Religion: The Little Sisters

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The mother superior hardly knew what to make of it. Here was a nun in her 20s, an attractive French girl with a wisp of brown hair sticking out from under the light blue veil of her habit, walking about alone in the streets of Madrid. What the nun told the mother superior, in a combination of French and halting Spanish, was almost equally surprising: she had come from Aix-en-Provence to establish the first house of her order, the Little Sisters of Jesus, in Spain. She asked the mother superior of the Casa de la Virgen for hospitality until she could find a place to live.

In a few days, Sister Marie Aline was joined by a teen-age novice, Sister Dominique, who had once been a student at the University of Aix-Marseilles. Every morning after Mass, the two sallied forth alone in their blue and grey habits on long walks through sections of the city where nuns and priests—or anyone with a few pesos to rub together—are seldom to be seen. At last the horrified mother superior summoned them and demanded an explanation. "We are searching for our future home," replied Sister Marie Aline serenely. "But it is not up to us to decide exactly where we should settle. Jesus will let us know." She explained that the principal rule of their order, inspired by the French priest Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) is simply "Live and work among the humble."

Pigs & Garbage. One day the two young nuns found La Bomba. Called that because it is expanding like an exploding bomb, it is a shantytown village on Madrid's outskirts, without streets or lights, without water or trees or grass. There is only a huddle of huts and a dusty, sun-baked path ending in a square with a deep hole in its center, the community's only sanitary system. It is a place of shred-clothed beggars, gypsies, shrill urchins, stray dogs, pigs and piles of garbage. Whenever a new family arrives, the whole community turns to and helps build them a shack by night, when the police dare not interfere. When morning comes they have a "house," and can stay there as long as they want.

In La Bomba, Sister Marie Aline and Sister Dominique knew they had found their new home. That night the nuns of the Casa de la Virgen prayed long for the two sisters out in the dangerous dark. And that night, by the light of a big bonfire, the neighbors of La Bomba labored with the sisters to build their house.