(Posting from Ypsilanti this weekend at Ave Maria's Thomistic Theology conference.)
Here's one for the "Credit where it's due" department:
I used to think that "Soeur Sourire" was just the lamest thing possible: a nun with a guitar back in 1964 singing some silly song she wrote. It made the top pop-charts -- one of the rare times a foreign-language song did so well. But I have been writing her off as a symbol of the whole disaster of trendy nuns falling for pop culture and losing the faith.
On the other hand, have you ever seen the lyrics -- the original ones in French? They're quite faith-filled: they're all about St. Dominic preaching to (and against) the Albigensian heretics: and the song even calls them that. It sounds all happy-clappy, but the text is quite triumphal.
(Ignore the English version on the page linked above: it's not the real thing.)
Alas, poor Soeur Sourire and her vocation did end up on the rocks: she did leave religious life, like so many others, and came to a bad end in 1985, another washed-up one-hit wonder. If only she'd stuck with St. Dominic!
I actually owned the vinyl for that album, and I can still sing parts of Dominique in French. As an Anglican child, I was fascinated with the lives of the saints that I borrowed from the library. My local branch library had the Vision books series in hardback and I think I read every one of them I could find by the age of ten (1965). I remember being fascinated with the story of St. Dominic and the Rosary, and I remember having to look up the word heresy in the dictionary. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
What was the bad end that came to Soeur Sourire?
I liked her music too. I'm sorry she's stopped writing music/singing.
The bad end that came to Jeannine Deckers was suicide in 1985. I cannot say that staying in the order of Saint Dominic would have made her life any happier as it was the Fichermont Dominicans who made her a star then took it from her.