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Show Anting Alone pa g e 289 delight of dining in his presence. Some unfortunate postulant would be expected to forgo supper that she might walk the snarling, straining Liebchen around the grounds, to keep the paranoiac priest's protection from the legendary Intruder entertained during the meal. The special linen and the good silver and the best china would all be broken out. The older nuns, who considered it an honor to be allowed to fuss over a priest, would give the younger women lectures on classical table manners, downright crash courses if Father Bopp simply dropped in with no advance warning. "Spot checks," he called these unannounced visits, with a smirk. In the midst of these visitations, Simone would invariably get Polycarpana started laughing by-whispering something like, "What does he want from us? A spiritual boquet of four thousand ejaculations?" It was all very well to joke about Bopp as he sat at the head of the front table in Mother Superior's pre-empted place of honor, propped and cushioned there, pouting at his good china plate of nunly food as his fifty handmaidens, his own personal harem of virgins, scurried about on all sides, satisfying his every petulant whim. But there were more insidious ways that Bopp and others like him saw to it that women in religious life were kept cowed and docile, other devious, dangerous ways that the self-esteem of sisters throughout the church was systematically damaged every moment of their lives. Obscurantism and revisionism, for example. As Saint Paphnutius* own little representative of the paternalistic church, Bopp had an interest in cutesifying the mighty, womanly myth of Mother Pudentiana. He trod upon her amazing story by actually, with deliberate conscious effort, suppressing |