Move Over, Vlad
Here's something ghoulish to read as you sip your latte. One really hopes that a film will be made - something experimental, like Joan of the Angels (1961), which I haven't seen since college. But in color, definitely. Remote Romanian settings would demand color.
The incident has a striking medieval flavor. No power, no running water, just a priest and a remote convent. But there is a modern touch, too. The novice (Sister Irina had only been at the monastery for three months before her crucifixion) had been treated for schizophrenia. But the priest, if he knew that, didn't put much stock in science. The seriously absent detail, of course, is the subject of the argument that the nun and the priest were having during Mass - "according to locals." (Are these "locals" Central-Casting peasants from Hammer Studios, or what?) I would venture that it was Sister Irina's challenge to Fr Daniel's authority that served as proof of her Satanic possession.
Have you read The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley's spellbinding account of events occurring in a provincial French town in 1634? It may be that Vintage is about to reprint it; if you see the new title, snap it up and settle down for a good read. Well, I remember it as being a very good read. When I first read the book (again in college), 1953 seemed a long time ago, but it was only fifteen years. Huxley, who most certainly did not believe in Satanic possession, saw in the persecution of Urbain Grandier, a priest who may have been fooling around with the prettier nuns in his cure, a fantastically displaced intrigue involving Cardinal Richelieu (then at the height of his power, and in the middle of his famous castle-demolition project) and the local sire (who wanted to keep his castle). Père Grandier lined up with the losing side (guess which one), but roasting alive still seems excessive.
There is, of course, the opera by the same name of Krzysztof Penderecki. I bought the first (and probably only) recording, and listened to it once. I may still have it. If so, I'm getting rid of it. The atonal music completely prevents goosebumps.
And then there's something new to me, Michel de Certeau's The Possession at Loudun (Chicago (translation), 2000). Perhaps I ought to have looked into this before buying a used copy. The word "discourse" may appear in it rather more frequently than I can bear. In all these versions of the historical anecdote, it's the priest who gets killed, not the nun. I'm not up on the Romanian death penalty, but if there is one Fr Daniel may be up for it.
Even though the crucifixion occurred just the other day, it took place in a world almost as distant as seventeenth-century France, and even farther from the kind of objective record-keeping that would give us a reliable account of what the hell was going on.
