After a six-year hiatus, a group of women religious are taking their Nuns on the Bus election education campaign to the streets of America ahead of the US presidential election in November. Source: Global Sisters Report.
They have been down this road before, starting in 2012, and have since made six other cross-country treks and a virtual tour in 2020 during the pandemic.
Each year’s bus ride has had specific themes, but the recurring message has been to encourage people to vote and think about all the issues at stake in the elections, something that is highlighted at the rallies and town hall stops along the way.
What’s different about this year’s “Vote Our Future” tour, a project of the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, is that the riders are not all women religious, which is why this year’s tour is called “Nuns on the Bus and Friends.”
On the three different legs of this two-and-a-half-week journey – 20 stops from Philadelphia to San Francisco – the bus will be filled with a rotating group of 15 sisters and 15 advocacy representatives.
At the campaign’s first event in Philadelphia on Monday, dozens of speakers addressed the crowd while standing in front of the pale blue bus parked on the street near City Hall.
They urged the crowd to get out and vote as a sacred duty, and to be multi-issue voters looking at where candidates stand on immigration, child tax credits, climate change, housing, health care and racial justice.
Sr. Bridget Connor, a Grey Nun of the Sacred Heart, based in Philadelphia, who had been an educator for nearly 40 years, joked that the rally crowd included a lot of gray-haired nuns.
But she also acknowledged that the sisters see this work as “extremely important,” and then added that, more than that, “it’s essential”.
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Nuns on the Bus, with friends on board, kick off 2024 tour in Philly (By Carol Zimmerman, Global Sisters Report)
