Vatican switchboard sees a human touch as the answer

[MoBeck]

latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-phonenuns28-2008oct28,0,4468154.story?track=rss

Vatican switchboard sees a human touch as the answer

For 50 years, callers to the Holy See have found the sweet voice of a nun at the other end of the line. The sisters field half a million calls a year from the friendly, the loud, the troubled.

   			 		 		Reporting from Vatican City -- Telecommunications technology of the early 21st century has produced a phenomenon known as "phone hell": an audio inferno where callers are tormented either by mechanized voices or human ones with less soul than the machines.

But the opposite exists. It can be found here in a simply furnished second-floor room where multilingual nuns in gray habits answer phones with an unfailingly sweet-voiced greeting: “Pronto, Vaticano” (Hello, Vatican).

For 50 years, the nuns of the order of the Sister Disciples of the Divine Master have operated the Vatican switchboard. They are the gatekeepers of the Holy See.

The sisters field half a million calls a year from all over the world. They assist the friendly, the loud, the troubled. They help the faithful negotiate a labyrinthine Roman Catholic Church bureaucracy whose instincts tend toward discretion, if not mystery.

Sister Maria Clara, the 55-year-old chief operator, is gentle and bespectacled, her Italian tinged with her native Korean. After 11 years on the switchboard, she sees her job as a blessed calling.

 "People ask us: 'So you really work on Christmas? You work on Easter?' " she said. "Of course we do. The church is a mystic body. I feel that we are the heart of the church. And the heart never stops."

Sister Maria Grazia, 71, became an operator 14 years ago after serving as a missionary in Africa. The robust, jolly Italian speaks English, Spanish, French and Korean and gets by in other languages too. Most of her calls come from Asia, Africa and the Americas. And she talks to quite a few people who say they need an exorcist.

. . .

“It’s hard to tell whether they are psychologically ill, whether they are in the grip of a sect or whether it is something else,” she said.

At least once a day, someone insists on speaking, urgently and directly, with Pope Benedict XVI himself. The sisters respond with tact and prudence. They never say an outright “No.”

You can also read this story on Fr. Z’s blog with his comments