Letter by Letter, Keeping a Catholic Outpost Alive [View all]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/us/working-to-keep-a-catholic-outpost-alive.html?_r=0


Brother Norbert Karpfinger has witnessed the economic decline of East St. Louis, Ill.

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: March 22, 2013

EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — On a raw and windswept day in this forsaken place, as the rest of the world’s eyes turned to the cardinals assembling amid Vatican grandeur to select a new pope, Brother Norbert Karpfinger sat down to write a letter. It was late February, two weeks into Lent, a busy time for the correspondence that is his mission.

Each year, he writes hundreds of letters seeking donations for the Catholic Daycare center.
Eighty years old, more than a half-century in the Marianist order, Brother Norbert bent over the dining room table in the convent house next to a vacant lot that once held the St. Adalbert Church. Across the street, the Catholic Daycare center pulsed with life, young life.

The day care center is one of the handful of outposts of the Roman Catholic Church left in the city, where Catholic social teaching about service and the preferential option for the poor can still be enacted. That center was the subject every time Brother Norbert set pen to paper.

“Dear Kim,” he wrote, addressing a middle-age man who had been his student 40 years ago in Colorado. “As in recent years I write with the hope of support for this wonderful work of charity for little children. Please help this important place for little ones by sending a donation. God bless you and all those dear to you.”

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