Editorial intro: Seeing the Light, by Tom Shroder

GOD KNOWS

Miami Herald, The (FL)
December 20, 1987
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Gus Vass was in Vietnam in the 101st Airborne when his twin sister wrote to say that she had decided to join a medieval order of nuns. From now on, she wrote, she would be known as a Poor Clare. Gus Vass couldn't figure it. He wasn't much of a believer, and he didn't see why Fran would want to do such a thing. When he got back to the States, he went to see her at Christ the King Monastery in Delray Beach. He walked into the visiting parlor and to his astonishment saw her on the other side of a metal screen. The screen, known to the sisters as "the grille," bisected the room, starkly separating the corrupt secular world from the realm of the Poor Clares. He and Fran kissed through an opening in the grille and sat down to talk.

"What are you doing here?" he remembers asking her.

Praying, she told him. Praying morning, evening and night. Prayer, she said, was her apostolate, her work.

"You're so young," he said. "You have so much to offer. Why don't you go outside, if you want to be a nun, and be a teacher, stay in contact with the people?"

She said she could do better where she was.

He left, appalled.

"I was glad to get out of there," Gus Vass recalls, "because to me it was almost like going to see someone in prison."

He later learned to accept and even admire his sister. But the initial visit is usually rough. Twenty-five years ago another young woman, Frances Fortin, was driven by her family to a monastery of Poor Clares in the Bronx. The family said goodbye, and the young woman disappeared behind the enclosure. The next day the family returned to the monastery to visit, but could not touch or even see her as she stood behind the grille and a thick black gauze curtain. Frances Fortin's sister, Diana Fortin Schindler, remembers, "All you could see was a shadow and a glint of light off her glasses."

Suddenly, Frances Fortin was dead to the world. She had deleted herself from society, committed cultural suicide. She had become a living shadow.

She took the name Sister Mary Frances. She moved to Delray Beach in 1974, and joined Sister Frances Vass at Christ the King Monastery. They still live behind the grille. The aluminum structure is not so imposing these days; it looks as though you could bust it down with one kick. But no one does.

The contemplative's vows are for life. Vows of poverty. Chastity. Obedience. Enclosure. They do not minister to the sick, do not teach the ignorant, do not spread the Gospel to the heathen. They're not going anywhere. They just stay home and pray. Forever.

They will never know the joy of teaching a child to walk, of romantic interludes at a dark cafe, of browsing at a bookstore. There is no going to movies, no dancing, no getting out. Theirs is the ultimate poverty -- the relinquishment of the world, the promise never to climb a mountain or swim in the ocean or glide down the canals of Venice. The cloister is their oyster.

Why do they do it?

How can they stand it?

Isn't this a little bizarre?

And just who do they think they are?

Sister Frances Vass says, "I don't blame anyone who doesn't understand."

But she and Sister Mary Frances are willing to try to explain. One has only to meet these women to see that they are not so strange after all -- and that the mystery of their life is really the mystery of the church, the mystery of why people are called to the religious life, the mystery of what happens in the modern world when we close our eyes and pray.

In Florida there is only one contemplative community, one place where Catholics who have taken religious vows are cloistered, shut away from the world. Christ the King Monastery of Poor Clares is secreted along a quiet suburban street on the outskirts of Delray Beach. A chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, encloses 11 acres of pineland. A bike path loops inside the perimeter. The monastery building resembles a typical church, with two wings slanting off from a central chapel. One wing holds the visiting parlors and quarters for special visitors. The other wing houses the dormitory, the dining room and the kitchen. There is a swimming pool in back. The nuns swim only on Sundays.

There are 13 of them inside. They rise at 5 a.m., pray and meditate for two hours, celebrate Mass at 7, pray again at 8:15, then work for three hours. Most of them make altar breads for parishes around the state, a small business that helps support them. One sister sits at a window in the small foyer, like a bank teller's window, only with a grate over it similar to the grille in the visiting parlor. She greets the few outsiders who come to ask the nuns to pray for a loved one. The visitors make an offering in exchange for the prayer, usually $1 to $5.

At 11:45 a.m. the nuns have their midday prayer. At noon they eat the one large meal of the day. At 12:45 they pray again. Then they do dishes and relax or read or pray some more, until 3:30, when there is usually choir practice. At 4:15 they meditate in the chapel. At 5:30 they eat supper. An hour later is the night prayer. After that they are free for the evening, and some watch the TV news.

