The Department of Religious Studies held the 15th annual Bernardin Lecture on Tuesday, in honor of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin — an American cardinal of the Catholic Church who served as Archbishop of Chicago until his death in 1996. This year’s speaker was religious leader, attorney, poet and public speaker Sister Simone Campbell.
Campbell works on Capitol Hill lobbying for changes in public policy, specifically in the areas of peace building, immigration reform, healthcare and economic justice. Campbell has also led three national speaking tours called "Nuns on the Bus," with the first tour in 2012.
Campbell began her discussion sharing the four processes that Pope Francis calls for in order to "weave the garment back together" or, in other words, to create unity — which included creating dialogue in communities about what really matters and giving up one’s desire to win in order to “let the hunger for unity prevail over conflict." The climax of Campbell’s lecture, however, involved audience participation in creating a human bar graph.
Each of the seven audience participants represented a different socioeconomic class, starting with the bottom 20 percent and ending with the top 1 percent, and were instructed to take a single step from the starting line for every 5 percent growth since 1980. With the bottom 20 percent having to take one step backwards and the top 1 percent taking 45 steps forward, Campbell gave the audience a visual representation of income disparities in the United States.
“The human bar graph took the visual to another level and really exhibited the discrepancy among incomes in our country,” fourth-year public relations student Lauren Harper said. “I knew income inequality is an issue in our country, but seeing it in that perspective was interesting.”
While the audience consisted of many professionals and religious affiliates, several students also attended. Some of the students were required to attend the lecture for various classes. However, by the end of the lecture they seemed pleased to be there.
“I thought [the lecture] was very interesting because it was a political conversation but coming with a faith background,” fourth-year marketing and management student Katie Vause said.
While Campbell spoke on serious and daunting issues relevant to our community today, she remained hopeful and optimistic throughout her speech — managing to inform her audience without discouraging them. During the lecture she made various jokes to lighten the mood and kept the audience laughing and engaged throughout.
“She has such a wonderful holy energy,” St. Joseph Catholic Church member Rebecca Hamby said of Campbell. “You can tell she is part of the body of Christ.”
To close her lecture, Campbell revealed her four "21st century virtues" to the audience — a play off of the four cardinal virtues, or principle moral values, recognized in Catholicism. She encouraged the audience to develop a modicum of joy and emphasized the importance of laughter.
She discussed the implementation of holy curiosity and sacred gossip in one’s life — the responsibility to seek out and share important information in one’s communities. Finally, Campbell left her intrigued and humbled audience with a call to action: Do your part for your community.
“I liked how in depth [Campbell] got with her ideas. She didn’t just give facts,” said fourth-year psychology student Kelsey Wood. “She also empowered people to make a change.”