He is an American Carmelite priest, Reginald Foster, Latin's loudest advocate in the modern world.

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St Therese, a French Carmelite nun who died of tuberculosis in 1897 aged 24, came to wider attention after her autobiography was published.

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As the old prioress, Madame de Croissy, lies writhing on her deathbed, she cries out that God has forsaken her and the Carmelite order.

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What really distinguished her was a strength of character and political astuteness that enabled her to reform the Carmelite Order and found 17 convents across Spain.

ECONOMIST: Christian believers

Her reformist ideas were strongly opposed within the Carmelite order and other religious orders frequently tried to keep her out of cities already bursting with convents and monasteries.

ECONOMIST: Christian believers

In the early scenes in the Carmelite convent, the crowd disappeared, but as the outside world began to intrude on Blanche's refuge and the nuns were threatened, expelled and finally condemned, Mr. Carsen brought it back.

WSJ: Two 20th-Century Works That Still Shock and Awe | By Heidi Waleson | Salome | Dialogues des Carm��lites | Canadian Opera Company | Metropolitan Opera | Francis Poulenc | Richard Strauss | Atom Egoyan

Instead they used the visual language of modernism to tell the terrible tale of the Carmelite nuns in as direct and universal a way as possible and 36 years after the fact, the results still look timelessly true.

WSJ: Long After the Initial Shock, Modernism Still Delivers | Sightings by Terry Teachout