At midnight they wake, gather in the chapel and pray again. Then they go back to sleep until 5.

Sundays they pray all morning, take the afternoon off and then pray again at 6.

The cycle can be interrupted by special occasions, such as when the nuns go on "retreat," remaining alone for days at a stretch to pray intensively. Family members can visit four times a year. Occasionally the nuns leave the monastery to go to conferences with Poor Clares from other states. They go out to the doctor or dentist. They leave to vote.

What the Poor Clares have created is sort of an approximation of heaven. In this heaven on Earth, nothing much happens. So it would seem to the uninitiated. To the nuns it is a vigorous, vibrant encounter with God.

"It is a personal relationship with another person," Sister Mary Frances says. "It is Jesus Christ, or God the Father, they are one. It is a personal relationship of love. I'm in love with God."

Earlier this year, someone really special came to town. The pope.

Most of the nuns decided to stay home. Despite receiving permission to travel to Miami to see Pope John Paul II, despite the chance to be treated as VIPs and publicly admired for their great dedication to Christ, the Poor Clares chose to watch the pontiff on TV.

Except two of them -- Sister Mary Frances Fortin and Sister Frances Vass. They are two of the youngest -- 43 and 40 respectively -- and are probably the most outgoing, if such a word can be used to describe anyone who takes a vow of enclosure.

The other 11 declined to be interviewed for this article. Their solitude, their uninterrupted contemplation, is vital to them. They also may doubt the ability of the secular press to represent accurately the nature of their faith.

As the Abbess of the Monastery, Mother Clare Ellen, put it, "If you came in here to live with us for a few years, you still wouldn't have enough to know what we're all about."

At 3 a.m. the day of the papal Mass at Tamiami Park, Sisters Frances and Mary Frances, clad in white habits, disembarked from a bus on 107th Avenue and came walking toward me. They were not the grave, dour, sepulchral creatures that one might have expected. They did not speak in painful whispers or stare bug-eyed at the crowd streaming into the park in the predawn darkness. They were virtually nonchalant, as though it were an everyday thing to wander into a crowd of tens of thousands.

I said, "You seem so . . . "

"Normal?" they both answered, and laughed.

At that hour the gate to the VIP section was still closed. People were milling around. We wandered into one of the buildings of Florida International University, looking for a place to sit down, and found the press room for the journalists covering the Mass. The people posted at the entrance wouldn't let the nuns pass. The room, they said, was for reporters only. (Sister Mary Frances later said, "You couldn't get in the enclosure at the monastery, but we couldn't get in the press room either. It's the same dynamic.")

We eventually found an unlocked office and began to talk. The two nuns tried as best they could to explain why they spend their lives in a one-on-one relationship with someone who is not, in any secular sense, there.

"The mission of the contemplative," Sister Mary Frances said, "is to witness to the absoluteness of God. The monastery itself, just standing there -- even though people don't see us -- it's a reminder that there's something more. Faith is intangible. It goes beyond intellectual analysis. It is not reason. There's nothing wrong with reason, but reason must always be subservient to faith, because faith is greater."

They spoke enthusiastically. They like their lives. But they admit it can be a little rough. Far from being alone, they find themselves immersed in a family of women, and they're not always in a state of reverential bliss.

"We're human," Sister Frances said. "There are times when we wish we could drive down to the beach. We can have disagreements with one another. But those two people have to be reconciled. They have to go to one another and ask for forgiveness. And that's one of the hardest things to do."

Sister Mary Frances: "Imagine yourself in a building with 13 or 14 people you didn't choose and imagine yourself being there for even a month without going out. . . . "

Sister Frances: "I don't want you to think we're on a supernatural high all the time. Much of the time, maybe."

Fine. But how can they stand being cooped up?

Sister Mary Frances: "On a very human level, if I was out living on my own, I would love to travel, I would love to see the world. But because of the calling I have accepted, I am completely and utterly at peace where God has placed me."

If they wanted to leave the monastery permanently, they would need dispensation from Rome. It's no jail, though. They know where to find the keys to the front door.

