Recent Bridgefolk webinars are now available online at
https://www.bridgefolk.net/conferences/webinars/
Tag: Bridgefolk
Board profile: Ann Marie Biermaier OSB & Samantha Lioi, co-chairs
When Fr. John Klassen retired from his role as Abbot of Saint John’s Abbey and departed for a six-month sabbatical in January 2024, he also concluded his tenure as Catholic Co-chair of the Bridgefolk board, a position he had filled since its formation. Sr. Ann Marie Biermaier, a board member from the St. Benedict Monastery, graciously accepted the invitation to join Mennonite Samantha Lioi as co-chair.
Samantha and Sr. Ann Marie are women of different generations, and both bring a rich diversity of experiences that drew them to ecumenical involvement. Sr. Ann Marie quotes Toni Sorenson as she looks back on her six-decades-long career as a Benedictine sister: “Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes isn’t as much about the walk or the shoes; it’s being able to think like they think, feel what they feel, and understand why they are who and where they are. Every step is about empathy.” Biermaier notes: “I have had several opportunities over the years to attempt to ‘walk in others’ shoes.’ I pray that they and I are better because we’ve shared along the way.”
Living in a religious community has given Biermaier ample opportunities to walk with others. “We are a group of women from a variety of backgrounds—educationally, socially, socioeconomically. We’ve shared formative moments through study and praying together frequently each day. We’ve welcomed individuals from other cultures into our community.” Biermaier also extends welcome through her involvement with the community’s Studium program in which individuals come from around the world to do research, study, and creative work. She finds deep joy in welcoming individuals of other religions and cultures.
At the September 2023 Bridgefolk co-sponsored the Rooted and Grounded conference at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), Lioi commented to some new acquaintances, “Some of my best friends are Catholic!” This has been true since childhood when, growing up in north Jersey, both of her best friends from grade school through high school were Catholic. She remains a close friend with Dominique, who is Italian like half of Samantha’s family, and Karla, who is half Mexican, half Okinawan via Hawaii. Samantha remembers meeting Dominique in the bus line one day after school, when they were about eight. “A zealous kid immersed in late-eighties evangelicalism,” Samantha recalls, “I was wearing a small pin that said, ‘Jesus loves you.’ Dominique smiled and said, ‘I like your pin,’ and we soon had a confusing exchange when she asked if I was Catholic, meaning Christian, and I said no and specified the kind of Christian I was.”
Despite having Catholic friends from an early age, Lioi regrets the judgmental attitude she absorbed as a child and youth about “the exclusive rightness of my church’s particular way of being Christian. Especially sad is a lack of connection with my Italian grandmother’s Catholic heritage. My dad’s mom left the Catholic Church to marry my Protestant grandfather, whose father had emigrated from Italy with a bad taste in his mouth from some harsher penance practices he had observed. Yet, my dad bore no hint of shame in telling me about his great aunt Emily, who was a Dominican sister.”
Both Biermaier and Lioi had educational experiences that introduced them to new people and perspectives. Biermaier’s doctoral studies presented a rich opportunity to study with a number of indigenous students. “We exchanged ideas on education, culture, and ways of improving education in our K-16 settings. Through social events we got to know each other personally.”
For her part, Lioi discovered “the rich breadth of Christian history and tradition, including the church year, classic spiritual disciplines including silence, solitude, fasting, celebration and centering prayer, as well as Catholic social teaching. “One of my profs turned me on to Rerum Novarum, and I eagerly studied the full text for a final paper in that class. That same professor dropped phrases like ‘God’s preferential option for the poor’ into theology classes, piquing my interest and planting seeds in me toward a theology of justice and peace.”
For 20-plus years, Biermaier made frequent trips to The Bahamas to work in the Benedictine education program there. She assisted students completing their degrees with the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. She lived in Nassau for two years, which she describes as “an immersion into the culture – educationally, spiritually, and socially. I grew in understanding their values, their desires for their country and world, and their love of nature and the earth.”
Biermaier made additional trips to Tanzania and India, exploring semester-long study opportunities for education students. As she explored what it might mean for US students to study in those cultural and educational environments, she also considered how African and Asian students would do as they adjusted to the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. A pilgrimage to Europe allowed Biermaier to trace the paths of Benedict and Scholastica in Rome and Subiaco. “As I walked the steps up the hill from the town of Subiaco to where Benedict lived, I felt deeply his love for the earth, love for prayer, the countryside, and his love for where his sister lived. I came home with a richer understanding of my Benedictine heritage.”
