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Show Acting Alone Page 462 This is not to say that she didn't acknowledge the documented fact that certain very good and, yes, holy people's bodies simply do not rot. Saint Francis Xavier's even withstood the quicklime. But her reaction to that was so what? Whose souls had these wonderfully uncorrupted bodies helped to stay from decay, whose lives had these undying corpses enriched while still moist and ambulatory? Aside from the hideously sexist overtones, Polly was indifferent, she realized now, to this exhumation per se. She didn't even care to inquire whether the Bishop might have received the proper dismissorial letters from the Congregation of Rites in Rome, or whether, on the other hand, Bopp here might be taking some ill-advised, renegade-type action that would surely spoil Pudentiana's chances for canonization in the end - which, of course, would be vintage Bopp, his own version of the slapstick of incompetence. Her only strenuous objection was to his timing. Why in God's name did he have to choose this, of all days, to do his dirty bits of business on the ruined, but now pristinely beautiful side of the old mountain? Just so he could go around making that stupid joke about suiting up for the big double header? Chaplain Wagstaff Bopp now adjusted his chasubule in the cracked, blistered vestry mirror. He looked at his own broken face for a moment as at a stranger's, and got quiet all of a sudden. He addressed his two minions in a sad voice. "Yes, sisters. Your former Provincial Superior's shrine was miraculously spared from evil's recent freakish multiple outlash, that limited disaster visited upon our heads, only to have the very ground in which her remains are laid bought up by what many reasonably tolerant Christians see as a giant, unchristian, corporate cult." |
