Word: sisterly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Moreover, John Paul is firmly convinced, as are many others, that Mary brought an end to communism throughout Europe. His faith is rooted in the famed prophecies of Mary at Fatima in 1917. According to Sister Lucia, one of the children who claimed to see her, the Virgin predicted the rise of Soviet totalitarianism before it happened. In a subsequent vision, she directed the Pope and his bishops to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart in order to bring communism...
...much more aggressive view of Mary is emerging from feminist circles within the church, emphasizing her autonomy, independence and earthiness. Old- fashioned views of the Virgin, complains Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a Fordham University professor of theology, "make her appear above the earth, remote and passive," with "no sex and no sass." She adds, "There's still a strong element of that in the present hierarchy...
...revisionist views of the Madonna claim her as an active heroine who was variously an earth mother and a crusader for social justice. Mary, says Sister Lavinia Byrne, who works with non-Catholic groups in Britain, stood by loyally during her son's crucifixion while all but one of his male disciples ran away. Her agreement to bear the Son of God, argues Ivone Leal of Portugal's Commission on the Status of Women, was the act of "a strong woman. She followed her son's adventurous life, which was known to be doomed to failure, and always sustained...
...hardened, sinewy blond who is almost succeeding in fighting off the encroachments of middle age tells her unstylish, homebody sister how sorry she is that the homebody threw away her life caring for their bedridden father and addled aunt. The care giver insists she has no regrets: "I can't imagine a better way to have spent my life." Later she explains, "I have had such love." She does not mean her elderly wards' love for her -- they are often cross or ungrateful -- but rather hers for them. She is not confessing to neurotic possessiveness or bidding for sainthood...
Bessie, the care giver, connects tenderly with her harsher sister's teenage sons, one a powder keg of anger who burned down his neighborhood, the other a bespectacled Milquetoast who perpetually retreats into a book. She also has a wonderful speech recalling her only romantic love, a carnival worker who drowned before her eyes when a partying crowd onshore mistook his desperate pleas for habitual clowning. Amid the grim reality, McPherson's characters take childlike delight in simple things and maintain a giggly sense of humor. Bessie's father Marvin, unseen but for his shadow through a glass-brick wall...