Tonight HBO2 will premiere the film, called “They Killed Sister Dorothy” at 8 p.m. EST (see HBO write-up). The film is a documentary about Sister Dorothy Stang, SNDdeN.

Sister Dorothy was shot and killed in 2005 in Brazil amid a dispute with ranchers over Amazon rain forest land she wanted brought under Brazilian government protection.

The 73-year-old Sister Dorothy spent three decades trying to preserve the rain forest and defending the rights of poor settlers. She and her community worked with the poor in the rain forest of the Amazon basin in Anapu, Pará, Brazil. When wealthy cattle ranchers began destroying huge areas of the rain forest to make way for grazing land, Sister Dorothy became active in the Brazilian government’s Sustainable Development Project, also called PDS. She also became a Brazilian citizen.

For more information visit www.theykilledsisterdorothy.com.

I will be writing a review on the documentary within the next couple of weeks.

The Flying Nun is an icon in many people’s imagination — whether Catholic or non-Catholic, whether you saw the originals or just the re-runs. The Flying Nun was a sitcomin the late 1960s starring a young comic Sally Field as Sister Bertrille, a novice with the Daughters of Charity who could fly. Admittedly I dismissed the Flying Nun image as an unfortunate stereotype that we Catholic sisters and nuns still have to tangle with. Inevitably I’m asked, once people find out I’m a nun, if I can fly. The answer (not counting biking or driving) is um, no.

But I think I have had a conversion, or at least the beginnings of one. This morning I read an op-ed piece that made me proud to share the word “nun” with the Flying Nun. The article “Fear of Flying Nuns – a feminist defense of a 1960s girlhood TV hero” was written by Melody Clark for OpEdNews.com. In the article Clark wonders aloud why it’s perfectly acceptable to have a flying Kansas farmboy (Superman, Smallville) but not a flying young female nun. (Her commentary here is exquisite.) While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the article, it did give me a different way to think about the image of the Flying Nun.

Here’s a snippet from the article.

And Sister Bertrille was no “owned woman” like the female lead in I Dream of Jeannie (constantly clad in provocative attire while she refers to her male companion as “master”).  Or a housewife who was regularly “ordered” to do things by her husband as was Samantha on Bewitched. Sister Bertrille (whose “real name” was Elsie Ethrington) was not a nun but a novice and therefore not yet “married to Christ”. The only man in her life was her companion of choice (the wonderfully harassed while continually love struck Carlos Ramirez). Her life was her own. Her career was her choice. She owed her gift of flight to no one but destiny.

Quite simply, The Flying Nun is a sweet, lovely allegory for personal empowerment (especially for little girls … and for those of us who occasionally aspire to think like them)….

I encourage you to read the whole article which critiques reviewers who have cast aside The Flying Nun as “the worst TV show of all time”. Clark redeems the show as well as the image of The Flying Nun and in effect reclaims Sister Bertrille as a young woman who can inspire us even today.

Sister Act movies have long been a source of entertainment but also a problem when it comes to communicating who Catholic sisters and nuns really are. Unfortunately many people’s image of nuns is based solely on Whoopi Goldberg as lounge singer Deloris Van Cartier hiding out as Sister Mary Clarence in a San Francisco convent (do we even know the religious community?). Each of the nuns portrayed in the movie is naturally a caricature but still the images are compelling enough that they tend to seep into our imagination and to feed false stereotypes: stern mother superior, quiet mousy little sister, bubbly bumbling nun.

And honestly, people, do nuns really need a Vegas lounge singer to enlighten them to the needs that are literally right outside their convent door?

But enough about what I may think, I’m much more interested in what you think because I’m still not sure what to do with these movies. In some way they can lend themselves to positive perceptions of nun life but in other way to negative or false perceptions.

Sister Act movies, Whoopi, and images of nuns: discuss.