Word: priestly
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...course of the year 1631, in the little French town of Loudun, an entire convent of Ursuline nuns went insane, or rather, to use the analytical term of that day, they were possessed by devils. And since the chiefest of these was a demon of desire for the parish priest-a dashing esthete adored by the women of the town and detested by their husbands-it was indisputably evident to the man's enemies that he was a wizard, and that something had to be done about...
...Rash Priest. Father Urbain Grandier, the center of the disturbance, looked for all the world like "a fleshier, not unamiable and only slightly less intelligent Mephistopheles in clerical fancy dress." Since his arrival at Loudun in 1617, he had fully exploited his devilish good looks. He not only made himself free with scullery trulls and upstairs maids; he also abused the confessional and other sacred precincts, it was said, with docile ladies of the parish. He had even taken a rich "wife," though his enemies had difficulty in proving it, because Grandier himself had served as both priest and bridegroom...
...Revenge. Yet it was Sister Jeanne, prioress of the Ursulines, who brought the long delusion of Grandier to an end. In Huxley's interpretation, her native hysteria was aggravated by the abnegations of convent life; she began to have daydreams, and later night sweats, about the handsome priest. She offered him the post of director of her convent, and Grandier refused. Thereupon, as Huxley reads the evidence, Sister Jeanne's fantasies turned into a mania for sadistic revenge...
...pain as hospital attendants carried him on a stretcher to the healing spring in the grotto. They lowered him into the water. A few moments later, Godard stood up, unassisted. "I'm cured!" he cried. "It's a miracle!" "You should be very thankful," said the attendant priest, Abbé Jeanson, "but are you really cured?" To prove his point, the exuberant pilgrim hopped & skipped around the priest...
...sitting on a pillar. Psychiatrist Karl Stern writes about St. Théreèse of Lisieux, a bourgeois French girl who died in 1897, at 24, in a Carmelite cloister. Also included: one Pope, Pius V; two Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola and his missionary follower Francis Xavier; one parish priest, St. Jean Vianney, the 19th century cure...