A remarkable woman died this week - Soeur Emmanuelle, an indomitable nun who topped surveys time and again as France's most admired woman. Nora Boustany wrote a wonderful obituary in Friday's Washington Post. If you want to know what Faith in Action is about, look at her life and work.
Soeur Emmanuelle was a beacon at interfaith meetings, especially the annual Prayer for Peace that the Community of Sant'Egidio organizes each year (the next in Cyprus November 16-18). There, among somber and almost exclusively male religious leaders, this small feisty woman could not be missed, striding rapidly along in sturdy sneakers, wisps of hair escaping a headscarf, with two women, one on each side, supporting her. Age did not wither her (she was 99 when she died), and neither did protocol.
Soeur Emmanuelle was admired both for her work and for her courage in speaking "truth to power."
Her recent work was centered in Egypt, where she spoke for and worked with children. She was best known for her passionate support for those who rank among the world's most destitute - children who scavenge garbage at dumps. She fought persistently and effectively to build and run schools and clinics for them.
I'll never forget her wisdom and her passion at a 2005 discussion about children, love, and hatred. She told the story of a five-year-old boy in one of her schools who tried to kill another child with a knife and, when asked why, cried, "I HATE him!". How could such hate come so young? For her, the answer was clear. The child had never known love, never been held, had no one who put him first. And he felt hatred all around him. He was labeled and he learned to label others almost as soon as he could talk. Soeur Emmanuelle and her sisters answered the hate with love.
But, she asked, how can we have a world where so many feel that kind of misery and loneliness, where it is "normal" to hate so bitterly? What can we do about the deep fissures in our society? For Soeur Emmanuelle the answer was love in action, holding and caring about the children but also giving them the hope that can only come with education and health. They must learn to understand "the other," whether it is someone from another neighborhood or religion.
Soeur Emmanuelle was courageous too within her beloved Catholic Church, fearless both in distributing contraceptives at her clinics and in saying that what she did was moral and right.
Soeur Emmanuelle denied fiercely that she was a saint, and with sparkling eyes told tales of her joyous youth. She saw and felt the pain of poverty but she also conveyed a sense that we can and must do something about it. Her spirit and example will be sorely missed.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