For her part, Lioi lived for ten months with an American family in Tanzania in her mid-twenties. There she developed friendships with Anglican pastors/missionaries from Australia and England, and many varieties of expatriate Christians worshiped together at an intentionally ecumenical local church. When she returned to the United States and enrolled at AMBS, her emerging Mennonite identity became grounded, fleshed out. “Marlene Kropf became an important mentor, and my formation as a worship leader was threaded through with Catholic contemplative spirituality and attentiveness to liturgical seasons. Professors Mary Schertz’s and Alan Kreider’s ways of reading and teaching the Bible and church history and mission profoundly impacted me.”
In summer 2007, Bridgefolk met on the AMBS campus. Lioi participated as a volunteer and found herself “immersed in mutual love and respect, joy, personal storytelling, worship, earnest faith, energizing conversations.” She was pleasantly surprised several years later to be invited to serve on the Bridgefolk board. “What a gift to be part of Bridgefolk’s ongoing growth in love, understanding, compassion, and relational peacemaking as we ‘proceed through friendship.’ I look forward to the Spirit’s winsome guiding as we continue to watch and listen for what is next. May we find—and spread—more healing and transformation as we continue to embrace one another on the bridge.”
Biermaier’s participation in Bridgefolk began when her good friend and fellow Benedictine sister Theresa Schumacher joined the Bridgefolk board. “Becoming part of Bridgefolk gave me another opportunity of ‘lifelong learning.’ I wanted to learn more about the Mennonite-Catholic relationship—the peace-loving, sacramental emphasis given within each church’s perspective. I look forward to continuing this search as I take on this new role with the board.”
22 years in Bridgefolk:
John Klassen OSB reflects
By John Klassen OSB
Catholic co-chair of the board, 2002-2024
As a “grassroots dialogue” between Mennonites and Roman Catholics, Bridgefolk began in a classic Benedictine way. It started small. There were a number of creative energies behind it. In the first place there was an amazing group of 25 people who gathered at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania in August 1999.
Some of these were couples in so-called “mixed marriages,” a Mennonite and a Catholic who had married. A number were persons who sought deepened spirituality or commitment to peacemaking in the other’s tradition. During the weekend, each person shared their story. Because of the striking differences between these two religious traditions, their stories carried grace as well as pain. No theologizing, no hypotheticals, simply speaking in the first person. When we speak of Bridgefolk as a grassroots dialogue, this is what we mean: close to the ground, close to human experience, but shot through with profound theological reflection and a deep love for the breadth and depth of these two traditions.
A second major impulse for Bridgefolk came from the success of the first international dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics. Working across a five-year period (1998-2003), six Mennonite and six Roman Catholic leaders drafted and wrote a report named “Called Together to Be Peacemakers.” These were theologians, church historians, and scripture scholars, who listened deeply and well to each other. What distinguishes this work from almost all other ecumenical efforts within the Catholic environment is that no previous ecumenical work between Mennonites and Catholics had been done at the national level. The report itself is a fine piece of thoughtful work in that it faces significant differences in the interpretation of church history, the stance towards infant baptism, and the authorization of ministers within the respective church. The authors also pointed to further work that needed to be done, for example, a study of the violence against Mennonites throughout their history because of ecclesiology and their refusal to be drafted into an army.
A third crucial ingredient in the founding of Bridgefolk was the presence of a core group of passionate, committed leaders who were willing to invest time and energy to the evolution of this idea. These included Gerald Schlabach, Ivan and Lois Kauffman, Marlene and Stanley Kropf, Weldon Nisly, William Skudlarek, Margaret O’Gara, and myself. How to embody the work of peacemaking and the mutual exchange of gifts between Mennonites and Catholics in a way that grew out of those who came together? The group decided to start by hosting a summer conference at Saint John’s Abbey in 2002. There were many topics and speakers and we focused explicit attention to building relationships, simply building trust. This developed into a series of summer conferences that always included worship, praying and singing from both traditions, sharing the reading of Scripture, and giving space for informational questions.
