Agnes Mary Mansour

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Agnes Mary Mansour (born April 10, 1931 in Detroit , Michigan , † December 17, 2004 in Farmington Hills , Michigan) was an American Roman Catholic theologian .

Life

Mansour came from a Lebanese Maronite immigrant family. She attended St. Charles High School in Detroit . Mansour studied medicine and chemistry at Mercy College , where she graduated in 1953. She entered the Religious Order of the Sisters of Mercy as a Roman Catholic nun . For further studies she went to Washington to the Catholic University of America , where she graduated in chemistry in 1958. She completed further studies in biochemistry at Georgetown University . She studied administration in the American Council on Education program at the University of Kentucky.

From 1971 she was president of the University of Detroit Mercy . She has taught Roman Catholic theology at Michigan State University and Wayne State University .

In the 1970s she became politically active and a member of the Democratic Party . In 1982 she ran in the Michigan Democratic primary, but lost just short to her competitor Sander M. Levin . The then Archbishop Edmund Casimir Szoka in Detroit supported Mansour's candidacy for political office in 1982. After the 1982 election, Democratic Governor James Blanchard made her director of the Michigan Department of Human Services (DSS), Michigan's largest state administrative agency. With this appointment, she became responsible for state health care in the state of Michigan and was responsible, among other things, through Medicare for public funds for abortions .

In this responsibility she got into an argument with her Archbishop Edmund Casimir Szokam, who demanded that she publicly reject abortions. In this dispute between her and the archbishop and abortion opponents, she was supported by her order and for justification she relied on the encyclical Ad Petri Cathedram .

As a result, Szokam issued a directive calling for Mansour to resign from her public office. There were demonstrations by hundreds of nuns of their order and some Roman Catholic priests against this action by the Archbishop. The protests were supported by the US organization National Coalition of American Nuns . Margaret Traxler , Roman Catholic nun of the Poor School Sisters of Notre Dame , sharply criticized the Archbishop. She was proposed as a Senator for the Michigan Senate on March 8, 1983 . Theresa Kane , head of the Religious Order of the Sisters of Mercy , has been invited to a formal hearing by the Vatican in the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life to reprimand you and your Order for supporting Mansour which you and your deputy Emily George opposed and continued to support Mansour's stance on the abortion debate. It was at that point that Mansour decided to leave your order to be free in her responsibilities as director of the Michigan Department of Health (DSS). After 30 years of membership in the order, she left the order in this dispute.

She then remained at the top of DSS as director until 1987. In 1984 she signed the A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion campaign that appeared in the New York Times .

After 1987, she served on the Mercy Health Services Special Initiative to the Poor in Michigan and founded the Poverty and Social Reform Institute (PSRI). In the following years she served on the supervisory boards of various organizations and companies, including PSRI, Sisters of Mercy Health Corporation, Women's Economic Club, Michigan Bell Telephone, National Bank of Detroit and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities . In 2004 she died of complications from breast cancer.

Prizes and awards (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Time: Religion: The Nun vs. the Archbishop, March 21, 1983
  2. ↑ NUN DEFIES ARCHBISHOP ON MEDICAID ABORTIONS In: The New York Times. March 8, 1983.
  3. ↑ a b Religion: Obey or Leave. on: time.com , March 23, 1983.
  4. ↑ Kenneth Briggs : Double Crossed: Covering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns. Random House Digital, ISBN 0-385-51636-3 , p. 171.
personal data
SURNAME Mansour, Agnes Mary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Roman Catholic theologian
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Detroit , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH December 17, 2004
Place of death Farmington Hills , Michigan