Sacred Symbols,School Ideology and the Construction of Subjectivity

In the period before Vatican Two, Catholic convent schools were identified with certain sacred symbols. The symbols conveyed specific images of God, the Virgin Mary and various saints. They had long histories in the social memory of each religious congregation and were powerfiilforces in directing the subjectivity of teachers and students. A problem associated with the symbols is a lack of historical justification which has resulted in their taking on the guise of eternal truths as they appear to exist outside history and the acts of humans. The focus of the paper is to establish the centrality of three sacred symbols in the social memory of a religious congregation and one of its schools, to explore the historical construction of the symbols, and to identify discourses embedded in the symbols as they related to the construction of subjectivity. The study is informed by feminist, poststructuralist theory.