"It's not something against our will. We choose enclosure," said Sister Mary Frances. "You wouldn't deny a scientist his laboratory to work in. You wouldn't deny a musician his studio."

At dawn we went back to the field where the Mass would be held. Thousands of people were bottlenecked at the four metal detectors at the entrance to the VIP section. The sisters, who had been among the first to arrive, now faced the prospect of waiting in line for hours to get to their assigned seats. They were unsure what to do. I encouraged them to butt in line. They followed my lead, casually, humbly.

No one complained. These were nuns, after all. In some circles, a habit is as good as a badge.

The line started to lurch forward. "We are moving a bit, thanks be to God," Sister Mary Frances said. Eventually they got inside and took their seats.

The day before, Sister Mary Frances had edged her way to the aisle of St. Mary's Cathedral and shook -- touched, really -- the pope's hand. It was a transcendent moment, to touch the direct successor of St. Peter, the apostle whom Jesus appointed as head of the church. Sister Frances, farther back, stood on top of her pew to get a better look. Some of the nuns had screamed.

"Is he going to be in the popemobile?" Sister Frances asked. "Maybe I can shake his hand this time."

"You'll have to lean over the fence," the other said.

"I'll lean over anything."

They took positions at the edge of the fence along the main aisle. An hour and a half later, they were still standing. Finally the pope hummed by in the popemobile, protected behind bullet-proof glass. Shortly the Mass began. And then the rains fell. The sisters had brought raincoats, but were soaked anyway. The Mass ended prior to communion, and the pope jetted off to another city.

"It was still worth it," Sister Mary Frances said afterward.

"I sat there, so much at peace. I had a real sense of peace and awe," said Sister Frances.

The first agreed, and added, "I enjoyed the experience of being with people."

Jesus said that only the poor and the meek would inherit the Kingdom of Heaven -- and yet the church that grew in His wake is the richest and most powerful on Earth. Jesus said that a rich man has as much chance of entering the Kingdom as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle, but today that idea is muted, especially in America, where wealthiness is next to godliness.

The modern Roman Catholic Church, for all that it does in the way of charity, goodwill and service, resembles a great corporation, a bewildering hierarchy in which the contemplation of God is often obscured by bureaucratic demands, financial worries and international politics.

It was much the same in the 13th Century, in the age of corrupt priests and rich Benedictine monasteries. There lived in the town of Assisi a little man named Giovanni Bernardone who believed that the church had lost its way. Francis of Assisi was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant, but he rejected wealth and took to the streets in rags to live with beggars and lepers. He tried to emulate Jesus, seeking not merely external poverty but a denial of self, a radical humility. Unlike the Benedictine monks who argued over such precise theological questions as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether Jesus owned his cloak or merely "used" it, Francis eschewed intellectualism in favor of faith. To him, that meant choosing to live in a state of continual prayer, to become prayer incarnate.

"In prayer," he said, "we speak and listen to God, and leading an almost angelic life we live in the midst of the angels. But in preaching we see ourselves obliged to use great condescension toward men, and -- being obliged to live among them -- one is forced to think, see, talk and hear many human things."

To Francis, "human things" were inherently corrupt.

Among those captivated by his message was a beautiful local girl, also of well-to-do background, named Clare Offreduccio.

Clare's parents had already planned her marriage, but she had no interest. She wanted to follow Francis, her close friend, her soul-mate. The night of Palm Sunday, 1211 A.D., she broke with her family and went to Francis. She gave up her jewelry and assumed the ragged habit of the Friars Minor. Francis cut her hair. From then on she was devoted only to Christ and poverty.

Francis and Clare were part of a larger, complex series of poverty movements that nagged at the Roman church. The church's rulers were uncomfortable with these characters -- by contrast, their own excesses were embarrassingly clear -- and there was always the temptation to declare them heretics and have them burned. Nevertheless, after lobbying from Francis and Clare, Pope Innocent III granted Clare's community of nuns at the Church of San Damiano the rare and exalted Privilege of Poverty.

At the time most monasteries enjoyed almost a feudal lordship over the surrounding areas, but Clare desired only to be left alone with God, and lived off the alms of mendicant Friars and the donations of bread, the humbler and more broken the loaf the better. Clare, the legends say, would often fast for days on end, and Francis had to insist that she eat at least 1 1/2 ounces of food a day to keep from wasting away.

