Does Faith Breed Mediocrity?
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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.
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.
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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.”
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