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I bet a good number of people who read NCR Today will resonate with this column, written by Nicholas D. Kristof, and appearing in The New York Times today. Kristof writes about the Vatican, as it "wrestles with the consequences of a patriarchal premodern mind-set," going on to describe another Catholic church he has gotten to know over the years.
The following is how he describes that church and, in a few paragraphs, casts light on some of the ingredients of Catholicism that inspire so many of us. I know that every regular NCR reader personally knows some of the priests, nuns and lay persons he refers to in his column.
You might add their names, as comments, when you think of them.
This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.
This is the church of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America and the Cabrini Sisters in Africa. There’s a stereotype of nuns as stodgy Victorian traditionalists. I learned otherwise while hanging on for my life in a passenger seat as an American nun with a lead foot drove her jeep over ruts and through a creek in Swaziland to visit AIDS orphans. After a number of encounters like that, I’ve come to believe that the very coolest people in the world today may be nuns.
