Word: nuns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Monica Baldwin is an ex-nun. The cousin of England's onetime Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, she took the veil of a Roman Catholic contemplative order in 1914, left it with a papal rescript in 1941 when she finally realized that she "was no more fitted to be a nun than to be an acrobat." After 28 years behind cloister walls, she was almost equally unfitted not to be a nun. Her bestselling first book. I Leap Over the Wall (TIME, Jan. 30, 1950), had a certain Rip van Winkle-ish appeal: it drew the portrait of a woman...
...book is a raggedly plotted novel whose first-person heroine, Sister Ursula, obviously walks in the footsteps of Monica Baldwin. Unhappily, Author Baldwin's story of a nun who misjudges her vocation also treads close on the path of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story, and by comparison comes off secondbest. Such fascination as it has lies in the book's embittered documentation of a nun's daily round and the romantic-escapist character of Sister Ursula who acts like an adolescent schoolgirl at the stage door of heaven waiting...
...there were 35 in the community, with a duplicating machine and a sculpture studio set up in a barracks. The sisters set out to build a chapel, put it up in two years from excavation to roof on nothing but their own nun-power. Now a 50-room guest house is almost completed, and on the drawing board is a new 1,000-seat chapel plus auditorium...
...Catholics who argue that it is good public relations for the church to show that priests and nuns are human, Brizzolara reports that "unfortunately, their humanity is all such movies can depict and thus give us only half a priest or half a nun . . . The best [Hollywood] can hope for is to show Father as a 'real Joe,' and Sister as a 'good egg,' naive, perhaps, but wisecracking, gay, dedicated-always the part, never the whole...
...Reader Vernon's family says the painting (see cut) was given to an ancestor, William Henry Vernon of Newport, R.I., by Marie Antoinette not long before she was beheaded in 1793. It hung until 1833 in Vernon's collection at Newport where it was listed as "A Nun, a finished picture by Leonardo da Vinci." In recent years the Vernon family has kept it in a bank vault in Manhattan...