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CHARLENE FAITH MACLEAN (Faith, 19) is the only child of the oppressive, huge alcoholic MARJORIE AGATHA (Aggie, 54, teased blond hair) and the combative, anorexic teetotal JUDE VALENTINE MACLEAN (Vallie, 49, balding), an attorney.

Vallie’s two overweight – unmarried and unemployed – brothers, JUDE VINCENT MACLEAN (Vince, 57) and JUDE VICTOR MACLEAN (Vic, 53) live with them in a small southern town in a grand antebellum mansion inherited from Aggie’s grandfather.  Aggie and Vallie and his nincompoop brothers yell at each other and fight all the time.

With an anti-Papist father and an in-name-only Catholic mother often bed-ridden from alcoholism and other digestive excesses, Faith’s religious education fell to her maternal grandmother Faith, who insisted that her granddaughter attend Catholic schools.  As devout and as fanatic a Catholic as a woman could be, Grandmother Faith had baptized each of her three sons in the name of St. Jude, the patron of hopeless causes.  Each of her three pregnancies had been grueling, and she believed that it was only her nonstop prayers to St. Jude that enabled her to deliver each of them safely.  And in honor of Winston Churchill’s ‘V’ for victory, she gave each of her three boys a middle name beginning with ‘V.’

At St. Matthew Parochial School, Faith always wore the school uniform neatly pressed by her grandmother: a navy blue skirt that fell three inches below the knee, a starched white blouse, and white socks and black and white saddle oxfords.  A colored handkerchief was allowed in the blouse pocket, though it had to be pinched in the middle.  Faith’s favorite handkerchief had brick red hearts of all different sizes.  For religious services she wore a navy blue beanie secured to the crown of her head with bobby pins.

Of all the classroom duties Faith had during her elementary school years, she was most proud of having been designated in the fourth grade as the student who collected money for Pagan Babies during Lent.  Every Monday morning, up and down the rows of desk, she would carry a cigar box that had been blessed with Holy Water on Ash Wednesday.  After a stirring plea over the loudspeaker from the principal, Sr. Mary Raphael, to make a selfless sacrifice in honor of Our Lord’s Passion and Death, most of the 9-year-olds decided that their 7 cents originally intended for an after-lunch Fudgesickle Bar would be more prudently re-directed to the Pagan Babies.

Faith was a late bloomer and became embarrassed when her classmates began wearing training bras in the sixth grade, while she continued to wear sleeveless undershirts.  The other girls made fun of her because she was underdeveloped.  When Faith finally reached puberty in the eighth grade, she began to feel awkward and unattractive.  Her mother refused to have a “facts of life” talk with her, and so her teacher at St. Matthew’s, Sr. Mary Rosarita, gave her – privately – a pamphlet on menstruation, with faint line drawings depicting the female body.

When she was in the eighth grade, Fr. William Bodace, the pastor, would periodically visit Sr. Rosarita’s classroom to extol the virtues of a religious life and to exhort the 13-year-olds to pray for a vocation.  Then, Sr. Rosarita would take aside several girls thought to have a “calling” and urge them to listen to God’s voice and enter the convent.  Faith was always included in this group of special girls – her grandmother Faith gave hefty donations to the convent, and to Pagan Babies, to ensure that she was included – but at the time Faith had little interest in entering the convent.

Things changed in high school.  When she was a junior, Joseph Vance, the coach of the girls’ volleyball team at St. Joseph Academy, hit on Faith after practice, pressing his body close to hers as he illustrated the proper technique for serving a volleyball.  The event increased her distrust of men.  Afraid to tell anyone what had happened to her after that volleyball practice, she began to reconsider Fr. Bodace and Sr. Rosarita’s words about a religious vocation.  And, without explanation, she quit the volleyball team.

Faith came to see the convent as a retreat from the madness at home and a refuge from the attention of vile men like Coach Vance.  She spoke with the Barnabian nuns who taught in the high school to learn what life was like in the convent.  Sr. Denis, her religion teacher, would take her on walks and fill her with stories of the joys and glories of the religious life.  To be a bride of Christ, no calling could be higher.  In particular, Faith was taken with the brick red habits and black knotted-rope cinctures worn by the Barnabian nuns.  She drew pictures of herself in that habit, and scribbled in the margins of her textbooks, “Sister Mary Faith.”

Often after school she visited the St. Joseph Academy chapel and prayed to the Virgin Mary for a sign that she had a vocation.  One day during chemistry class as a senior, a beam of sunlight shone through a test tube and fell directly on the words she had written on her experiment guidelines, “Sister Mary Faith.”  It was the sign from God for which she had been praying.  The next day she went to Sr. Denis’s office and signed the papers to enter Saint Monica convent to become a Barnabian postulant.

Faith has large hazel eyes and dark hair, is 5’6” – 5’7” tall, and is pretty with a shapely body and delicately sensuous lips.  Leggy, she glides when she walks.  Shy but intensely passionate, she is both holy and wild.  Faith is generally circumspect about men and distrustful of them.  One of her most prized possessions is a large gold-leafed missal given to her by her grandmother Faith on the day of her Confirmation in the sixth grade.  She has an Irish temper, enjoys sketching, and loves the theater.