Nuns

Friday

Jacqueline Sweet

Pennsylvania nuns fight back against false voter fraud claims

A Pennsylvania order of nuns is threatening legal action over false voter fraud claims from a political operative with a scandalous history in Republican politics. The founder of a “ballot chasing” operation was seemingly unable to identify a very-online monastery of Benedictine sisters. With two weeks to go until the presidential election, a Republican door-knocking initiative claimed to have uncovered startling fraud in the up-for-grabs swing state: “BREAKING: A member of PA Chase discovered an address in Erie, PA today where 53 voters are registered,” Pennsylvania Chase founder Cliff Maroney wrote on X Tuesday evening. “Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there. We knocked on the door because a Republican mail-in ballot is unreturned.

nuns

Wednesday

Fergus Butler-Gallie

An incisive memoir of life in the cloisters

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the immaculately Brylcreemed megastar of the golden age of Catholic television and radio evangelism in the United States, famously hated hearing the confessions of nuns. Doing so, Sheen is reported to have said, was “like being stoned to death with popcorn.” Despite this, Sheen — at one point broadcasting to over 30 million Americans — found himself hearing a lot of nuns’ confessions in his later career. He was reduced to this, alongside what was rather euphemistically referred to as his “international cassette tape ministry,” having fallen foul of the archbishop of New York, the doughty Cardinal Spellman.

Cloistered

Monday

Birdie Hall

Married in Meteora

I first visited the Greek monastery of Agios Stefanos on the rocks of Meteora in the early spring of this year, one week after my baptism into the Orthodox Church. Greece was heavy with Great Lent fasts and preparations for Christ’s resurrection — Easter. I had just escaped the clutches of an extremely sweet but annoying young tour guide with whom my very Greek now-father-in-law had set my fiancé and me up for a tour of the ancient churches. I wanted nothing to do with this young man in a tour van who sounded like he was reciting words from a tape recorder. Later I found out he was, and had taught himself English by doing so (which is pretty endearing in hindsight).

meteora