Does Faith Breed Mediocrity?
Among the interesting people I covered as medical/science writer for The Des Moines Register was Patricia Clare Sullivan, alias “Attila the Nun.”
Her obituary was in the newspaper recently. She died in Florida at age 89, having left the Sisters of Mercy of Omaha about the time she retired as president and CEO of Mercy Hospital in 1993.
I don’t know who gave her the alias “Attila,” but I personally experienced two sides of her: the tough business person – which undoubtedly accounts for the alias – and the gentle, compassionate nun who, even as CEO, regularly visited patients. According to the obituary, she was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Leadership Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. She also was inducted into the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame.
What is certain is that she was an accomplished, serious business person while being a person of faith. And she wasn’t alone in this respect. Another remarkable woman whom I covered was Sister Catherine Dunn, who retired in 2006 from the presidency of Clarke University (formerly Clarke College) in Dubuque. She was a member of the board of directors of several companies and organizations and was the first female chairperson of the Iowa Transportation Commission.
Among the Few Female CEOs
Either of these women, I’m convinced, could have run just about any major corporation. In fact, it occurred to me back in the 1980s that there were about six Catholic hospitals in Iowa, all of which were headed by nuns who were at the time among the few female heads of major corporate employers. That’s interesting for a church that many consider to be less than enthusiastic about the role of women in leadership.
The point of this blog is that the faith of these women, and of millions of other people, didn’t get in the way of their extraordinary contributions to society and human progress. Indeed, history is filled with the accomplishments of religious people in the “secular” world.
Contributed Greatly to Human Progress
Apart from people like Jesus, who are in a category by themselves, many people of faith have contributed greatly to human progress. They include Galileo, Michelangelo, J.S. Bach, Abraham Lincoln, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and scientists like Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, and Gregor Mendel.
Ok, you might say, but these are people who have been dead a long time. And they lived in a time when the natural world couldn’t be explained without God. Things have changed. Faith and modernity don’t mix.
Then how about Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and former director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute; Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest who was first to propose the Big Bang theory; Wernher von Braun, one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration; William G. Pollard, Anglican priest who worked on the Manhattan Project and for years served as the executive director of Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies; John Gurdon, co-winner of a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and Antony Hewish, British astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics?
Some people believe that because religion professes belief in the afterlife, believers aren’t concerned about excelling in this one – in the sciences, the arts, business and technology, for instance. The lists of people above show that’s not true.
Faith Means Doing Your Best
But this doesn’t just apply to famous people. Faith should not breed mediocrity. People searching for God should know that in the Christian tradition, at least, faith means doing your best to make the world into God’s image. Here’s what “The Church in the Modern World,” a document of the Second Vatican Council – the three-year meeting of Catholic bishops held in the early 1960’s – has to say on the subject.
“For while providing the substance of life for themselves and their families, men and women are performing their activities in a way which appropriately benefits society. They can justly consider that by their labor they are unfolding the Creator’s work … and are contributing by their personal industry to the realization in history of the divine plan.
“Hence it is clear that (people) are not deterred by the Christian message from building up the world, or impelled to neglect the welfare of their fellows, but that they are rather more stringently bound to do these very things.”
