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Show Acting Alone Page 460 tell the assembled postulants a wide-eyed miracle fable entitled The Great Denture Mixup, and Mother Pudentiana's Miraculous Solving of Same: In the early days of Saint Francis Hospital down in Colorado Springs, a new postulant is assigned to collect and brush all the patients' dentures; and, because she has been lax in her prayers, the Blessed Virgin allows this girl's mind to get careless, and she gets all mixed up as to which sets of teeth belong to whom. But our very own Potential Saint Pudentiana calmly shines forth through the darkness of the log-and-mud corridors and straightens everything out with miraculous, healing insight, calling upon the Blessed Virgin to place these uppers and those lowers between the correct pairs of sunken coalminers' lips, and so on. A manageable, serviceable, ladylike miracle, sure to get a chapter all its own in the hagiography - no mention made of how it was "Mother P.'s" own fire and blood and guts that had gotten the semi-civilized miners to donate the money for the hospital in the first place, that had seen the very physical plant itself through to completion against all odds: Protestant sabotage; Klan rape-raids; the anti-Papist libel of local demagogues, etc., etc. The simple, gross irreverence of an unreconstructed but non-malicious heathen like Sammy (he called her Super Mom) was far less damaging to Catholic womanhood than Bopp's canonically legitimate attempts to get Pudentiana beatified. Up until now the chaplain had more or less restricted his female-baiting to Holy Hour Homily. He had a whole collection of brief but effective parables, morality tales, even object lessons, starring his two favorite characters: Sister Mary-Altarrails and Sister Martha-Tabernacleveil. The names had been |
