|
Book Review
Sr. Dorothy's ’greatest gift’
Reviewed by Andrew Junker, The Catholic Sun
March 6, 2008
With a focus on almsgiving, Lent brings the poor to the minds of Catholics. And while many will donate money to charitable causes or volunteer their time working in a soup kitchen, the cry of the poor calls some men and women to a much more radical response.
It’s not enough for them to visit the poor every once in a while. Instead, they seek solidarity with them, living with the least among us and sharing their trials and joys.
Very few modern Americans lived this life with and for the poor as fully as Sister of Notre Dame de Namur Dorothy Stang.
In “The Greatest Gift,” author Binka Le Breton explores the story and motivations behind this missionary nun who worked for decades transforming the lives of countless Brazilians in the Amazon.
Sr. Dorothy was born into a large, devout, mid-Western family in 1931. The rhythms of Catholic life permeated the Stang household. Catholic education, family rosaries, frequent confession and festivities like the May Crowning all played a primary role in the growth and development of Sr. Dorothy.
When she decided to enter the convent at age 17, it came as a surprise to no one, though her father was a little worried that she was so young and hadn’t yet seen much of the world.
That would come soon enough, because Sr. Dorothy had a missionary zeal. This became quickly apparent when she was sent with a few other nuns to Phoenix in the 1950s. Working at the newly established Most Holy Trinity Parish, Sr. Dorothy — or Sr. Mary Joaquim as she was known before the 1960s — managed to work with the poor migrants and Native Americans whenever she could.
A fellow sister who worked with Sr. Dorothy in Phoenix recalled that their ministry here set the stage for her work in the Amazon.
“I think for Dot the Arizona years led her to push forward a strong desire to work with the marginalized and the poor, and certainly laid the foundation for her future work in Brazil,” Le Breton quotes Sr. Paula Marie. “Everything that we did seemed to enrich everything else, and had such an impact on our future lives.”
Sr. Dorothy’s future life began in 1966, when she first arrived in Brazil. She worked in various dioceses throughout the country, but always insisted on following the poor and voicing their concerns to an often-adversarial government.
Le Breton does a good job of describing Brazil during the decades Sr. Dorothy lived there. The interplay between the government, the land speculators and the poor farmers can seem complicated to a reader who doesn’t have a strong grasp of recent Brazilian history. Le Breton sorts out the complexities.
Basically, there was a great push by the Brazilian government from the ’60s onward to stake a claim in the resources offered by the vast Amazon rainforest, fearful as they were of other government benefiting from the region.
They built a freeway cutting through the forest and encouraged citizens to begin clearing the land and working it.
Unfortunately, often-violent disagreements arose over land ownership — both because of corruption and incompetence. Speculators intimidated the small farmers, confiscated their land and forced them to work it like indentured servants.
Sr. Dorothy spent her life in the forest organizing these small farmers into co-ops for greater protection, setting up Bible study courses and schools for their children. She helped them sell their produce and navigated the mystifying waters of governmental bureaucracy when needed.
But above all, she loved the men, women and children she worked for and protected. “The Greatest Gift” makes this abundantly clear with its multitude of testimonials from the nuns, laity, priests and bishops who all encountered Sr. Dorothy.
“She drew her strength from the Bible and the Book of Hours,” said Brother Jerónimo, a religious who worked with Sr. Dorothy in the ’80s. “She counseled the farmers, lived with them, ate what little they had to offer but was always sensitive to their lack of resources.”
At times, Le Breton falters in her writing and does a disservice to her readers by offering heavy-handed analysis of the Catholic Church. Consider this distillation of 2,000 years of Church history:
“But as the hierarchy developed, early churchmen considered the very notion of associating spirituality with the female to be dangerously reminiscent of the ancient goddess religions and firmly repressed it. The fall had come about through Eve; women were sinful and must live in subordination to men,” Le Breton writes.
“Any form of dissent was rigidly punished by the inquisition, and centuries later, in the 1980s and 1990s, the office of the inquisition (renamed Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith), in the person of Cardinal Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — continued to silence priests who espoused any form of theology that differed from the Vatican party line.”
Paragraphs like these — which read like they could have been ripped from “The Da Vinci Code” — distract from the book’s success at portraying Sr. Dorothy as a normal woman who accomplished great things through love.
It was her love of the poor that led Sr. Dorothy to Brazil in the first place. For nearly 40 years, she built communities, educated the farmers and spoke out against the corruption that seemed to permeate the forest.
It was her love for what she called “her people” that never allowed her to tire in her concern for them. And it was her love for them that eventually led to her death in an execution-style shooting Feb. 12, 2005.
Even at that moment of death, her love didn’t fail her. Witnesses said that this 73-year-old nun from Dayton, Ohio, responded to her killers by calmly reading the Beatitudes.
“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.”
“The Greatest Gift” tells the story of how that kind of courageous love is possible.
Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.
|
