Meet The 91-Year-Old Nun Standing Up to JD Vance
As America's most notorious Catholic convert in power stays silent, a 91-year-old nun shows what living the Gospel really means.
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While JD Vance talks about faith, Sister JoAnn Persch lives it. Nearly two decades ago in suburban Chicago — on a 20-below-zero morning in January 2007 — Sister Persch and her fellow Sister of Mercy, the late Pat Murphy, showed up at Broadview detention facility for the first time.
A deportation lawyer had asked them to pray for immigrants being shipped out, and what they witnessed that dawn was heartbreaking: families being torn apart at the seams.
Shivering in the predawn dark, the two nuns looked at each other and made a pact: “We have to be here every week.”
And so they have — every Friday at 7:15 a.m., for 19 years straight, in rain, snow, ice, or blistering heat.
As she recounts for The Daily Beast, They began what Sister Persch calls a “hug ministry” outside the facility — comforting traumatized wives, husbands and children with a warm embrace when words fell short.
“Families were traumatized, and what could we say but just hold them and let them express their grief,” she remembers.
From day one, Persch and Murphy refused to take no for an answer.
When ICE guards told them they couldn’t enter to visit detainees, the sisters got to work.
