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Show Acting Alone Page 459 strong, natural, mere woman. Some magic must be involved here, sisters; never believe your mere selves capable of such determination and independence. Exhumation was not only macabre, it was beside the point. No miracle but hard work and strident social activism had been wrought by Pudentiana. Heroicity of virtue, yes. Prestidigitation, no. Of course not. Let the woman rest. The ultimate slap in her decayed or undecayed face was yet to come: the community was probably going to have to beg up enough cash to pay some male canon lawyers to do the investigation into her past for the beatification. It would be the male canon lawyers' job to dig up Pudentiana's history as brutally as Bopp's backhoes would her body, and to throw together the official hagiography. The nuns, Pudentiana's daughters all, were supposed to be too incompetent to perform such an investigation on their own. And the men could be relied upon conscientiously to ignore the considerable oral tradition that had sprung up as it were underground despite Bopp's sinister revisionism, and to cutesy the whole myth up. The paternalistic status quo, Bopp included, had a vested interest, explicitly enunciated in personal creed and officially acted upon with 1,950 years of tradition behind it, in degenerating Pudentiana*s womanly legend into cutesy magic tales, trumping up a Fame of Sanctity. Oh, yes, little Mother P.! Pat the ground with thy dainty, ivory-white, fragrant, uncallused instep and bring us forth a sodaspring upon which to build thy unabashed shrine and grotto! During Community Days Gorgonia's roommate here, a charter member of an entire generation of willing, dedicated dupes of the all-male clergy, would |
