To a young girl attending Catholic school in the 1940s, eternal damnation was no abstract concept. “The nuns really terrified us,” says Pat Conroy, who grew up in Maryland. The list of potential transgressions—from eating meat on Fridays to missing Mass on Sundays—was long. “It seemed like almost anything was enough to send you to hell. I became so scrupulous and worried about everything I did.”
“Hell was an important part of the religious landscape of my childhood,” recalls Peter Steinfels, who grew up in Chicago during the same period. “It was the hell of endless flames and eternal punishment; although even in second and third grade I recognized that there was something mythical about this.”
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