Sister Mary Clarence: Keep your knees together, and pray for deliverance.

Sister Mary Clarence - Advice you can believe in.

You may not like it, but you can believe in it.

Dear Sister,

All my friends are getting their belly buttons pierced. Some of them even have tattoos. My mom says this is a sin. What do you think?

Blingless in Birmingham.


Dear Blingless,

It is not a sin to get your belly button pierced, but it is asking for trouble. Your mother has conveniently forgotten her own misguided adventures in conformity to popular culture so now she can’t give you the direction you need. I don’t blame your mother though. It really started with your grandmother. Fortunately you have turned to Sr. Mary Clarence before it is too late.

Your grandmother used to roll her skirts at the waist so she could display her bony little knees for all the world to see. Her more adventurous contemporaries also wore patent leather shoes so the boys they knew could, upon reflection, glimpse higher up their legs than the Lord intended.

Never mind the sexual havoc that ensued, these girls, when they became mothers, were rendered incapable by their own shamelessness to instill moral values in their daughters. This was the unfortunate plight of your mother’s generation: to be brought up by mothers who thought their own modesty ought to be tempered by fashion. Oh what a slippery slope that is, my dear.

Your mother’s skirts were so short off the rack that they required neither rolling nor patent leather shoes in order for the boys of the age to discern the color of her underpants. Is it any wonder that she cannot rely on the sense of good example to guide her daughter’s choices, but must instead rely in desperation on her fabricated hope for the wisdom of Holy Mother Church to prevent your trumping her pathetic little micro-mini with a horrifically unimaginable adornment to your navel.

I have seen your little friends out and about in public. I know about bare mid-riffs, thongs, skin tight knit tops, underwear as outerwear, and every other manner of baring, sharing, displaying, teasing, and advertising a seeming indifference to modesty, decorum and chastity that your too experienced too fast generation is prey to. Because your clothing leaves nothing to the imagination, you now think you have to adorn your actual flesh with metal and ink in order to differentiate yourselves one from the other. One shudders to think to what lengths your daughters will go to be attractive when fashion will no doubt dictate the flagrant airing of their actual pudenda to public scrutiny. You will have even less ground to stand on than your mother, and Holy Mother Church will be hiding once again in catacombs.

No, child, getting you belly button pierced is not a sin, but inviting the sexual attention of boys is. Go finish your homework, and then write 500 times, “My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and I will not defile it.”

Yours in Grace and Rectitude
Sister Mary Clarence, OPS