Those Silenced Catholic Nuns
Offending the Catholic Church With Gelato
US Catholic Priest Molested Over 200 Deaf Boys
"Unusual Couples" plan Protest against Mexico's Catholic Church
Moving of a mountain: Pedophiles or Catholic celibacy?
The Economist has a very interesting review on a new incredibly amusing book on the lives of Catholic nuns in the early years of the Italian Renaissance.
Nuns, you'll learn in Craig Monson's Nuns Behaving Badly (the title says it all), were then mostly not of the pious folk. Most of the nuns in convents were not attracted because they loved the "Good Book", but simply ended up there as the least bad of options: "Convents in 16th- and 17th-century Italy were largely dumping-grounds for spare women: widows, discarded mistresses, converted prostitutes and, above all, the unmarried daughters of the nobility. Aristocratic families were loth to stump up dowries for more than one daughter."
And in such a setting, there existed in convents a "reality-television world" with back-stabbing and enviousness tearing nuns apart. The church knew that many of these nuns were lascivious and inclined to debauchery. Many nuns during this time, chaste as they were in principle to the church, were pregnant.
The church sought to clamp down on such deviance and part of the effort was banning the public singing of nuns: "Nuns sang unseen beyond the altar and people flocked to hear their hidden choirs. But the church pronounced female music the devil’s work, allowing only the plainest chant. Two nuns stand out: Laura Bovia, who transported audiences “so high that, here on Earth, they seem to taste heavenly harmony”; and Christina Cavazza, a singer who crept out in disguise to attend the opera. Both were silenced."
This greatly brought to mind the talented singers in the Islamic Abbassid empire in the 8th-10th centuries who also were prohibited from publicly singing. Islamic texts speak about beautiful women with soulful voices who could only sing behind the curtain never to be seen by any unrelated males expect the caliph. People would hear them and be taken away by such sweet voices spoken in poetic prose. The songs were said to be timeless beauty.
How very similar these two ancient world were!