After three summer conferences at Saint John’s, the leadership group was convinced that the fourth conference needed to be in a Mennonite setting. Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA, stepped forward to host the conference. This move began a pattern of alternating the conference between Catholic and Mennonite locations. This significant move embodied having a conversation between two real partners and giving each other a feel for each other’s unspoken and unarticulated traditions. Later on, the board invited a sister from Saint Benedict’s Monastery in Minnesota and the community has become a Catholic host for the conference (2012). Finally, in 2013 we had our first conference hosted by Canadian Mennonites, at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ontario.
As a Bridgefolk group we danced around the question of shared Eucharist for many years. At the outset of these comments, let me observe that there is no standard Catholic believer in Eucharist and probably no such Mennonite creature either. Eucharistic faith is deeply personal. However, there are significant differences between Catholics and Mennonites and the ritual by which we celebrate Eucharist. The Roman Catholic rite is well defined and structured; one can go across the Catholic world from country to country, in different languages, and encounter a fundamentally similar liturgical experience. Within Mennonite churches, even though there has been significant attention to liturgical renewal and retrieval within the communion, there is an enormous variation across local churches.
For two years running (2012-2013), we created a “double Eucharist,” with a unified Liturgy of the Word and Eucharistic prayer and institution narrative from each tradition. This liturgy required an enormous effort in its preparation and the gathered assembly also needed to be prepared for what was going to unfold. The first year we did this really well. The second year, not so well, because we had enough new participants who did not have the deep background for this liturgical expression and were left profoundly puzzled by the complexity. Like many good scientific experiments, this one failed, but we learned a lot from it!
As a result, the board charged Professor Mary Schertz and me to create a liturgical frame for foot washing. As is well known, in John’s gospel, chapter 13, where we would expect to find an account of Jesus handing the Eucharist to his disciples, instead he washed their feet. We created a Liturgy of the Word with opening prayers, and a major prayer modeled after a eucharistic prayer which includes an institution rite, an epiclesis, and anamnesis. Finally, we added an agape meal with formal prayers and scripture that echoed eucharistic language from the early centuries. We have found that this foot washing / agape rite has served us well as a body because we have freedom to choose preachers and presiders, men or women, from either tradition.
This experience of taking an existing rite and shaping it for our specific purposes brought us to a fundamental insight for the work of mutual exchange. In formal dialogues, there tends to be little formal prayer and liturgical experience because it is usually those elements that are contested and for which ecumenical agreement does not yet exist. As Bridgefolk, we found it essential to create and shape some existing liturgical experiences to help us celebrate our being together. For example, from the very beginning we sang hymns together, from both of our traditions. When we explored the meaning of the “communion of saints” we discovered that while we have a very different theology of intercession, both of our traditions have an overlap of reverence for martyrs in our respective church. Thus, we created a “litany of martyrs and holy ones,” which integrates men and women martyrs and which we routinely sing together at some stage of our conferences.
I must include some comments about Ivan and Lois Kauffman and their novel experiment in founding the Michael Sattler House at the edge of the property of Saint John’s Abbey. This unique experiment in offering hospitality to those who needed a place for prayer, resting, and gathering their wits was fittingly named after the Benedictine prior (second in command) of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Germany in the 16th century (1490-1527). Sattler left the community (1525) and became a theological leader in the early Anabaptist movement. He and his wife Margaretha were martyred in 1527. My minds reels at the collection of delightful ironies present in the witness of hospitality provided by Ivan and Lois in memory of Michael Sattler. I enjoyed many a rich conversation and refreshment in this place of encounter and nourishment.
While conferences in the first fifteen years or so focused on specific elements in our shared Christian tradition such as baptism, Eucharist, prayer and discipleship, and ordained ministry, especially as these relate to peacemaking, in the past four conferences we have focused our attention on the way we as specific Christian communities have responded to issues of social injustice such as the evil of racism and the thorny issues around land, settlers, and indigenous peoples. This focus is not without tension in relationship to Bridgefolk’s founding mission but as abbot of Saint John’s Abbey until January 7, 2024, I personally benefitted hugely from the presentations and discussions at all these conferences. Those who have been involved with Bridgefolk over the past twenty-two years would probably cite different key moments along the way.
