Analysis Of Christopher Durang's 'Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You'

Since it was first published, the play “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” by Christopher Durang has been subject to criticism and claims that it goes beyond satire, into defamation. These claims are based on Durang’s negative connotation of the Catholic church, but he does not actually defame or slander the church at any point in the play. Durang simply uses exaggeration, ridicule, and irony of the character Sister Mary and of her students to prove a point about the Catholic Church. The Oxford English Dictionary defines satire as a work “which uses humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize prevailing immorality or foolishness, esp. as a form of social or political commentary” (Satire), which is exactly what

In order for the play to be defamation, which is defined as “being defamed or slandered” (Defamation), Durang would have had to explicitly lie about Catholicism or claim untrue things to be fact in order to damage the church’s reputation, but his aim was never to hurt the church, it was to bring forward a truth about the church that he experienced firsthand. The now-grown students of Sister Mary paint a vivid picture of the bad conditions in which they were taught in their catholic school. Philomena attests to Sister Mary that “when I didn 't know how to do long division, you slammed my head against the blackboard,” (Durang 404) and Aloysius reminds her that she would never let him go to the bathroom, up to the point where he would wet his pants every day and still has issues with his bladder. Because of Durang’s personal experience with being in a catholic school himself, he most likely draws these examples from experience rather than having made up things about the church. He exaggerated their experiences in order to emphasize his point about Catholicism being hypocritical and enforcing students to blindly follow dogmatic

In the original play, Sister Mary is presented in a way that she is initially trusted by the readers and her students such as Thomas, because she seems like a normal nun. As the play progresses, however, true hypocritical nature of her teachings and of herself eventually become evident. We first see this when she begins to answer questions from the audience. The whole purpose of Sister Mary’s presence is supposedly to educate the audience on Catholicism and answer their questions, yet whenever she is faced with a difficult question such as “If God is all-powerful, why does He allow evil in the world?" (Durang 385), she skips it. Durang then presents a very clear example of her preaching out dogma and having it memorized and recited back to her rather than teaching for real understanding, through her interactions with Thomas. Sister Mary further shows her hypocritical nature through the fact that although the catholic dogma she teaches is supposed to promote virtues such as kindness, fairness, and patience, Sister Mary is seen to lack all of these in practice. She gets frustrated easily and reacts violently and cruelly, as seen