The other day I received an e-mailed advertisement for a production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Washington National Opera. Prominently included above the title of the opera was a blurb from The Toronto Star that read: “Wonderful psychological complexity . . . a hymn to the powers of sisterhood and the strength of female solidarity.” There was no mention there or elsewhere in the ad that the females in question were nuns, or that the cause of their “female solidarity” was their joint refusal of a demand by the Legislative Assembly of Revolutionary France that they renounce their faith in a certain patriarchal religion. We may put to one side the apparent lack of “power” in this particular sisterhood, since that refusal resulted in their being guillotined, but surely any less obvious power attributed to the martyrs hymned by Poulenc and his librettist Georges Bernanos can have had little or nothing to do with their sex.

Anyone who didn’t already know the opera’s subject might naturally suppose that the “sisterhood” mentioned by the blurbist was of the feminist sort, and that may well be what he—or she—is meant to think. There is no reason to suppose that the politically correct would have any scruples about claiming the heroes of their enemies as their own in this way. More likely, however, the WNO publicist was simply guided by caution. Some people nowadays, particularly if they are among the consumers of high culture, might be