Mercy Sister Christian Molidor began her service at Catholic Near East Welfare Association long before her emails to donors, excerpted here. In her self-deprecating style, she would say she joined CNEWA before the alphabet was invented. She arrived one day in 1984. Msgr. John Nolan, then the head of CNEWA, had no idea what to do with the Illinois native, so he sent her “packing.”

She went to India, where she visited orphans, catechists, priests, senior citizens, the handicapped and her beloved religious sisters. She helped cook and clean. She did the wash and hung the laundry. And she photographed. She took thousands of pictures of smiling children, sisters laughing and patients praying. She collected their stories, wrote them down, squirreled them away in her head and shared them for decades.

It would be the first of many trips through CNEWA’s world. In her photographs, Christian documented children exhausted by decades of conflict in the Middle East, animated Ethiopian seminarians and Eritrean sisters, and exuberant villagers in southern India.

Christian held several positions at CNEWA — from communications director to associate secretary general to special assistant to the president — but she loved most taking the portraits of the people she loved to serve.

Christian’s love for and faith in Jesus, and his presence in the lowly, the poor and the marginalized, fueled her being. And she shared this love and faith with everyone she encountered. Everyone!