Catherine Coldstream

speaker

329 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Catherine Coldstream’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · A former nun on why she ran away from her 'Cloistered' life · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

And their agenda was to keep everything unchanged as it had been.

And we're very resistant to any suggestion that we should have more dialogue or questioning or more discussion.

So, yeah, it was really difficult.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, this was not the perennial prioress.

It was quite strange.

We had a sort of prioress who was the sort of natural leader who everybody loved, basically, but had quite big problems with as well.

I think some people did.

This was another prioress.

This is a relatively new prioress that in my later years, when there had been some changes in the structure of the community and culture,

I think she was having a breakdown.

I think she was, I mean, I've often wondered why she took it out on me so physically.

But what was happening was this was an expression of a much wider kind of thing that was going on in the whole community.

There were breakdowns happening, there were tempers flying, there were people dying.

You know, being carted off to the infirmary, having had physical breakdowns.

I mean, the community went through a time of sickness, if you like, when there was this massive, stressful eruption of disagreement about, you know, who should be prioress and how...

the the authority of the priors should be mediated and there were it basically there were two points of view there were two groups and there was a sort of breakaway clique who resisted the the rest of the community so it felt like the community was split in two and i think people were just struggling so much this particular moment when i was beaten i think that the the priors who did that to me was basically somebody who was experiencing such extreme frustration she just didn't know how

She was just taking it out on me.

I don't know.

But when you said it was an extremely shocking thing, I know it reads as shocking when I describe it in the book and people notice that.

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