Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [119]
Three days before her 1968 graduation, she was shattered by the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. But faith is idealism regenerated. Back in Ohio, working as a hospital nurse, she found herself managing a night ward with one aide and thirty-six patients, a milieu so different from Georgetown’s hospital with its interns and residents and collegial atmosphere. She had read the studies that showed poor staffing affected survival rates. Searching for a way to apply her ideals, she went to Boston College for a master’s in nursing.
Soon thereafter, she met several members of the Medical Mission Sisters, an order founded in 1925 with a history in north India, where thousands of Muslim women and children died for lack of medical care. The sisters as health providers considered themselves “a healing presence at the heart of a wounded world.” Chris Schenk’s studies of theology reinforced the sisters’ embrace of the Other, finding grace in the poor. She met brilliant, idealistic nuns opposed to U.S. policy that perpetuated poverty in countries where America supported dictators, often to plunder the natural resources.
Her religious life began in Philadelphia, a teaching job at Temple University; she returned her $28,000 salary to the community; however, she soon soured on academic politics. With the support of the Mission Sisters, she became an interfaith organizer with the United Farm Workers (UFW). At a UFW event she met the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, author of A Theology of Liberation. “To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed,” he had written. “We can stand straight, according to the Gospel, only when our center of gravity is outside ourselves.”17 She found her center in Kentucky, where she trained to become a midwife. The region’s poverty drove her to join a campaign to change state law so that nurse-practitioners could write prescriptions, an acute need in areas without doctors. In a difficult decision, she left the medical sisterhood, realizing that her need to be rooted somewhere geographically did not mesh with life as a foreign missionary.
In Kentucky, she found a mentor in Baptist midwife Elsie Maier Wilson, “the most enlightening revolutionary of my life. She taught me to trust Jesus’s power.”
Some members of the nursing board saw our expanded roles as an abandonment of nursing. Many times as I made the long drive to big-city Louisville from the remote simplicity of the mountains I prayed for God’s help to present our case well. We changed the law because of the common decency of ordinary Kentuckians. But it was Jesus’s power to empower the powerless, and the organizing skills I learned from the Farm Workers, that gave me the courage to try.18
In 1978 she moved to Cleveland. She had romance, a boyfriend, but a spiritual quest for justice ran deep. As a nurse-midwife among the poor, she lobbied for legislation to expand prenatal care services. In time, she was drawn to an activist sensibility in the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the order of Sister Helen Prejean. For a second time, Chris Schenk became a nun.
SANTIAGO FELICIANO JR. AT WORK
Cleveland in the 1980s was a crossroads for refugees from Central America. Bishop James Hickey, who had ministered with Mexican farmworkers before his studies in Rome, was aghast at the March 1980 murder of El Salvador’s archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass. The funeral was disrupted by gunshots: twenty mourners were wounded as Hickey and others took shelter in a cathedral. Hickey, who was about to become archbishop of Washington, D.C., encouraged Clevelanders Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, and Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel to continue their work in El Salvador. Just before Christmas, they, too, were murdered.
The FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service harassed New Mexican and Arizona churches in the Sanctuary movement that aided people fleeing civil wars and