Grace

Before the donations, before the volunteers, before the outrage, there was SISTER NORMA PIMENTEL. For more than 30 years, shes been on the front lines of Americas immigration crisis, trying to restore human dignity to people who are often running for their lives.

- Marin Cogan

They say that God works in mysterious ways, that you find him in the most unexpected places. He found Norma Pimentel in a Pizza Hut. It was the mid-1970s, and Pimentel was living at home with her parents after graduating from college. The daughter of two Mexican immigrants, she was born in Brownsville, a border city deep in the tip of Texas, and grew up in an era when travel between the two countries was easy and unremarkable.

As a girl, Pimentel was drawn to sketching and painting, so she went to college to study fine arts. After getting her bachelor’s degree, she wanted to travel and work as an artist, but her father, an auto electrician who ran his own repair shop, had other plans. “My dad wasn’t really happy about letting me just go offand explore the world and discover myself and my profession,” she says. “He wanted me to stay home and one day get married and be a teacher, or something like that.”

That wasn’t the life Pimentel imagined for herself. So she decided to apply to graduate school, thinking she would study architecture. While she was waiting to hear back from the school she’d applied to, a friend reached out and said she was going to a prayer group. After the meeting, everyone was going to Pizza Hut.

Pimentel’s decision to join her proved pivotal. Before that day, Catholicism had really been more of her parents’ faith, not something she felt deeply in her own life. But through the prayer group, she started to experience God in more personal—and profoundly moving—ways. “Something happened, something changed in me, I guess,” she says. She became more and more involved in the church, until one day, her mom asked her a question she had been wondering herself: Are you going to become a nun, or what?