“I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it,” said Bill Monaghan, a St. Raphael/St. Joseph parishioner who in the early 1990s visited Stang’s community and the Springfield church’s sister parish of St. Lucy’s near the Trans-Amazon Highway.
Monaghan said the nun who managed to be “really just an energetic, very positive person” even in those primitive living conditions was aware of the danger she faced.
“I was more outraged” than she was, Monaghan said. “She just saw that as an inevitable consequence” of her work.
Shelly Kabbes, a parishioner who visited Stang in Anapu in 1994, said “there were a lot of things I didn’t know to be afraid of.”
The social setting was so different that when she told Sister Dorothy she’d “met the dude that wrote this book,” Sister Dorothy replied, “Oh, honey, that’s the bishop.”
The political setting also was radically different.
In a part of Brazil where the rule of law and police protection do not exist — and where families were threatened with murder and burned out of their homes — “it’s really about the people knowing that if they want something to change, they have to come together,” Kabbes said.
Stang “would listen to the people and help them to take whatever their issues were or their concerns were and put it to action,” Kabbes added.
“Ultimately, she knew it was very dangerous.”
Monaghan said the force of Stang’s personality and her contacts with the outside world had the added effect of shining a light on the struggles there.
“People don’t tend to notice issues,” Monaghan said, “but they’ll follow a very strong personality.”
He said he sees her murder as a calculated attempt to “kill the spotlight.”
Parishioner Patricia Wickham, who learned Portuguese so that she could translate messages from the sister parish in Anapu, described Stang as “absolutely passionate” about two related issues: the people and the Amazon itself.
Lou Ann Horstman said the issues involve “callousness not only to the people but to the planet” — both regarding what Horstman calls “that lack of regard for sacredness.”
Stang also had a depth of commitment.
Said Kabbes: “She loved something else more than herself. And you don’t find that a lot.”
Without detracting from Sister Dorothy’s sacrifice, St. Raphael/St. Joseph Deacon Norm Horstman underscores Stang’s work as of primary import.
“Our overall concern is with what the people are experiencing,” he said. “And that’s why they killed Dorothy, because she stood with them.”
The work continues today with a piglet project to help the village increase its income and viability.
Lou Ann Hortsman said one other remarkable thing about Stang.
Among Americans “with the ability to help more than we do,” Horstman said Stang nonetheless remained “without resentment, without judgment and without anger.”
Kabbes said she wonders the extent to which Stang saw even her killers as being caught up in the powerful forces that bore down on her.
In that context, Stang’s death on a muddy road in Brazil might not be so much personal as business: Her killers doing their business and Stang doing what she believed to be God’s.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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