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Show Acting Alone Page 2g2 the waves of nuns she intended to swamp the area with in the very near future. She talked the owners of a certain rundown TB sanatorium into giving her their building, and she established a new provincial Mother-house within its yellow stone walls, the community's first convent in the New World, named after her favorite saint, Paphnutius. All this she managed to do while at the same time teaching herself the language of America. One newspaper obituary that could be found on microfiche in the main branch of the Colorado Springs library, said, " . . . she treated all donors with equal respect and gentle condescension: the rich Catholic silver magnates as well as those lesser individuals who could only afford to give enough money to buy one brick for one of her chapels or convent schools or hospitals which dot the eastern Coloradoan landscape today." Within twenty years after Pudentiana's arrival on the scene, local mores had finally caught on to the deleterious effects of this powerful woman's presence on the politico-sexual status quo; and unwritten statutes were implicitly enacted prohibiting nuns from even walking down the streets of Colorado Springs unchaperoned (for their own protection, of course) . From that point on, the quality of person entering the community declined. Good girls like Gorgonia's future cellmate felt it safe enough to join, and were rewarded with a nice quiet retreat from the world and all its problems. And, not surprisingly, Pudentiana herself, or her physical moiety at least, went into a corresponding decline. From the moment she arrived on these shores from Tubingen, right up until the very moment of her death in the early thirties, she had pushed around not merely Chaplains like Bopp here, but bishops and archbishops |