NUN

For Mary Catherine Bunting, giving is adiverse enterprise. The former nun sometimes drops by a local homeless shelterwith fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, offerings from her own garden. She helps anelderly neighbor with her oxygen tanks. And she volunteers once a week withthe Hospice of Baltimore, sitting at the bedsides of the dying. This fall, Bunting also presented Mercy Medical Center with the largest philanthropic gift in its history, an undisclosed amount that will help build the hospital's new 18-story facility, to be named after her. Previously, the largest gift was $10 million.

In the beginning was the punching nun puppet. Customers bought it and Mark Pahlow said to himself: This is good. So the punching nun begat the glow-in-the-dark statue of Mary and the plush computer voodoo doll and the Hindu lunch boxes. Not to mention the Amish and rabbi punching puppets.And business is good.Pahlow's company, Archie McPhee, is hardly the only place to find less-than-reverent religious merchandise. Elsewhere in the world people are selling a plastic golf ball with a plastic angel inside (to protect, no doubt, from an ungodly slice)

Carolyn Manuszak, the hard-driving former nun who turned Villa Julie College into a production line for business-ready graduates with solid grounding in the liberal arts, will retire June 30 after 33 years as president."

If the four short plays in "Queer Cafe '99" were actually items on a menu, they might be listed like this: appetizer, PS Lorio's amusing "Always the Bridesmaid"; entree, James Magruder's "Too Much of Me," the evening's most substantial offering; side dish, Madeleine Olnek's spirited monologue, "The Jewish Nun"; and dessert, Charles Derry's sweet "Ten Memories of My Mother in the Order I Think of Them."It's a fairly balanced meal, though more limited stylistically than the broad mix of abstract as well as naturalistic pieces from the two previous annual installments of "Queer Cafe" -- the omnibus title for PussyCat Theatre Company's anthologies of short gay and lesbian plays.

More than half a century ago, Doris Auer left the rowhouse where she was born on Penrose Avenue in West Baltimore, walked down Pulaski Street and entered the convent of the Sisters of Bon Secours.The woman who became Sister Urban is 77, and she is still in the neighborhood as the oldest working sister at Bon Secours Hospital.As her order celebrates its 175th Jubilee, Sister Urban embodies the mission of the Sisters of Bon Secours to bring compassionate healing to those in need.Although the sisters made a gut-wrenching decision in July to end inpatient care at Liberty Medical Center, they are determined to maintain their commitment to serving needy families in West Baltimore at Bon Secours Hospital, which opened its doors 80 years ago."

IN CASTRES, FRANCE, at a retreat for aging nuns of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, I found Sister Joan of Arc last month, sitting in a wheelchair and reaching out to me across a room, and across 55 years of separation.She was my shelter at one of the most vulnerable times of my life, in the midst of World War II. I was a young Jew on the run from the Nazis. She was the one who comforted me, and told me I would be safe with her. Now, in the autumn of 1999, I was returning.I have told the earliest pieces of this story before.

Leonard M. Rieser,76, who as chairman of the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was seen in numerous news photographs resetting the hands of the "Doomsday Clock" that FTC the journal uses to dramatize the threat of nuclear war, died of cancer Tuesday at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.Sister M. Matthia Gores,104, the oldest nun in the international congregation of the School of Sisters of Notre Dame, died Monday in Mankato, Minn....

Sister Mary of Mercy, 79, teaching nunSister Mary of Mercy Coleman, OSP, a teaching nun who devoted six decades to her religious order, died of an aneurysm Tuesdaywhile visiting her ailing brother in Philadelphia. She was 79."She was a gentle, generous person who persevered, even though she knew she was sick," said Sister Mary Celestina Johnson, a friend and nun in the Oblate Sisters of Providence.When Sister Mary of Mercy died, she was visiting her brother, Dradon Coleman, at a Philadelphia hospital.

Impossible Industrial Action will present the world premiere of Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz's "The Madman and the Nun" at the Theatre Project beginning WednesdaySet in a mental hospital, the play focuses on a novice nun assigned to help rehabilitate a mad poet. To create an evening of what Witkiewicz called "pure form," director Tony Tsendeas has come up with a multimedia production concept that includes slide projections and an original score.Show times at the Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St., are 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through April 28. Tickets are $14. Call (410)

LINCOLN, R.I. -- The German television crew has left. Ted Koppel may call at any moment. And the nun is late.Noel David Earley can't remember the nun's name, or where she is from, but she sounded nice on the telephone. He still plans to kill himself -- the nun had no more success talking him out of it than had other callers -- but there was a sweetness about her. When she asked to visit, he agreed.So everyone's waiting -- a documentary film producer working for "Nightline"; a reporter and photographer from the Providence Journal-Bulletin; a reporter from The Sun.This has the promise of a good scene.

