OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 14 relics, in their tiny golden reliquaries, were pinned in echelons on the purple velvet interior. There was a single facial hair formerly belonging to Saint Chrodegang; a browned, curled fingernail of Saint Nympha; there was even a wedge of the grey tongue meat of Saint Chrysologos pressed in the miniscule crystal window of one monstrance-like reliquary. There were many such first-class, or "notable" relics, and also a few second-class relics, including three fibers from the personal linen of Saint Cyprian himself, Pope of the Catacombs, the whole labeled in a Latin abbreviated nearly to the point of indecipherability. Mere wood and gold surely comprised the least part of the great weight that must have been digging now into the lap of Sister Gorgonia's cellmate. In a hiatus between siren blasts, the old woman's high voice could be heard emanating from the gloom behind the case. "Sisters, shall we pray a rosary for the safety of our sister Gorgonia and anybody else up there, and also for the canonization of Mother Pudentiana?" The oldest of all the nuns in the tunnel today, Gorgonia's cellmate had been a young novice in the 1930's, in the days of the convent schools, when Mother Pudentiana, the foundress of the province, had lain in her death chamber giving audiences to the children and postulants and novices. By all reports, Mother Pudentiana should've been quarantined for cholera; if that were so, Gorgonia's cellmate's presence among the living today might qualify as one of the three miracles requisite for canonization. Even though Gorgonia's cellmate had apparently laid eyes on Mother Pudentiana only about three or four times under highly inhibited conditions, still she persisted to this day in calling Mother her "mentor." She prayed |