SISTERS
STEVE PFOST, COURTESY OF OPUS PRIZE FOUNDATION
SISTER TESA FITZGERALD, C.S.J. has worked for years as executive director of Hour Children in Queens, New York, helping thousands of women inmates and their kids get through prison terms and rebuild their lives.
See the Spirit in sisters BY SISTER DIANE ROCHE, R.S.C.J.
Sister Diane Roche, R.S.C.J. is a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She is currently the director of the Office of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation at the Stuart Center in Washington, D.C.
There is something about the communal effort to serve others while living simply and without a mate that makes religious life a sign of hope, even to people who are not Catholic.
I
WAS ONCE INVITED to a festive dinner sponsored by a community organization near the inner-city St. Louis neighborhood where I lived. I was both eager and a little apprehensive as I drove down the dark, unfamiliar streets straining to find the Fifth Baptist Church where the event was to be held. After close to 30 years of being a nun, almost all of them spent living and working in poor neighborhoods, I tell myself that I am fairly streetwise. But if I am honest, I know that what has kept me safe and allowed me to work joyfully and effectively in dangerous surroundings has less to do with wisdom than with an utterly unearned kind of grace that seems to hover when I’m where I ought to
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