Nuns

They're being forced to live on crumbs, so nuns at a Hollywood convent famous for its pumpkin bread are warning that they may have to slice up the place for development. The threat of a shutdown of the 75-year-old Monastery of the Angels below the Hollywood sign has prompted neighbors and supporters to mount a campaign to save the four-acre religious retreat.

Organizing a country-western hoedown was a first for the nuns. So were the carne asada sale and the trips to the casino. But then again it isn't everyday that the founder of your religious order will be canonized by the Pope. For 30 years, members of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a worldwide Roman Catholic order, have operated a home for the elderly in San Pedro, a facility devoted to the care of about 100 impoverished elderly residents. They call themselves "the begging order" and rely on God's providence to provide the financial means to meet the needs of some 202 homes they run in 32 countries.

In the 1960s and '70s, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange picketed with farmworkers and marched with Cesar Chavez, even serving jail time for the cause. In the 1980s, the Catholic nuns rallied behind janitors trying to unionize. Long known as friends to labor, today the sisters are on the other side of the picket line, locked in a clash with a union that wants to organize at a chain of hospitals the nuns operate throughout California.

Telecommunications technology of the early 21st century has produced a phenomenon known as "phone hell": an audio inferno where callers are tormented either by mechanized voices or human ones with less soul than the machines. But the opposite exists. It can be found here in a simply furnished second-floor room where multilingual nuns in gray habits answer phones with an unfailingly sweet-voiced greeting: "Pronto, Vaticano" (Hello, Vatican).

An elderly nun, under questioning by a lawyer, recently said she could remember almost nothing about his client, a child who had been sexually molested by a Roman Catholic priest. Lawyer Irwin Zalkin was puzzled because church records showed she had heard several complaints about the San Diego priest, and the file noted that she had reported them to higher authority.

A rancher accused of masterminding the slaying of a U.S.-born Catholic nun went on trial Monday in a case widely viewed as a test of the impunity long enjoyed by wealthy Brazilian landowners in the Amazon. Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura is one of two cattlemen charged with ordering the 2005 killing of Sister Dorothy Stang, 73, who had over decades become a champion of poor settlers of the Amazon.

SANTA BARBARA -- For 43 years, Sister Angela Escalera has lived and often worked out of her order's small convent on this city's east side, helping the area's many poor and undocumented residents with translation, counseling and other needs. Now retired and partly disabled at 69, the nun thought she would live out her days here, in the community where she is still an active volunteer and in the dwelling that was built for the order in 1952.

Three nuns who recently learned that their Santa Barbara convent would be sold to help cover the costs of Los Angeles' multimillion-dollar priest sexual abuse settlement say they have been overwhelmed with offers of help -- and media attention. "The support has been just unbelievable," said Sister Angela Escalera, the local superior of the Sisters of Bethany house. "It's come from all parts of Santa Barbara and outside too. And from all denominations. It's just astounding."

Six Roman Catholic nuns have been excommunicated for heresy after refusing to give up membership in a Canadian sect whose founder claims to be possessed by the Virgin Mary, the Diocese of Little Rock said Wednesday. Msgr. J. Gaston Hebert, the diocese administrator, said he notified the nuns Tuesday night after they refused to recant the teachings of the Community of the Lady of All Nations, also known as the Army of Mary. The Vatican has declared all members of the Army of Mary excommunicated.

Police evicted 65 rebellious ex-nuns from a convent they illegally occupied for two years after defying a Vatican order to replace their charismatic leader. The former nuns walked out after a locksmith opened the gate to the walled compound and police in riot gear rushed in and arrested the mother superior, who has said she has religious visions.