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty. From the start of this sadly familiar and stagy tale, set in a Bronx church and Catholic school in 1964, the headmistress, a stern disciplinarian named Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), suspects her priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), of sexual misconduct. After Sister Aloysius persuades the naive Sister James (Amy Adams) to alert her to signs of unspeakable acts, the younger nun witnesses behavior she thinks raises questions.

The Virgin Mary is split in two. That's the first thing the audience sees in Everyman Theatre's current production of Doubt - and we notice it even before the play begins. That long crack, running from halo to heel in the full-sized triptych, divides this mother from the holy infant dangling on her knee. Like much in this staging, it's not particularly subtle, but it effectively communicates the main themes of John Patrick Shanley's play, which picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in 2005.

Sister Muriel Curran faced the man who shoved her to the ground and ripped away her purse three years ago. She quoted Scripture. She thanked him for the guilty plea that spared her a trial. And she asked a Baltimore County judge not to send him to prison. "There is possibility and hope - I believe in it, it's what I'm about - in rehabilitation and a future," the 78-year-old nun said yesterday, explaining that she has difficulty believing in a penal system that sometimes leaves criminals worse off than before they went to prison.

For Mary Catherine Bunting, giving is adiverse enterprise. The former nun sometimes drops by a local homeless shelterwith fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, offerings from her own garden. She helps anelderly neighbor with her oxygen tanks. And she volunteers once a week withthe Hospice of Baltimore, sitting at the bedsides of the dying. This fall, Bunting also presented Mercy Medical Center with the largest philanthropic gift in its history, an undisclosed amount that will help build the hospital's new 18-story facility, to be named after her. Previously, the largest gift was $10 million.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Gunmen fatally shot an Italian nun and her Somali bodyguard yesterday outside a nursing school and children's hospital where she had taught for the past four years. The killings shattered a two-month lull in political violence in Mogadishu and revived security concerns just as several Western humanitarian organizations were considering a return to the Somali capital. The attack also was a setback for Islamic Courts Union, which seized control of Mogadishu from U.S.-backed warlords in June.

She's a nun who's convinced that all prayers are answered, but "sometimes the answer to our prayer is no." He's an accountant who finds himself acting in a play he's never rehearsed. These are the respective protagonists of Christopher Durang's 1981 double bill of one-act plays - Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and The Actor's Nightmare, receiving a serviceable revival at the Vagabond Players under Barry Bach's direction. The plays are an interesting pairing. The nun thinks she knows everything; the accountant doesn't have a clue.

Punishing pacifists sends strange signal So many events in this 21st century have verged on the surreal that what once seemed unimaginable is accepted as commonplace. Still, the article "Nun freed after serving 3 years for war protest" (Dec. 23) reveals chilling details of an incident that simply could not have happened in the America we once knew. In this instance, satire, however bitter, is inadequate - even the master Mark Twain would have found the task daunting. Dominican nun Sister Ardeth Platte, 69, is now home at Jonah House after 41 months behind bars.

Sister Marie Ernestine Harkness, a Franciscan nun and nurse, died of complications from multiple sclerosis Thursday at her order's retirement home in Aston, Pa. She was 83. Born Caroline Rose Harkness in Sellersville, Pa., where she had her nursing education, she entered the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia in 1944 and took the name Marie Ernestine. In the 1950s, she joined the staff of what is now St. Joseph Medical Center as a pediatric supervisor and later headed the hospital's central supply department.

Local television news is easily criticized: From its endless stream of over-hyped crime stories to self-important talking heads, easy-to-hit targets abound. But every so often, local stations do exceptional work - important journalism that provides a public service. Survivors Among Us - a one-hour, prime-time special airing without commercials tonight at 8 on WBAL-TV (Channel 11) - is an example of such work. In the documentary, WBAL chronicles the histories of Baltimore-area Holocaust survivors.

VATICAN CITY - The 19th-century mystic nun who inspired some of the more controversial scenes of Mel Gibson's hit movie The Passion of the Christ was beatified yesterday by Pope John Paul II. Beatification is the last formal step before a person is elevated to sainthood. In addition to Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German nun known for her purported visions of Jesus' crucifixion, the pope beatified the last reigning emperor of Austria, two French priests and an Italian nun. The ailing 84-year-old pontiff, whose schedule has been greatly curtailed as he marks his 26th year in the papacy this month, struggled to deliver yesterday's homily.