OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 290 the facts of her life - the life of a strong, self-willed, working woman - and replacing them with typically mindless little miracle tales. Oh, yes, sisters, our foundress Mother P. did indeed tap the mountainside with her dainty foot one day and cause that geothermal spring to come forth. Yes, verily, little sisters, the tornado did come last year and rip out every last aspen in the clearing, but miraculously left good Mother P.'s shrine - er grave intact. (Must watch that premature cult introduction, mustn't we, little sisters? But it can't hurt to pray for her canonization, can it?) And, with a diabolically manipulative cleverness obviously not his own, which he could only have derived from a nineteen-hundred-year-old tradition of institutionalized sexism, Bopp had carefully painted a secondary portrait in the sisters' minds of a rather slatternly, irresponsible Pudentiana, even as he insinuated these insipidly miraculous powers upon her. He would humanize Mother Pudentiana in the most condescendingly slanderous way by hinting that she'd died of cholera but had been too frightened and medievally superstitious to allow a doctor into her death chamber to verify the diagnosis; but that she'd summoned the girls from the convent school and the postulants and novices to her deathbed that she might indulge in the dispensation of her homespun, cutesy, primitivist wisdom. The woman was a nurse by profession, for God's sake, a foundress of hospitals. Of course she would have known the nature of her disease, and would have taken every precaution to preserve the likes of old Gorgonia's little cellmate from infection. But no, the paternalistic elements must insinuate that she'd been a mere, typically unsanitary nun, perhaps succumbing |