I cannot find it now, but I know for a fact that the actress,Virginia Moss Patton, who played the wife of George Bailey’s brother in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life was a devout Catholic. She was also General Patton’s niece. I think she is still living. Wikipedia sums up her exit from an acting career as follows: “Patton has been married to Cruse W. Moss since 1949, and gave up acting in the late 1940s to concentrate on raising a family with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She later attended the University of Michigan. She is president of The Patton Corporation, an investment and real estate holdings company in Ann Arbor and is also involved in community work.”
Unable to find the article I had read detailing Virginia Patton’s Catholic Faith, I remembered posting a link to an article about another relative of General Patton who became a Benedictine nun. She is Mother Margaret Georgina Patton and she is now at Regina Laudis monastery in Bethlehem Connecticut. This is the same monastery where the actress Dolores Hart joined the cloister. Hart was given her same name Dolores in religion, after Our Lady of Sorrows. Playing the role of Saint Clare in the film Francis of Assisi (1961) was a big influence on her life. But it was another role in 1963 (not sure which one it was) that was a bigger tug from heaven drawing her to religious life. Interesting, too, is that Dolores Hart was engaged to be married in 1963 and she broke that off with her fiancè in order to join the Benedictines. Her fiancè, Don Robinson, never married; he would visit Sister Dolores every Christmas and Easter until his death in 2011.
The American Catholic, Donald McClarey: “[Patton] Chaplain, I am a strong believer in Prayer. There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by Praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning, or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that’s working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure.” See article here.