"The more she mortified severely the alabaster vase of her body in the narrow confines of her solitude, the more she filled with the perfume of her sanctity the whole House of God, the church," the Bull of Canonization, the declaration that made her a saint, stated years later.

As befits a woman destined for sainthood, she was credited with astounding miracles. When infidels invaded Assisi she was said to have turned them back with the brute force of her prayers. "Lord Jesus," she prayed as the ruffians scaled the walls of San Damiano and entered the cloister, "do not permit these defenseless virgins to fall into the hands of these heathen." The invaders suddenly grew fearful and ran away. Another time, Clare's sister Agnes was dragged away by horsemen, and Clare fell to her knees to implore God for help. Instantly Agnes' body grew heavy as solid lead, and the men could not carry her.

Francis died in 1226 and was canonized three years later. Clare lived on for nearly three decades, and watched the Franciscan ideal flower into hundreds of monasteries and tens of thousands of monks, nuns and lay clergy.

Clare wrote a text, a Rule, that describes how the nuns of her order should live, and it is still used today with some constitutional modifications. In the 13th Century, when all the rules governing nuns were the work of men, and when a nun upon entering the monastery or convent had essentially no chance of being seen again in the outside world, Clare's Rule contained some surprisingly liberal innovations. She allowed the nuns to break their silence if absolutely necessary and so long as they spoke in a low voice; she allowed the curtains behind the grille to be parted when the nuns spoke to someone; she allowed the nuns to leave the monastery for a "useful, reasonable, manifest and credible cause."

As Franciscan monasticism spread, the central messages of Francis and Clare -- the importance of poverty, humility, contempt for oneself -- were diluted. Some convents continued to be refuges for pious noblewomen, who brought servants with them. This in turn incited smaller movements of radical extremists known as Spirituals, who roamed the countryside naked, flagellating themselves. They were decreed heretical and burned at the stake.

Extremism is something both ordinary people and people in power tend to fear. In a secular world, vows of silence and enclosure seem extreme. This has not been a century for cloisters, but the Poor Clares have held on. More than 700 years after the death of Clare, a few special women still choose to live 13th Century lives, the lives of the Saints.

Frances Fortin grew up in a poor, devout family, one of four children. Her father designed lace and embroidery in Toronto. After his only son -- Frances' older brother -- drowned at a public swimming pool, he fled the painful memories and moved the family to Rochester, N.Y., where he became a carpenter.

In high school, Frances had no car and shared a bike with her older sister. She liked to ride horses and went to all the school dances. It was a private Catholic school. Frances belonged to a religious club. Starting her sophomore year, she occasionally went to religious retreats, in which she would spend a weekend in contemplation, praying, reading, walking in the garden, talking to nuns.

"I felt I wanted to do that the rest of my life, I wanted to spend the rest of my life in prayer, to me it was like going on retreat the rest of my life."

The crystalizing moment came when she read a book entitled A Right to be Merry, published in 1957 by a Poor Clare. The book spoke of the grace that comes with suffering, featured chapters on "Obedient Virgins" and "My Lady Poverty" and "A Life of Penance." There was much writing about the concept of Christ as Bridegroom and Lover. What struck Frances Fortin was how much joy the nuns seemed to experience.

She didn't think much about the living conditions. Then she entered the monastery in the Bronx, in 1962. The first time she touched her assigned bed it made a crunching sound.

"Oh my goodness. What is this?" she thought to herself. There were corn husks inside.

She was not permitted to drink milk, her favorite morning beverage; instead she was allowed only black coffee. The nuns ate from wooden bowls with wooden spoons, and on days of special penance they ate on the floor. They slept on the corn husk- stuffed mattresses, and went barefoot. They had no heat at night, making the requirement that they rise at midnight for prayer all the more difficult. The liturgy was in Latin. Sister Mary Frances was told that she would not be allowed to leave even if a close family member died.

The harsh conditions did not upset her.

"I was where I wanted to be," she says.

At the time, Frances Vass was a student at South Broward High School. Her father used to tell her to go to church, but he'd stay home. She made better grades than her twin brother, Gus, and she tended to be more optimistic, to see the bright side of things. She was popular. She went to the prom.

