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This article examines Catholic nursing orders in Denmark. In 1849, 300 years after the Reformation, freedom of worship was introduced in Lutheran Denmark. In 1856 the first Catholic nursing order in modern times settled in the country. Others followed, and in 1940 the nursing orders owned 17 general hospitals and had a share of 10% of the hospital beds in Denmark. The purpose of this article is to identify images in the public media text of these Catholic nursing orders in Denmark from 1856 to the present, and to deconstruct the existing angel image the nuns and sisters in nursing have obtained. The assumption is that the public image is an important indicator of how a profession is valued in society. Six images - three positive and three negative - are identified, and it is demonstrated that these images were closely connected to the nursing sisters' professional activities and confessional affiliation. Until the 1950s the image of nursing sisters as representing a counterculture in Lutheran Denmark persisted. This image was succeeded by one of professional nurses of high standards. The shift was caused by increased secularisation and the renewal of religious life, as a result of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

In the nursing literature, a number of qualities are associated with loving care. Reference is made to, among other things, humility, attentiveness, responsibility and duty, compassion, and tenderness. The author attempts to show that charm, in the Marcelian sense, also plays a central role. It is argued that the moral foundation of charm is a unity of agape and eros. An impartial giving of the self for others is clearly of fundamental importance in an ethic of care. Including charm in the discussion points to the fact that eros also plays a crucial role. Eros produces a passion for people and for life. It is a physical and spiritual energy that animates a person in all facets of her life, including her caring work.

In this paper we argue that nursing is consistently presented as a practice without a history, constantly reinventing itself within new professional and technical realms. This rupture with and repudiation of a past deemed to be pejorative, coupled with a rebirth in a "preferred present," raises recurrent problems in the construction of nursing's contemporary professional identity and search for social legitimacy. Furthermore, constituting new nursing knowledge and practice as discontinuous with the past produces a sense of historical dislocation of that nursing knowledge and practice that, in turn, reproduces the need for relocation through reinvention. This phenomenon, which we term the "rhetoric of rupture," in our view, arises from nursing's frustrated attempts to gain social status and legitimacy. Paradoxically, this constant reinvention in fact hampers nurses' attempts to gain that status and legitimacy.