Word: abbesses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Foucauld was something of a problem monk. Postponing his ordination as a priest, he spent three years as a menial for an abbess of a convent at Nazareth...
...chosen was not easy for Geneviève (the name she took as a nun, from the patron saint of Paris). Says the abbess: "Geneviève wanted to arrive all at once. She tried too hard." The rigorous austerities of the Benedictines, whose daily Mass begins at 5 a.m., broke her health;for 22 years she remained a novice...