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Show Only a Poor Clare. HV FEW of us out in the world consider the personality of the nun. On the street two are traveling trav-eling together, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead, intent on performing Aie object of their journey and again escaping from the world to their abode in the cloister. One may have been the heiress heir-ess of princely wealth, sacrificed to the vow of perpetual chastity and poverty. Who knows, or stops to think? The other may have spent her childhood in the alley and been the little saint of the slums. "Who knows, or stops to think? To the world outside they are simple nuns. The habit of .their order conceals birth and rank and title. The girl may have been a queen or she may have been a peasant when she yielded to the light of the Holy Spirit and espoused es-poused religion. Now she is but a simple sim-ple nun.' and what she was before, we wot not as she quietly passes us by. A letter to the Intermountain Catholic Catho-lic records the death of a nun whom some of our readers may remember in life, albeit it will be such as groan under the weight of years and long for eternal youth beyond the grave. itiK- jcuri icviies mat on ine morning of the 29th of January, in the monastery monas-tery of St. Clare at Evansville. Ind., Hev. Mother Constanzia Bentivaslia, of the monastery of Poor Clare in Omaha. eacefully expired, after an illness ill-ness which terminated in pneumonia. Only a nun was Mother Constanzia, just like those who pass you on the street with downcast eyes and a look j of meditation. One of the order of Poor Clares, a name which is the synonym of humility, of obedience, of poverty, and of life devoted to charity. Now that this old nun has gone to her reward, re-ward, the world, perhaps, may learn her history. They would never hear of it while she lived in the cloister. Life in the monastery is not for this world. In the year 183S Mother Constance was born in the castle of St. Angelo at Rome, at the time her father, a relative rela-tive of the present Pope Leo, was governor gov-ernor of the Eternal City. The elder Bentivoglia was previously in the. service serv-ice of the first Napolean and attained the rank of a general in theimperial army. Today the brother of the de ceased nun, Count Bentivoglia, occupies occu-pies a prominent place among the aristocracy. aris-tocracy. Yet with an ancestry of blue blood running back to the tenth century, cen-tury, this child of the Bentivoglias gave up all for Christ and consented to become be-come only a Poor Clare in a foreign country. The letter from Evansville recites that in 1875 Mother Constanzia, with her sister, the mother abbess of the . house in Home, were sent to the United States by Pope Pius IX. They founded all the homes of Poor Clares in this country. Among the Poor Clares some there are, perhaps, with royal blood. The vow of perpetual chastity and obedience obedi-ence binds princess and peasant in'the equality of religion. And thus it happened hap-pened that in the monastery at Evansville Evans-ville the other day. it was only a nun who died onlv a Poor Clare. i |