Word: abbess
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...theater but came a little floridly into the living room. Yet both actresses gave the show its finest moment: a fateful mutual-humility act when the marquesa, in a weepy, alcoholic glow transferred her fierce love for her daughter to the peasant actress. Only Eva Le Gallienne's abbess managed to imbue the production with some of the pretty metaphysics of the original. "We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten,' she says. "But the love will have been enough . . . Memory is not necessary for love." Then a few seconds before final curtain, Actress Le Gallienne...
...republic that perches on the Apennines 60 miles east of Florence in north central Italy. But last week an unlikely rebel had the people talking angrily about throwing out the Reds once and for all. The issue: progressive education. The rebel: Mother Veronica, the frail, 74-year-old abbess of the Convent of St. Clare, who runs a top-notch traditionalist school for about 90 of San Marino's girls...
...Belgian Congo as a missionary nurse. She was assigned instead to an insane asylum where 100 overworked nuns cared for 1,000 female patients. There she tended a countess who thought she was a dog and ate from a plate in the center of the floor, a onetime abbess whose chief quirk was to wear a brown-paper bag on her head night and day, and a dementia praecox case who thought she was the Archangel Gabriel and nearly succeeded in strangling Gabrielle to death...
...heavily clerical, e.g., a monk's full prostration before his bishop brings the comment: "Rather ham, don't you think?", and one catty nun will say about another: "And you should see her genuflections." The abbot on the phone burbles to his opposite number: "Well, Abbess, and how's the old blood pressure?", while a fierce little monk clutching a horsewhip snarls: "Who's pinched my relic of The Little Flower?" Most of Brother Choleric's cartoons are taken from real life. Says he: "One doesn't have to think up jokes...
Three years later Sister Clare was abbess of an order of nuns in the old 8th century Church of San Damiano, which Francis had rebuilt, largely with his own hands. For the 38 years that remained to her, Clare never left those walls, while the order she founded spread all over Italy and France. As with the Franciscans, poverty is the cornerstone of the "Poor Clares"; they may not even hold property in common, but depend on begging...