MOTHER KNOWS BEST

With her ample jowls and round, beamish face, she looks a bit like Benny Hill--without, of course, the late British comic's leering smirk. Her voice is high-pitched, nasal and a trifle slurred, her frequent laugh a piercing cackle. At a time when some Roman Catholic nuns wear discreet designer clothes, she is resolutely old-fashioned in her ankle-length brown robe and hair-concealing white scapular. The Catholicism she espouses is old-fashioned as well, redolent with devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Latin-rite mass, deeply rooted in the Baltimore Catholicism of the 1940s. Some critics call her "the zinging nun" for her forthright...