Word: conventionals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most nuns choose a religious life because they have a vocation. Not Sister Virginia. Instead of a vocation, she had a widowed father who wanted to get rid of her. At 14, she entered the Convent of Santa Margherita in the north Italian town of Monza, took the veil two years later. Her father, the Lord of Monza, not only managed to save the expense of a dowry but also pocketed the bulk of his daughter's personal fortune and was left free to range the world, fighting the Moors, the English and the Turks. Based on trial records...
Satan's Payroll. Until she was 22, Sister Virginia's life passed uneventfully in the nunnery. Then she looked out a window and saw Gian Paolo Osio, a handsome young man who lived on a fine estate next to the convent. "After I had seen Osio twice," Sister Virginia said, "it seemed as though I were forced by the Devil to go to that window." She meant it literally. Like everyone else in those days, Sister Virginia believed that Satan and all his devils roamed the world to snare men's souls...
...Lady of Loreto, prayed endlessly that "the Lord would free me from that passion." But several nuns who were Sister Virginia's close friends acted as if they were on Satan's payroll: when the time came, it was one of them who tossed the convent key over the wall to Osio...
...Sister Virginia, Osio belonged to a gang of reckless noblemen who "did nothing night and day but roam the streets armed with forbidden weapons, breaking into houses, assaulting now this one, now that, giving them wounds." To accomplish the seduction of the nun, Osio frequently attended Mass at the convent, sent intermediaries with gifts of silver crucifixes and other valuables, and even employed a licentious priest to help him achieve a persuasive elegance in his love letters...
...Binh Xuyen gangsters. Once, arranging a demonstration against them, she was surrounded by a hostile crowd of Binh Xuyen. She jumped into her car, cried, "Arrest me, if you can!" and drove straight through the ring of tommy-gun-toting toughs. Finally, the family shipped her out to a convent in Hong Kong to keep her quiet during a period of attempted conciliation. "It was just like the Middle Ages," she says, "but that's where I learned English." When she returned to Saigon three months later, she was still spoiling for a fight. Finally, Diem smashed the Binh Xuyen...