From The New York Times:
The Norbertine Canonesses, an order of Roman Catholic nuns in the Tehachapi Mountains of California, are famous for their selflessness. They sleep for an hour or two before their alarm goes off at 11:45 p.m. every night. They climb out of bed, pull habits over their hair and walk to a cold chapel for the first of their seven daily prayers. They wait in the pews, quiet, for midnight to arrive. When it comes, they begin to chant and pray for anyone who may need help — with insomnia, addiction or a crying newborn.
“Just as the mother rises in the middle of the night, so we rise,” the leader, Mother Mary Oda, told me. That night, I rose with them. I’d come to visit the nuns because they had gone viral. New mothers online had been moved that someone, somewhere, would get up each night to feel their pain. The nuns do this even as empathy has become politicized. Prominent conservatives have called it toxic and a threat to Christian values. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Elon Musk told Joe Rogan. Some progressives, in turn, have said empathy breeds complacency — too much feeling, not enough action.