Last month the 2,000-member coalition, an activist group representing roughly 2 percent of the U.S. sisterhood, urged a boycott of Cholewa's St. Joseph, Mich., company, Blessings, Expressions of Faith, which sells 20-inch dolls dressed in the garb of 32 Roman Catholic orders for $139 to $199 each. Rindler, 64, has never shied away from a fight. Over the past decade she has expressed opposition to the Pope over his stands against same-sex marriage and the ordination of women, and has written President Clinton to protest human rights violations in Guatemala.
Still, Cholewa, who was reared with six brothers and two sisters in a blue-collar Polish-Catholic family in Lombard, Ill., is bewildered by her criticism. "We're promoting a symbol of the Church," he says. "What these habits represent, you cannot knock." He and his brothers quizzed nuns on such details as the number of pleats in their habits. "I can't think of a time they didn't cooperate," he says. "Some even sent swatches of fabric."
Cholewa's salary of $20,000 a year helps support his wife, a waitress, and their two young daughters in a modest townhouse in Geneva, Ill. Fortunately for him, the boycott threat has stirred curiosity about his mininuns: Catalog requests have suddenly increased. "This whole thing," says Cholewa, "could be a blessing in disguise."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