This short essay is not meant to be a history but rather a reflective essay from an outgoing co-chair of the Bridgefolk board. My term as abbot overlapped the founding of this grassroots effort in what has indeed been an ecumenical exchange of gifts.
Abbot John Klassen retires;
Sr. Ann Marie Biermaier new Bridgefolk co-chair
Abbot John Klassen OSB has retired from his leadership of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota after 23 years of leadership. As Abbot John enters retirement he expects to stay involved with Bridgefolk but is stepping back from his leadership role there as well.
Sr. Ann Marie Biermaier OSB of neighboring St. Benedict’s Monastery has agreed to replace Klassen as Bridgefolk’s Catholic co-chair.
In 2001, only a few months into his service as abbot, Klassen invited Bridgefolk to make the abbey its home. As Bridgefolk organized itself in the following year, he became Bridgefolk’s Catholic co-chair, a role that he enthusiastically continued until now.
Sister Biermaier is director of the Studium program for visiting scholars at St. Benedict’s Monastery and is on the board of the College of St. Benedict. She has participated in Bridgefolk for many years and joined the board in the Spring of 2023.
Klassen retired at midnight on January 7 as he approached his 75th birthday. Having begun a discernment process upon the announcement of his retirement months earlier, the monks of Saint John’s Abbey began meeting on January 8 to select their new abbot. On January 9, they selected Fr. Douglas Mullins to be the 11th abbot of the community. To the surprise of all present, the community required only a single ballot to reach its decision, according to Fr. Eric Hollas.
Board profile: Gilbert Detillieux
Gilbert Detillieux started attending Bridgefolk conferences in 2013, when it was hosted by Conrad Grebel College in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He and his wife, Laura Funk, had been hearing about Bridgefolk almost since they started dating in 2005. He being Roman Catholic and she Mennonite, Bridgefolk drew their attention. Gilbert’s interest in ecumenism predated his meeting Laura, so the ecumenical nature of Bridgefolk appealed to him. What won both of them over, however, was the warm welcome they received at their first conference, and the network of like-minded friends they quickly formed.
Abbot John Klassen invited Gilbert to join the board in 2017, and he has served since then. Attending board meetings and annual conferences has helped deepen and solidify Bridgefolk friendships. It also brought additional responsibilities, small at first, and then a very big one: helping to plan the 2019 conference, which was hosted by Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg—only the second Bridgefolk conference held in Canada.
Gilbert and his wife Laura worked as a team to organize the conference, together with a local planning committee. They invited Sr. Eva Solomon CSJ to be the Roman Catholic keynote speaker, and Steve Heinrichs the Mennonite keynote. Sr. Solomon brought a wealth of knowledge from her Anishinabe (Ojibway) background, and Heinrichs was at the time director of Indigenous-Settler Relations for Mennonite Church Canada. A panel discussion provided additional Roman Catholic, Mennonite, and indigenous perspectives. The conference opened with the staging of the play Discovery: A Comic Lament, which was both entertaining and thought-provoking. The planning group was grateful for the participation of several indigenous attendees, mostly affiliated with St. Kateri Tekakwitha Indigenous Catholic Church in Winnipeg. Despite the hectic and stressful nature of conference planning, Gilbert found it very rewarding and a highlight of his board involvement to date.
Gilbert considers his participation on the board both a pleasure and privilege. He misses those who have transitioned off the board during his tenure but has been happy to learn to know new board members, appreciating the greater diversity of voices and perspectives that new board members have brought.
Videos from Bridgefolk 2022 now available online
Videos from the 2022 Bridgefolk conference, “Standing at the Crossroads” are now available online at Bridgefolk’s website. The conference “stood at the crossroads” in two ways: It offered the opportunity to look back in gratitude and forward as participants discerned a future path for Mennonite-Catholic dialogue and peacemaking.
Additionally, the conference continued the ongoing exploration of what it means for Mennonites and Catholics who seek a Just Peace to address issues of racial justice, which it began at its 2018 Conference. In particular, Bridgefolk sought to engage with indigenous communities, acknowledging the legacy of injustice and harm done by the historic removal of indigenous communities from traditional homelands by European settlers and the forced attendance of indigenous children at residential schools. The conference featured stories, including indigenous voices, of this work of repair and healing at the institutional, community, and personal levels.