"I dated, I went to parties, I had a normal life. It wasn't like I was a wallflower. In fact, I don't think any of us were wallflowers. It's not like I couldn't get anybody and so I came to the monastery," she says.

Her vocation dates to the moment of her confirmation at the age of 17. It was at St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Fort Lauderdale. The bishop made the mark of the cross on her forehead with blessed oil. Suddenly she sensed that God had called her, that He said, You're Mine now.

"I was zapped by God," she says. "I just had this overpowering realization of the presence of God, and that I was very special to him."

She walked over to an Augustinian priest who was attending the ceremony. She stumbled and stammered and tried to explain what had happened to her.

"Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" she said to him. "I think God wants me to be a nun." She stopped wearing makeup, stopped shopping for nice clothes. She stopped dating. "People were a little concerned about that, but I was very idealistic." She had a boyfriend living in Pennsylvania -- "nothing too heavy," she says -- and when she broke the news to him, "He really freaked out."

She went to junior college and worked odd jobs. She had some doubts. Would she be happier as a missionary? As a different kind of nun? She waited three years, went on a pilgrimage to the shrines of prayer at Fatima and Lourdes. The doubts faded. In 1967, she entered Christ the King Monastery.

By that time the contemplative life of Poor Clares everywhere was changing. Until the early 1960s, the
entire Catholic Church had been static for four centuries. But the 20th Century had created the greatest challenges to the Church since Reformation -- secularism, agnosticism, atheism, rationalism, empiricism, isms of all stripe. Even the most devout believers regarded the Latin prayers as relics. So, in 1962, the Church embarked on a lengthy, massive self-examination under the auspices of the second Roman Catholic Ecumenical Council, commonly known as Vatican II.

Vatican II reaffirmed the need for contemplative prayer but de-emphasized veils and curtains and groveling. Nuns were granted "free time." They began to watch television, the news and even sit-coms. Governance of the monasteries was democratized. All but a few monasteries gave up the practice of walking barefoot. There was more food. Bedrooms were enlarged, modern mattresses introduced. In 1967 the sisters in Delray Beach built a new, roomy monastery filled with light. The parents of one nun donated a swimming pool. The monastery now has a couple of VCRs. The nuns rent movies like The Mission and The Name of the Rose, and sometimes movies on secular topics, though it is hard to find even a comedy these days that doesn't lapse into vulgarity, which they avoid.

Nuns read a lot now. In Delray Beach, the monastery subscribes to National Geographic, Smithsonian, U.S. News & World Report and Readers Digest. Until Vatican II they were prevented from reading even a newspaper; St. Clare had discouraged illiterate nuns from learning to read.

The boon of free time has turned one sister at a monastery outside Boston into a sort of unofficial historian for Poor Clares in the United States. Her name is Sister Mary Francis Hone (there are a maddening number of Francises and Franceses in the order), and she has been cloistered for 34 years. For the last five years, she has been accumulating rare manuscripts about the Poor Clares, hunting down the few English translations, corresponding with libraries around the world.

"When the opening came it was very nice. I never thought we would be allowed to do things, study and whatever," she says. "We know very little about the history of our order. We should be the ones who study our roots and study our history. Our identity has to come from us and not from the outside."

Despite the reforms of Vatican II, despite the "modernizing" of the medieval life of the Poor Clares, their life has grown less attractive to contemporary women. There are so many other options for women today. Why shut yourself up behind a metal grate? And though Vatican II made the contemplative life less harsh, it also seemed biased toward action in the action vs. contemplation debate, emphasizing the social dimensions of the Gospel and encouraging nuns and lay Catholics to fight the social battles of the times.

The monastery in Delray Beach has not had a new member since 1974. A few have come since but decided not to stay. Usually they leave within a year or two. This past year, one sister who had grown increasingly withdrawn decided to give up the life and go home. Another sister died of old age. That left only 13 nuns in a building that could hold up to 30. With most of the nuns in their 50s and 60s, Christ the King Monastery might eventually be forced to shut down, and the surviving nuns would have to pack off to another monastery.

Nationally, nuns are virtually, and literally, a dying breed. The average age of the 113,658 nuns in the United States is 62 1/2 and rising.

