ROME — A true if unlikely tale: Young woman enrolls at a drama school sponsored by nuns, where the artistic director is a former Italian erotic film actress who redirected her career after a religious awakening. The students are selected to perform before the pope at St. Peter's Square, but during rehearsals the young woman fractures an ankle.
Unable to perform, the young woman, Cristina Scuccia, acts on a persistent spiritual tug and commits to becoming a nun. She travels to Brazil to work with poor children and then returns to Italy to live quietly in a convent in Milan. Except she is still a talented singer, so talented that she wins a Christian singing competition, and then auditions on March 19 for Italy's version of the televisi on show "The Voice."
There, dressed in a full habit, with the crowd on its feet and a tattooed rap-star judge fighting back tears, she belts out a hip-shaking rendition of "No One," by Alicia Keys, that brings down the house and quickly goes viral on the Internet, topping 47 million views on YouTube. Gossip magazines have splashed her on their covers in her habit and featured her in articles.
"It's a very good piece of content," said a smiling Marco Tombolini, a producer of the program, who has seen its rating s jump sharply. "It just is."
"Content" is the digital-age euphemism for what once was called a story, and in Italy few stories match that of Sister Cristina, who is now 25. Both Ms. Keys and Whoopi Goldberg, the star of "Sister Act," the 1992 comedy hit about singing nuns, have offered praise on Twitter. Sister Cristina has since won a "battle round" by outdueling another contestant during a duet of Cyndi Lauper's 1980s hit "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and more recently sang "Hero," by Mariah Carey. Her next appearance is expected on Wednesday night.
What once was nothing more than a singing show with mediocre ratings has become a TV phenomenon in Italy, with no shortage of potential story lines: Will Sister Cristina survive until the final round in early June? Will she convert her singing coach — the Italian rapper J-Ax — to Catholicism? And why has her appearance stirred such a huge reaction in Italy and beyond?
"My dream was to be a singer," Sister Cristina told ANSA, the state news agency, in her only interview. "The L ord has made use of my wish to call me to him, and is taking me to realize my dream in a way that I could have never imagined."
To some observers, the success of Sister Cristina is another byproduct of the new tone established during the first year of the papacy of Pope Francis. If it once might have seemed inappropriate for a nun to even appear on the show — an issue still stirring discussion on different Catholic websites — now the outpouring of public support is seen as more proof of the so-called Francis effect.
"There is a tendency for music to need to be transgressive," said the Rev. Raffaele Giacopuzzi, artistic director of the Good News Festival, the Christian singing competition won by Sister Cristina last year. "But today faith is the last transgression. So the time was ripe, but no one noticed."
Others see savvy programming. Aldo Grasso, television critic for Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily, said that reality shows occasionally produced viral singing sensations, such as Susan Boyle in Britain, but that the producers of "The Voice" also "were smart to exploit the fact that there is a popular pope who speaks to the faithful using popular language."
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He added: "The web is strange, because she went viral. The 'Sister Act' model, the nun that can sing, is always intriguing."
Early in the year, as "The Voice" was looking for competitors to give a boost to the new season, the show's creative director, Pasquale Romano, was scouring the Internet when he came across a video of Sister Cristina. He was stunned, and the staff invited her to sing in a conference room at the production company's office in Rome.
"It was not just picking a nun," said Mr. Tombolini, the producer. "It was picking that specific nun. She is young. She is talented. She fits perfectly the spirit of the show."
Having grown up in Sicily, Sister Cristina was not yet a nun in 2008 when she played the role of Sister Rosa in a musical to celebrate the anniversary of the Ursuline Sisters of the Holy Family. She was spotted by Claudia Koll, who had starred in the 1992 erotic film "Così Fan Tutte," which was released internationally as "All Ladies Do It," but who had since returned to the Roman Catholic Church and was starting a drama school at a nunnery in Rome.
"When I saw Cristina, I realized she should be one of the first ones" to enroll, Ms. Koll said. "She had the ability to reach people's hearts, to communicate with people. And she had a beautiful voice."
At the beginning of Sister Cristina's March 19 appearance on "The Voice," the camera focused briefly on her sensible nun's shoes as the judges perked up at the sound of her voice and the roar of the crowd. The show's gimmick is that during these early auditions, the four judges sit with their backs to the performers. Then, if they like the voice, they hit a button, and their chairs spin so they can face the singer.
The first judge to hit the button for Sister Cristina was J-Ax, who is now serving as her coa ch in the competition. Once a self-proclaimed bad boy, J-Ax began to tear up. A man who grew up idolizing Run DMC and Public Enemy saw in Sister Cristina a different sort of rebel, "somebody breaking the rules, and doing it in a joyful and cheerful way."
He also came to another realization: "Whoa," he remembered thinking, "this is going to blow everybody's minds."
Now, more than 400 media outlets have called seeking interviews with Suor Cristina, as she is known in Italy. She has remained at her convent in Milan, except when she is rehearsing with J-Ax, who said he promised the convent's mother superior that he would protect his protégée from the evils of show business. He also said that once the show ran its course, he would talk to her about spirituality.
"The light in her eyes makes me curious," he said. (Asked about J-Ax during her interview with ANSA, Sister Cristina shrugged off any suggestion that he was "a devil," calling him "attentive" and "very sensitive.")
"The Voice" still has weeks to go, with the promise of higher and higher ratings when Sister Cristina appears. The "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" program roughly quadrupled the ratings the show had registered before she joined it in March, which raises a tantalizing question: Will anyone dare vote her off the show?
After the duet, the decision of which woman would advance, Sister Cristina or the other singer, was left to J-Ax. He chose Sister Cristina. Before his decision, one of the other judges, Raffaella Carrà, praised Sister Cristina and laughingly told her not to worry.
"I'm convinced J-Ax will choose you," Ms. Carrà said. "Otherwise, he'll go to hell!"
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