Not a bad ministry at all

A few months ago, this Dominican sister in LA was mentioned in some story as an example of the various isn’t-that-nice ministries that today’s religious are involved in. She runs a tattoo removal parlor.
Now I have to admit this job description sounds strange, and the usual cynical impulse out here in blogdom is to write her off as another case of a religious sister doing a secular job that’s really in the domain of lay people. Let’s resist the impulse this time.
This is a pretty admirable work she’s doing, getting doctors to donate their services, getting the clients to do some community service in exchange for the free cleanup job they’re receiving. When the plan all comes together, she’s helping ex-gang guys, who are rejecting the glamor of evil and refusing to be mastered by it, to put their conversion away from evil into a concrete form, by removing the marks that used to reinforce them in lives of crime.
We could use something like that around here in Boston: a cashier at Wendy’s on Route 9 has “thug life” in a column of capital letters down his forearm, and he probably doesn’t have $2K to pay for his own cleanup.