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Show Anting Alone Page 285 got some Latin student from the UK on a temporary visa to translate the letter, and she was having a joke on everybody now. Yes, it was a transoceanic joke on paternalism that was secretly being shared by two women. At any rate, Polycarpana swallowed her pride and filled out the letter of request, no scribbling-outs, and mailed it off to Pope John Paul II. Then more head-cheese had to be boiled off, more wandering eccentrics ejected from the special collections room, all done wearing a perfect nunly pokerface for two and one-half weeks until the routine response arrived from the Vatican: Papal Dispensation #26512B-slash-80. The Supreme Pontiff used flawless Latin, and nice stationery; too - quite elegantly austere, not too much embossing, but still much more imposing than the pulp paper Marvel Comics printed his official funnybook biography on -: (Fill in the blank) is excused from observing the external appearances of religious life, according to the prescribed canon 643, article 2, nothing to the contrary notwithstanding, signed Basil Such-and-such, OFM conventional, subsecretary to the Holy Father. Chaplain Wagstaff Bopp had been no help at all in his supposedly professional capacity as counselor. Not that Polycarpana had needed any counseling especially not from someone with so many problems of his own. She would have just appreciated the time alone to think, instead of wasting it in Bopp's office while he, under the pretense of counseling her on the "intense shift in lifestyle she was about to undergo," forced her to listen to his latest bits of nunnery gossip - in particular the real reasons behind Sister Simone Stylite's recent incarceration in a certain Colorado Springs |