler, right?
(SMACK!) OOOWWWWW!
MY HAND!
AAAAUGGH!
And you'd fall two years behind in penmanship, right?
"Well, he's behind in
penmanship, Mrs. Carlin.
I don't know why." He's crippled. He's trying to learn to write with his
left hand.
We didn't have that.
We got..somehow we got lucky, y'know.
Got into a school where the pastor
was kinda into John Dewey and progressive education and he talked the parish...talked the
diocese, rather, into, uh, experimenting in our parish with progressive education and whipping
the religion on us anyway and see what would happen with the two of them there.
And uh,
worked out kinda nice;
there was a lot of classroom freedom.
There was no..for instance, there
were no grades or marks, y'know, no report cards to sweat out or any of that.
There were no
uniforms.
There were no...there was no sexual segregation;
boy and girls together.
And the desks
weren't all nailed down in a row, y'know.
There were movable desks and you had new friends
every month.
It was nice;
like I say, a lot of classroom freedom...in fact there was so much
freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith.
'Cause they made questioners out of
us and, uh, they really didn't have any answers, y'know.
They'd fall back on, "Well, it's a
mystery." "Oh, thank you, Father.
I dunno.
What's he talkin' about?
Mystery.
Part of "class clown" was being an imitator as you've probably noticed but I used to imitate the
priests...which was right on the verge of blasphemy, y'know.
I could do them all rather well.
I did
Father Byrne the best.
Father Byrne was the, uh, one who used to celebrate the children's Mass.
I always thought that was great - 'celebrate Mass' "Yeaaah! Yeah, man!"
Father Byrne did the
children's Mass;
did the sermon every week.
He used to do parables about "Dusty and Buddy".
Dusty was a Catholic...and Buddy.....was not.
And Buddy was always trying to talk Dusty into
having a hot dog on Friday.