BROWNSVILLE, Texas (RNS) — Sister Norma Pimentel remembers well the first time her new bishop joined the religious sisters in the Diocese of Brownsville at one of their gatherings.
He came into the kitchen where she was preparing plates of tamales, and “he begins doing what I’m doing,” recalled Pimentel, a Missionaries of Jesus sister who has gained an international profile for her work with migrants as the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
“I had never seen (that) from another bishop,” she told RNS in a Spanish interview on Dec. 12, explaining that a bishop would typically sit down and the sisters would serve him. “He doesn’t want to distinguish himself as special, just one among us,” said Pimentel, who also leads the women religious of the diocese.
For his part, Bishop Daniel Flores says that when Pimentel calls him and makes a request, like asking him to call another bishop to smooth the way for migrants leaving the diocese for another part of the country, his answer is: “Yes, Sister, I’ll do it.”
“My attitude as a bishop is if you have someone who knows what they’re doing, let them do it,” said Flores about the sister named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2020.
The relationship between Pimentel, dubbed by some media outlets as “the pope’s …