(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!