By Dan Gilgoff, CNN.com Religion Editor
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (CNN) – Sister Simone Campbell will get what may be the biggest media platform of her life on Wednesday night, when she addresses the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. But the Catholic nun already has plenty of star power.
Walking around Charlotte this week, Campbell was repeatedly stopped by fans who wanted to pose for pictures.
They had seen her on “the Colbert Report,” pushing back on the Vatican’s crackdown on American nuns, or read about the “nuns on the bus” tour that Simone organized to decry Rep. Paul Ryan’s federal budget proposal.
“One woman came up to me and said ‘my husband loves you; I’d be jealous if you weren’t a nun,’ ” Campbell, 66, said Tuesday night.
By asking her to speak at their convention, the Democrats appear keen to capitalize on Campbell’s budding celebrity at a moment when the official Roman Catholic Church has been critical of the Obama administration, claiming that it is infringing on religious liberty.
And at a convention that is revolving largely around an alleged GOP-led “war on women,” Campbell is a poignant feminist symbol. She has stood up to the Vatican’s criticisms of American nuns for what the church says is their fixation on progressive advocacy at the expense of promoting socially conservative positions.
“We’re certainly oriented toward the needs of women and responding to their needs,” she told Colbert in June, defending the nuns against the Vatican. “If that’s radical, I guess we are.”
But Campbell isn’t taking marching orders from the Democratic Party, either.
When party officials asked her to speak in Charlotte, she made it plain she’d do it only if she could give voice to her anti-abortion views.
And when Democratic handlers revised a draft of her speech in a way that sounded too political to her, she told them she was happy to give her speaking slot to someone else.
The handlers were more than happy to work with her to revise the revisions.
Campbell, who has a law degree from the University of California, Davis, has always been political. Her parents took her the Democratic convention in Los Angeles to see John F. Kennedy.
But she says her work has always been fueled by a passion for helping the poor. When she’s not giving interviews and staging bus tours, she works as executive director of Network, a Washington-based group that describes itself as a “Catholic social justice lobby.”
In 2010, the organization played an important role in promoting President Obama’s health care act at a time when the Roman Catholic Church opposed the legislation. The church alleged that the Affordable Care Act used federal funds to cover abortion (Democrats deny that claim).
Campbell organized a letter of support for the Affordable Care Act that was signed by dozens of leaders from women’s religious orders, giving the White House and Democrats political cover in the face of attacks from conservative religious groups.
At a celebration after the signing ceremony for the law, Obama thanked Campbell for her help: “He gave me a big kiss and said I was a tipping point.”
Campbell, who joined a religious order after her freshman year at college, says her support for Obamacare grew out of a lifelong concern for the poor.
“I remember as a kid, driving back from visiting relatives in Colorado and going through Indian reservations,” she said. “I would cry because it was so hard to see such poor people. Something touched me.”
She got her J.D. with an eye toward advocating for pro-poor public policy but wound up hanging a shingle in Oakland, California, helping the working poor on family law cases.
“For me, it was about being the gospel and living like Jesus did,” she said. “Following folks who were suffering and at the margins, struggling hard to make ends meet. I was like a parish for the unchurched.”
Campbell later traveled the world as the general director of her religious order, the Sisters of Social Service, founded in the 1920s by Hungary’s first female member of parliament.
At Network, Campbell’s proudest accomplishment is helping pass Obamacare. But she also boasts of becoming an early thorn in the side of Paul Ryan, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s running mate, by organizing the “nuns on the bus tour” in May.
The nine-state trip from Iowa to Washington was aimed at attacking the federal budget Ryan drew up as the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
The Ryan plan, in Campbell’s view, “set up this total undermining of government services as a way for there to be additional tax cuts for the wealthy.”
America’s Catholic bishops also criticized Ryan’s budget. But weeks before the nuns on the bus tour, the Vatican issued a bruising assessment of many American nuns, saying they offered a platform for “radical feminism” and played down church teachings on abortion and gay marriage.
To some church watchers, the nuns on the bus tour represented a thumb in the eye of the assessment from Rome.
But Campbell, who is not formally a part of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the group singled out by the Vatican assessment, has not been shy about saying that the church hierarchy is out of touch with the church’s religious life.
“The shock made me numb at first, and then I was profoundly sad that my life as a woman religious and my commitment to serving the poor would be so denigrated by the leadership of our church,” Campbell said this year, responding to Vatican criticism of American nuns.
If that sounds a lot like Democratic rhetoric around a “war on women,” it means Campbell’s speech could be a hit at the DNC.
