Nun memoir cynicism upended.

So the other week I started reading the second volume of the memoirs of Sister Lucia, one of the Fatima visionaries (the other 2 died in childhood).

Unlike the first volume of the memoirs, which deal with the apparitions and were written down like in the 1930s and 1940s, the second volume has to deal with details about her parents, and was commanded by her bishop in like 1980 because they were redoing her house as a tribute to "the family".

In the introduction, the introducer just gushes about John Paul II and how he stressed the importance of the family, and you can tell that the bishop ordering the old nun to do this was some move to catch the pope's eye and move up the ranks.

And not that it's not that, but I actually found this memoir much more moving than the apparition memoir!  I've only just begun reading it, but there's this wonderful section where she describes when the Spanish influenze hit her hometown in Portugal, and her mother made chicken broth to take to all the sick people who couldn't leave their beds, and her father commanded her mother to stop for fear of infection, and she said that she had take the chickens to make broth from other people, so to deliver the broth with her, and then see conditions for himself and see whether to continue.

The next thing you know, Lucia's father comes back with a child in tow, and then leaves and comes back later with more - all the children of the sick, who were wandering around houses because there parents were deathly ill in bed with fever.

Lucia also talks a lot about the poor who would always come to the door for food and maybe a place to sleep the night, and that made me think a lot about how social programs have alleviated much of that.

The entire time she kept talking about the big extended families, though, I kept thinking about how many women were the victims of domestic violence, or how many children were abused and kept silent.

I think about that a lot, after the abuse crisis, and also this one early New England diary my advisor talks about, which is "the most blood-chilling source you'll ever read" (as she describes it), as a married woman describes the vicious beatings received by her husband.