Officially they're a cloistered order, but they're quite lively.
Regina Laudis was a cloistered order, so it wasn't the ecclesiastical petting zoo that I'd hoped for.
Louise Penny has written an original variation on the "no exit" whodunit in THE BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY (Minotaur, $25.99) by dispatching Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec to a remote lake where a cloistered order of monks, thought to have been wiped out in the Inquisition, have been furtively living in the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.
Nearly 150 of these pieces will be on view in "Quilling: Devotional Creations From Cloistered Orders" at the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in Turin, Italy, from April 5 through Sept. 2. A number of works in the show are owned by the photographer Nan Goldin, who shot some of the pieces in the exhibition.
But joining a semi-cloistered order was by no means the end of her professional career.
With the aid of King Henry IV of France and his wife, Marie de Médicis, she brought the Carmelite nuns to Paris, leading to the introduction into France in 1604 of the Discalced Carmelites, an order of meditative, cloistered nuns.
The congregation of Paris in 1612 was raised to the status of a monastic order, living a strictly cloistered, or enclosed, life.
The book includes 40 Catholic orders, most of which are grouped into spiritual families (Franciscan, Benedictine and so on); if the order in question is cloistered, the stylised nun you'll see will have her back to you.
The order harks back to St. Benedict, who in the sixth century laid out rules for monasteries that would be apart from society but not cloistered, where monks would live communally, without personal property, sharing kitchen and cleaning duties and spending most of their time in prayer or work.
They were founded in 1264 and, until 1401, remained strictly cloistered, but at that date they began to accept third order affiliates women who desired to perform apostolic works outside the cloister, in schools, hospitals, and missions.
Many cloistered monasteries and convents now sell their wares through mail-order catalogs and on the Internet.
