Why I Honor the True Catholic Church

Nicholas Kristof didn't go to Sudan to pontificate about all that's wrong with the Catholic Church, and instead, unexpectedly, he ran into all that's right with it. Here, in the midst of grinding poverty, "are lowly nuns and priest—notable not for the grandeur of their vestments but for the grandness of their compassion," he writes. "It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church."

Father Michael Barton runs a school for kids who wouldn't have one otherwise—through civil war, prison, beatings, and disease. Or Sister Cathy Arata, who teaches farming and midwifery and "worries sometimes that if Jesus returned he would say, 'Oh, they got it all wrong!' " Either "would make a great pope," Kristof writes in the New York Times. "And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church." (More Nicholas Kristof stories.)