Catholic girls' schools as portrayed in manga aren't generally known for being accurate. Japan is not a Catholic country; Catholicism is to them what Buddhism is to Americans who wear the Buddha on their t-shirts and get him tattooed onto their backs. That's where G-Senjo no Maria stands out. The author, Miwa Ueda, attended a Catholic women's college and based the titular G-Senjo on it. She doesn't seem much better informed about Catholicism than the typical mangaka, but what she doesn't do is exotify it. That makes Gloria School is more like an real Catholic school than any other I've seen in manga.
G-Senjo no Maria establishes its lack of sentimentalism about Catholicism right off the bat: it opens with the schoolgirl characters selling Bibles stolen from their school church on the street to pay for their friend's dating expenses. They get caught but get let off with only some added cleaning duty (okay, so that's not that realistic).
But G-Senjo no Maria is not about G-Senjo. It's a deeply character-based story about a girl coming to terms with her sister's death. It's about growing up and moving on, symbolized by the girls' crumbling pre-war dormitory finally being torn down. It's a beautiful, heartfelt, lingering story, vastly different from the typical Catholic schoolgirl manga and all the better for it.
