Our father among the saints, Saint Dominic

(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!

3 comments

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

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