There is a 1973 motion picture titled Ash Wednesday. It stars Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor plays an aging woman who wants to return to the heights of her beauty. In pursuit of this obsession, she boards a plane to Switzerland, where she undergoes extensive plastic surgery. The doctors promise her that afterwards she will look twenty years younger.

Following the surgery, with her bruised face wrapped in bandages, Taylor dons dark sun glasses and decides to go for a walk. Slowly, in great pain, she strolls the streets of Geneva. Seeking a place to stop for rest, she enters an old stone church.

“Hidden in the back row of the sanctuary, she is like a new woman waiting to emerge from a gauze cocoon . . . until she is approached by an elderly priest making his way through the congregation. It is A…