Sister Mary Lavin, a Carmelite nun in Cleveland who is president of the national Association of Contemplative Sisters, says there are a fairly steady number of contemplatives in the United States, between 1,300 and 1,500, but she adds, "We're not getting vocations in their 20s anymore. . . . There's always that worry of what's going to happen when we're all in our 70s, and who is going to carry on."

As the sisters have aged, some have signed up for Social Security. Around the country, monasteries are diversifying their labors instead of sticking to the traditional host-making. At Lavin's monastery the sisters do office work and typesetting on a Wang computer attached to the mainframe downtown at the diocese.

In an essay called Contemplation in a World of Action, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk whose writings made him a spiritual giant of the 20th Century, asked, "What does the contemplative life or the life of prayer, solitude, meditation, mean to man in the atomic age? What can it mean? Has it lost all meaning whatever?"

Merton answered with a resounding affirmation of the importance of prayer. At the same time he ridiculed those who feel that prayer and suffering are types of "action" that will provoke a Supreme Prime Mover to intervene in human affairs. Catholics believe that God answers prayers of petition, but the true purpose of the contemplative life, Merton says, is to deepen faith and the apprehension of God, to see His direct and personal presence within our own being.

That's why theologians say contemplatives -- despite performing no concrete acts and perhaps seeming irrelevant -- are nonetheless crucial to the endurance of Christianity: A religion without a strong core of prayer is just a bureaucracy of goodwill.

After the pope's visit, I went to see the two Franceses a couple of times at the monastery in Delray Beach. I had asked Sister Mary Frances what exit I should take off I-95 but she had no idea. After 14 years all she knows is that she lives near Military Trail.

Having seen them whipping merrily through the big crowd at Tamiami Park, it came as a shock to find them waiting like inmates behind the grille in the visiting parlor. They stuck their wrists through the grille to shake hands.

There were still plenty of unanswered questions.

What do they wear when they ride their bikes? When they swim?

Sister Mary Frances: "We wear slacks when we go bike riding. We wear swimsuits when we swim."

Who was Jesus Christ?

Sister Mary Frances: "He was God and man."

Sister Frances: "God incarnate. He became man."

Sister Mary Frances: "Totally God. Totally man."

Can they hear God's voice as though He is in the room?

Sister Mary Frances: "You don't hear voices. No. You don't have visions. There's nothing supernatural in the sense of being contrary to the laws of nature. It is something within yourself, it's your relationship with God that deepens."

What is hell?

Sister Mary Frances: "If you have not chosen God in your life, and you do not choose him in death, you will suffer forever the pain of that separation . . . and you will know who you have separated yourself from, and the pain will be immense."

Sister Frances: "In turning away we go to a place where there is no love, there is no peace. And that's the hell of it."

Do they ever regret not having a husband and kids?

Sister Mary Frances: "We would all like the companionship and the intimacy of having a husband and a family, but . . . in a sense you make yourself available to the whole world. It's not something you crave, any more than you would material possessions."

Are they really willing to spend the rest of their lives in there?

Sister Mary Frances: "Perfectly content. I could stay here till I'm 110, if that's what God wants. This is forever, as long as I live."

And then comes eternity.

Sister Mary Frances, sitting behind the grille, points to the world outside the walls of the monastery, and says, "This is just a dream. The reality comes afterward. . . . The true reality is eternal life."

In the 14th Century, Saint Bonaventure wrote to the Poor Clares in the monastery at Assisi and told them of the glory of the coming of the Lord: That one day the Bridegroom would arrive unexpectedly, that the virgins should be ready to greet him with the lamps of their souls filled with the oil of love and charity, that Christ will have them seated at the table with the angels and the elect, that they will eat the bread of life and the flesh of the immolated Lamb roasted in the fire of love, with which He so ardently loved them all.

Eternal life: Sister Mary Frances thinks that heaven will be a place where she can be comfortable,

where she will feel happiness and recognize the faces of her friends and loved ones. She hopes to see her older brother, the one who died as a teen-ager. She is now much older than he ever was, but in heaven, she hopes, she can be a younger sister once again.

Sister Frances has no idea what it will be like. She thinks there will be no fear, no discontent, only a feeling of homecoming. Her whole life will flash before her, and God will say, "Can you accept your life?" And she hopes and prays that she can say, "Yes."


Memo: COVER STORY Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 8 Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald

Followup article: The World is Her Cloister, by Joel Achenbach