We invite you to linger prayerfully at the crossroads by sharing videos of the conference sessions in parish or congregational settings and discussing how you and your community are called to respond.
Videos from five conference sessions are available on the 2022 conference website, along with the discussion questions used at the conference. Click here to visit.
Why we “proceed through friendship”
It was 2003 and Bridgefolk had publicly launched, the summer before, with its first annual conference. Within our founding circle we were aware of the worldwide Sant’Egidio movement based in Rome. Sant’Egidio is a lay-led, Vatican-approved, “ecclesial movement” that has been active in peacemaking and solidarity with the poor since the 1960s. It gained international attention when it helped mediate an end to a 16-year civil war in Mozambique in 1992. As Mennonites and Catholics looking for models of how to combine the best of our traditions, Bridgefolk leaders felt great affinity for Sant’Egidio.
Following the Mozambique peace agreement, the Sant’Egidio community in Rome had sent a married couple, Paola Piscitelli and Andrea Bartoli, to New York to monitor United Nations compliance with the accord, while encouraging new Sant’Egidio chapters in the United States. When I learned that Andrea would be visiting my campus in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I jumped at a chance to meet him. We shared professional and vocational interests in international peacemaking, but what I really wanted to do was pick his brain about this hybrid ecclesiological category of “ecclesial movements” – officially recognized in the Catholic Church yet grassroots and participatory like Mennonites.
“Proceed through friendship.” That was Andrea’s response. As we took a stroll around my university, I wanted to talk about canon law and historical precedents and ecclesiology. As a co-founder and then-co-chair of Bridgefolk, I hoped to map out some kind of master plan for Bridgefolk participants like me who wanted somehow to identify as both Mennonite and Catholic. Instead, simply, “Proceed through friendship.”
Andrea’s counsel reflected Sant’Egidio’s sense of its own charism or spiritual gift. The movement sees friendship as key to its own bridgebuilding through service to the poor, peace-building, and prayer (see here and here). In turn, both Andrea’s counsel and Sant’Egidio’s charism surely reflect the Italian culture in which Sant’Egidio was formed as well. Though he didn’t say so, I suspect that Andrea found my American preoccupation with planning and projects bemusing. Instead, he was gently nudging me toward a more relational – indeed a more organic – approach. As a theologian and Christian ethicist, I should have recognized this already; friends of mine have placed friendship at the very center of the Christian life.
After I shared Andrea’s counsel with other Bridgefolk leaders, “proceed through friendship” quickly became a motto of our own. We didn’t have to solve everything doctrinally or structurally. We weren’t going to anyway – that should have been obvious – but the motto helped us relax.
Theologians and practitioners of interreligious and ecumenical (or interchurch) dialogue emphasize that dialogue can and should happen in multiple ways. In the standard list of different types of interreligious dialogue, the “dialogue of theological exchange” is only one. “Dialogue of religious experience” happens as we share prayers, spiritual practices, and life stories without expectation of conversion. “Dialogue of action” happens as we work together for the common good through service, peacemaking, and mobilization for justice. And then there is the simple and basic “dialogue of everyday life” in which people of different faiths learn to know and trust one another as neighbors. And friends. The counsel to proceed through friendship has guided Bridgefolk intuitively into all four forms of dialogue.
This is not to say that Bridgefolk has achieved nothing more concrete than warm fuzzies and good vibes. Through the Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquium, Bridgefolk offered resources to the international bilateral dialogue between representatives of Mennonite World Conference and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity – then helped disseminate its findings. Even while strengthen friendships, Bridgefolk’s annual conferences have explored tough issues, from obstacles to sharing Eucharist to racial injustice and land reparation. Some of these have led to real breakthroughs, as with Bridgefolk’s development of a Mennonite-Catholic liturgy of footwashing to celebrate the unity we have come to experience despite obstacles to intercommunion. A case could be made that Bridgefolk has been freer to contribute creatively both to the international dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics, and to the wider ecumenical movement, precisely because it has depended on friendship not on an official mandate.
