A week that saw one journalist revisiting his old Catholic grade school in San Francisco and sisters planning demonstrations at the World Cup soccer event in Brazil was overshadowed by the death of one of two women religious attacked outside of a church in Malaysia.
Mourning in Malaysia
Last week an unidentified assailant used a motorcycle helmet to attack two women religious outside of a church in Seremban, Malaysia. This week one of those, Sr. Juliana Lim, 69, died from her injuries, according to the country’s The Sun Daily.
Malaysians are reeling over the violent act, which authorities have now reclassified as murder, robbery and assault. The assailant has not been found.
Lim, a member of the Sisters of the Infant Jesus, died on May 20 at the Tuanku Jaafar Hospital without regaining consciousness.
She and Sr. Marie-Rose Teng, 79, both suffered serious head injuries in the assault outside the Church of The Visitation a week earlier.
Teng, who told authorities that the attack was carried out by one person, was released from the hospital Sunday. She said that a man beat them on their heads with a helmet, stealing a purse, a cell phone and some money.
The crime has been widely condemned by the country’s government and church officials. A funeral mass is planned for Friday.
Not all fun and games
Women religious who have spent years fighting human trafficking are armed for a new battleground: The upcoming World Cup in Brazil.
The Associated Press and Reuters reported on an international effort to call attention to child prostitution during the giant soccer event in games in 12 cities.
The coalition of women religious working on the public awareness campaign represent 240 congregations from 79 countries.
At a press conference at the Vatican, organizer Sr. Gabriella Bottani, an Italian nun, said international sporting events such as the World Cup attract human traffickers.
Traffickers often lure young people from the countryside with the promise of a job, Bottani said, and children from rural areas are also in danger of being kidnapped and and forced to beg for money.
During the World Cup, nuns and other volunteers for the “Play For Life, Report Trafficking” campaign will hand out leaflets at airports and key tourist areas around Brazil encouraging soccer fans to report suspected child prostitution or enslavement. Several demonstrations are also planned.
Organizer Sr. Carmen Sammut, a Maltese nun, said the women have the full support of Pope Francis, known to be an avid soccer fan.
“We need to make people conscious of what happens on the margins of big world events such as the FIFA World Cup and the suffering of those who are trafficked," said Sammut.
Learn more about the campaign here.
What happened here?
Authorities and the media in New York are still trying to figure out what happened last October when Sr. Denise Martin called 911 to report a fire on the grounds of the St. Joseph Hill Academy convent on Staten Island.
The fire was started by vandals. Three men have been arrested and are awaiting trial.
In the 911 call that a calm but desperate Martin made at 5:30 a.m. that day she struggled to give the operator directions to the convent, located behind a school.
A firetruck showed up seven minutes after she made the first of two calls, which poses the problem: The average response time is reportedly under five minutes.
It seemed like “forever,” Martin told public radio station WNYC News. “When you are in the process of an emergency like that, it seems very long.”
Members of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, who supplied recordings and documents about the incident to the The New York Daily News and other media, are using it to expose flaws in the city’s new 911 dispatch system.
One union official said trucks were delayed because it took the new system more than two minutes for the 911 operator to get the fire department on the phone line after Martin called.
Under the old system, the 911 dispatcher would have immediately patched in a fire dispatcher to take the call.
“It is a painful conversation to hear,” WNYC said of Martin’s 911 call. “A couple of times the nun coughed from the smoke.”
Martin called back a second time, to a different 911 operator, to report that the other nun living in the convent, Sr. Regina, had jumped out of a second-floor window to escape the fire and needed an ambulance. She broke three vertebrae and is still in physical therapy.
The union has complained about the new dispatch system since it was unveiled in May 2009.
“You call 911 and then you’re waiting for the fire engines to come . . . I mean I could hear the crackling and the wood coming down,” said Martin, who said she understood that the 911 operator was only doing her job.
“I don’t know if I can fault her or anybody. Everybody was trying to do their best at the time with the situation.”
An old story made new
Here’s a bit of history we didn’t know before this week, and perhaps you missed the 2008 book about it, too: During the Holocaust, members of the Jewish resistance joined ranks with Catholic nuns to hide Jewish children in convents.
Suzanne Vromen told the story of this life-saving collaboration at a program earlier this month in Middlesex County, New Jersey, that was sponsored by the Henry Ricklis Holocaust Memorial Committee.
The professor emeritus of sociology at Bard College is the author of a book called Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis.
She herself was hidden safely away as a child in a convent in the Belgian Congo, according to a story about her speech in the New Jersey Jewish News.
She said the rescue operations came about because of an informal agreement between the Catholic church in Belgium and Nazi leaders, who agreed to not interfere with the church if the church stayed out of Nazi business. “This in effect created the perfect bystander,” said Vromen.
She said the mother superiors of the convents “functioned like CEOs,” and some decided to offer shelter to children.
One of the hidden children Vromen interviewed for her book recalled a nun who learned to say “Sleep well, my child” in Yiddish and repeated it every night at bedtime while slipping the children a piece of candy.
She unveiled another story about 15 hidden girls the Gestapo caught wind of at one convent. The mother superior convinced the Nazis to come back the next day to give the nuns time to prepare the girls for their travels. Then, risking her own life, she arranged for the girls to be moved safely.
Walking down memory lane
Reporter Carl Nolte at the San Francisco Chronicle recently visited his old grade school, the city’s St. Peter’s Catholic School. And while he found, not surprisingly, that much has changed, some things are still the same.
The school was founded in 1878 by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy, eight Irish nuns running a school for children of immigrants, he writes. “One hundred thirty-six years later, it is the same school,” he reports. “Different immigrants.”
When he was a student there, almost all of the St. Peter’s kids were Irish or Italian. Now, 95 percent are Latino, two-thirds of them living below the poverty line, he found.
“But St. Peter's seems to be thriving,” Nolte writes.
For the first time in 138 years, the principal and vice-principal are not members of a religious order. “The nuns taught the girls, the Christian Brothers taught the boys – an arrangement that lasted more than a century,” writes Nolte.
He interviewed Sr. Marion Rose Power, one of three nuns who still help at the school part-time. “I don’t say I retired,” Power said. “I say I am a volunteer.”
Her main job is to raise money for the school, where the tuition is $3,800 a year. But since it costs $5,800 a year per student to run the school, Power is always looking for a little help from friends to get by.
Told you. Some things never change in the Catholic schools.
[Lisa Gutierrez is a reporter in Kansas City, Mo., who scans the non-NCR news every week for interesting pieces about sisters. She can be reached at lisa11gutierrez@gmail.com.]