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Show Acting Alone Page 461 changed from the more traditionally allegorical originals, Caritas and Humilitas, because, unbeknownst at first to the lax chaplain, he had two real nuns by those names in his charge, who were embarrassed and secretly enraged by the Abbott and Costello-like nature of these tales. Lively, cheery and pseudo-primitive on the surface, the stories were all insidiously manipulative condescension underneath - the precise sort of thing that the older beaten-down nuns like Gorgonia's roommate thrived on, for they loved anything that removed from their shoulders the responsibility of acting like mature, responsible adults. So, with the contempt almost visible on his pointy face, the priest would take every opportunity to feed them these tales of foolish, scatterbrained Sisters Mary-Altarrails and Martha-Tabernacleveil and their Laurel-and-Hardyesque misadventures in refectory and peagarden, designed, with consummate mythopoeic skill, to lower the women's levels of self-esteem and to keep them docile and politically unorganized. But tampering with women's self-images had apparently ceased to be fully satisfying to Bopp's sick appetites, and he had graduated to tampering with women's corpses now. Polly suspected that she should be outraged or something; but she found that she couldn't get too worked up over the so-called desecration of cold human remains. It might be either highly Christian, or fundamentally unchristian of her - she had absolutely no idea which - but she'd always separated the soul from its pale, corrupt reflection, and had always considered the resurrection of the body - even of the so-called "glorified body" - a rather gruesome metaphor. At peace in her own soul, the main associations she had with pain and corruption were necessarily physical. Probably it was fundamentally unchristian. |