Beyond plastic saints

Hope for me has been buoyed in recent months by three books that are very different from each other, except for their studied avoidance of the immediate, the sensational, the transitory, or the attention-lusting polemical.

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour narrates the patient goodness of Irish American nuns (the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor and the Congregation of Mary Before the Cross) as they minister to Brooklyn’s ill, homebound, and disabled people in the early 20th century. The novel revolves around the trials of a single family sustained for two generations by Sisters Lucy, St. Savior, Jeanne, Illuminata, and others. McDermott’s luminous but understated prose portrays nuns who are anything but plastic saints or manipulating ecclesiastics. Her account of their self-giving vocations offers a splendid complement to the ongoing exploration of American sisters that is currently being carried out under the direction of Kathleen Sprows Cummings at Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.

Evangelicals around the World, a multiauthored “global handbook” published by the World Evangelical Alliance, records an extraordinary range of healing activities undertaken by an extraordinary range of self-giving people. After Reaksa Himm’s Cam­bodian family was killed by the Khmer Rouge, he trained as a psychologist in Canada before returning as a missionary to his native people. Norberto Saracco, one of the first Argentinean Pente­costals to earn a Ph.D., happened also to participate in a Buenos Aires prayer circle that included the Catholic bishop Jorge Ber­goglio, later Pope Francis I. In Nigeria, the Evangelical Church Winning All, an offshoot of the Sudan Interior Mission, now in­cludes over 5,000 congregations with 6 million adherents and sponsors two seminaries, eight Bible colleges, 15 theological training centers, four hospitals, 100 medical clinics, an HIV/AIDS ministry team, and a school for nurses and midwives. While I read this book, the United States’ political-religious wars fade away almost entirely.