Friendship can devolve into insularity and cliquishness, of course. As the Bridgefolk movement moves into its third decade, this is a danger that will require self-awareness to avoid. When old friends at a party greet each other with warm bear hugs, they do well to keep their eyes open for newcomers hanging back shyly in the corners and draw them into conversation too. When conversation turns to reminiscing, old friends should work backstories into their stories, in order to initiate rather than exclude.
When a “friend group” is mindful of such dangers, however, friendship can remain invitational. Indeed, in a break-out session at Bridgefolk’s most recent conference, the moderator asked how participants had gotten involved in the movement, and many said that a friend had simply invited them. So long as the accent in “proceed through friendship” is as much on invitation to interested newcomers as on old timers sharing old times, friendship can be its own antidote to insularity.
Over the years, proceeding through friendship has been a way for Bridgefolk to expand its network more through word of mouth than through marketing itself. The 20-year history of Bridgefolk has coincided with the rise of social media as a way to maintain virtual communities and friendships – insofar as any virtual friendship can really be deep and authentic. Like many movements and organizations Bridgefolk has made use of social media as a tool to stay connected. But we have not depended on social media to advertise ourselves and grow thereby. Given all the toxicity that has gotten baked into social media over the last 20 years – religious social media as much as political – that may be for the best.
Some of us in Bridgefolk still dream of a day when it might be possible to find a canonical model like “ecclesial movement” that would make it possible to formally identify simultaneously as Mennonite and Catholic. Many of us long for a day when some form of intercommunion or Eucharistic recognition becomes possible. Even if such hopes only ever find fulfillment beyond our lifetimes, we can hope to be preparing the way now.
But ecclesial movements, like religious orders, only have reason to exist if they embody and channel a charism – a spiritual gift that God has called them to share in a particular way. In friendship, Sant’Egidio was willing to share its charism of friendship with Bridgefolk. So whatever else comes from Bridgefolk’s own way of proceeding through friendship, we will hold on to our own charism in the only way that anyone holds on to God’s gifts – by sharing and them giving away.
Gerald W. Schlabach
September 2022
Joetta Handrich Schlabach appointed
Bridgefolk director
The Board of Bridgefolk is delighted to introduce Joetta Handrich Schlabach as the newly-appointed Executive Director of Bridgefolk. The Board confirmed Joetta’s appointment at their meeting in early March 2022.
Joetta retired in 2018, following eleven years of pastoral ministry at Faith Mennonite Church in Minneapolis, MN. Previously she worked as a program coordinator at the University of Notre Dame, Bluffton (OH) University, and at St. Catherine University (MN), where she completed an MA in Theology and Certificate in Pastoral Ministry.
Together with her husband Gerald Schlabach, Joetta served with Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua and Honduras in the 1980s. She is the author of Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook. Since retiring, Joetta and Gerald divide their time between Grand Marais, MI, where she grew up, and Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, where Gerald developed friendships during 20 years of taking students to Guatemala. Joetta also serves as a long-term volunteer with Mennonite Disaster Service.
Joetta has been an active participant in Bridgefolk events since its inception, giving presentations at two of the annual conferences. Her sermon, “Communion and Peace” is included in the Bridgefolk website anthology We Are Each Other’s Bread and Wine.
“We look forward to Joetta’s leadership and contribution to the work and vision of Bridgefolk as we enter the third decade of the organization’s existence,” comments Bridgefolk co-chair Muriel Bechtel. “We hope all Bridgefolk participants will join us in welcoming her to her new role.”
Joetta can be contacted at coordinator@bridgefolk.net.
Hildegard of Bingen: A Model of Mennonite-Catholic Bridging
Bridgefolk participant Julia Smucker has jut published an article in U.S. Catholic magazine on ways that the 12th-century abbess, mystic, and musician has been “a companion on my meandering journey” of faith. Julia writes:
Hildegard’s ambiguity makes her an appropriate guide on my own journey, which has been characterized by in-betweenness and pilgrimage in various ways, most recently as I brought my Mennonite heritage into communion with the Catholic Church. Hildegard’s honest self-awareness and genius for integrating ideas helped show me the possibility of living such a duality and the contribution it may yet make in this church I now call home. Her example helps me to articulate what I hope I am also becoming: a complex woman of conviction and questions, reconciling differences and pointing to the connectedness of all things.
The appears in the February 2012 issue of U.S. Catholic (pages 63-64) or online by clicking here.