Local sister in ‘Nuns on the Bus’
Tour of 13 states for social issues scheduled to hit both political conventions
Sister Ilaria Buonriposi has traveled the world to work with the disadvantaged over the past 30 years, ministering to prisoners in Spain, to the poor in the slums of Peru, to children in the violent streets of Colombia.
It has gratified her to do God’s work among the forgotten around the globe — that’s the mission, after all, of her international order of Catholic nuns, the Comboni Missionary Sisters — but she has never looked forward to a journey more than the one she’s about to take across the midwestern United States.
Buonriposi, 51, who lives and works at St. Matthew Catholic Church in Baltimore, is about to join the Nuns on The Bus, an annual initiative in which a group of Catholic sisters takes a tour of several states by bus, stopping in multiple places along the way to work with the needy and draw attention to social-justice causes.
Sisters who specialize in applying Catholic doctrine to societal problems are chosen from parishes across the country.
Buonriposi, a native of Florence, Italy, who has lived in Baltimore since 2009, is the first sister based in town to join the tour.
This year’s tour — the fifth — starts in Madison, Wis., on Monday, and will take a rotating roster of 18 nuns 2,400 miles through 13 states, finally rolling into Philadelphia on July 25.
Nine sisters will be riding at any given time in the lounge-style vehicle, which this year will stop in 23 cities, including St. Louis, Terre Haute, Ind., Rochester, N.Y., Concord, N.H., and Newark, N.J.
The bus will bear the tour’s 2016 theme, “Mend The Gaps,” in blue letters across a mural-sized map that displays the planned destinations.
It will bring the sisters to both national political conventions — the Republican gathering in Cleveland on July 18-21, and its Democratic counterpart in Philadelphia on July 25-28.
Each tour has focused on one issue related to social justice as the sisters view it. This year’s theme, “Mending the Gaps: Reweaving the Fabric of Society,” refers to what NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, the nonprofit that organizes the trips, views as the need to reduce the “widening gaps in income inequality in our nation” and develop a less hostile, more inclusive political atmosphere.
“At every stop, we will meet with Americans who are struggling,” the group’s promotional material for the tour says. “We will hear their stories and call on everyone running for office to listen as well, and to do everything in their power to mend the gap — to close the vast and growing economic and social divides that are weakening the fabric of our country.”
In every city, the nuns will hold a caucus with members of the public that explores seven issues NETWORK sees as crucial to mending such gaps: tax policy, living wages, family-friendly workplaces, voting rights, access to equitable health care, access to housing and immigration.
Each nun will be responsible for one issue, leading discussions, hearing stories and proposing solutions in that area.
Buonriposi’s is living wages — what NETWORK calls the right of working adults to be paid a fair wage.
In ministering to the poor, she says, she has seen time and time again that men and women who must hold down several jobs have little chance to spend time with their families, beginning a cycle of neglect that can have disastrous consequences.
Buonriposi says that while the nuns on the tour address issues often framed in political terms, their approach is moral in nature, not political. “Pope Francis tells us to appeal to the dignity of the individual human beings, and that’s our perspective,” she says.
Sister Simone Campbell of Washington, D.C., the executive director of NETWORK, helped launch the Nuns on the Bus program in 2012, after a Vatican commission under Pope Benedict XVI issued a report criticizing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that represents the majority of the 57,000 nuns in the United States.
The report cited NETWORK as being a negative influence on the group, specifically because it so strongly emphasizes social-justice issues at the expense of the Vatican’s favored issues at the time — abortion and same-sex marriage.
After consulting colleagues in prayer, Campbell says, NETWORK developed the bus-tour idea, which has drawn significant media attention over the years and succeeded far beyond their expectations.