Laura Sheahen.

I was standing in a Catholic church in Moscow with a few ecclesiastically inadequate years of Russian under my belt. The incomprehensible sermon was long past, and the handshake of peace was next. As people turned in the pews, I realized I had no idea how to say "Peace be with you." I resigned myself to smiling politely.

A woman reached out to me with a broad smile.

Mir vam.

In just a few ways, Russian is simpler than English. Mir is "peace"; vam means "to you." I not only understood the woman, I could repeat her words as I shook hands with the congregants around me.

As a linguistic victory, it was minor. But it brought home to me--as Mass in a far-off land always does--how catholic the Catholic church is. With parishes in rice paddies and dioceses that stretch over savannas, we're everywhere you want to be.

We all know it, but we don't often think about it: somewhere right now, Mass is being said in a different language, in a country America probably doesn't like or that doesn't like America. International diplomacy may be in a bad state, but the church--in the spirit of its human communities--is as oblivious to borders as the water table, flowing through the world, nourishing it.

And that's a cause for hope, even as the church's scandals and internal divisions wound the heart. We have hope because the church connects us to millions of people we've never met, but whose souls are working on the same big project ours are. We have hope because believers can sustain each other spiritually, even when countries and causes divide us politically.

We need that hope in post-9/11 America, where an understandable but self-defeating paranoia is closing us in on us. Homeland Security is making it more difficult for outsiders to get in, or to visit as more than tourists. Exchange students, refugee families, and elderly foreign relatives of U.S. citizens languish in visa limbo. And fear keeps many Americans from traveling abroad. In the midst of it all, the Catholic Church offers the same inclusive vision it always has: no customs check, no passport stamp.

By its very nature, the church counteracts the isolationism and cultural smugness any country is prone to. It's harder to think in terms of "us" and "them" when we know that Arab kids in Jordan are saying the rosary before their classes begin, or that North Korean Catholics are welcoming a new vicar. With parishes, missions, and schools in almost every corner of the globe, the church was a web of world connections long before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore's eye. We were first to market, hip to diversity before diversity was hip. We were multicultural when it wasn't PC. And now, we can reap the benefits in wisdom.

On a practical level, the church gives us a global perspective that our theoretically all-encompassing media lack. With CNN supposedly beaming in news from every country, why did I hear about the crisis in Sudan first from Catholic Relief Services? My mother learns about Caribbean storms (political or otherwise) because her church has a sister parish in Haiti, not because it's front-page news in her paper. Five years ago, I learned about the disturbing activities of the School of the Americas not via cable TV or a Web site, but by reading my parish bulletin. Catholics are on the ground in those places, telling us what's going on, even if NBC isn't.

Because of the church's reach, we hear views that aren't popular in America--the pope's stance on war with Iraq, Latin American leaders' views on fair trade. If Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom, is right, we could see more of that in the coming years. Southern Hemisphere priests or missionaries may come to clergy-poor Northern countries, bringing their own countries' worldviews to blissfully ignorant U.S. parishes. We may see culture clashes in reverse, similar to what Western missionaries encountered when they trekked through South America or Africa a century ago. It's not easy to be part of a worldwide church, to listen to people whose ideas are outside our comfort zone. But it's catholic.

The church offers a model of hope and sanity to a security-obsessed world. Well-intentioned but xenophobic measures like the Patriot Act probably won't save us from the attackers. Trying, however clumsily, to meet the "other"--risking the unknown to find common ground--just might. Yes, terrorism is a real threat. Is the answer to shut our country up tight? Will Americans feel safer never having contact with any foreigners? Or might they feel safer knowing that schools like Baghdad College--run by American Jesuits for decades--may have persuaded many Iraqi Muslims that not all Westerners are Crusaders? The history of the church proves that if we connect with others, meet them where they are, we just might save ourselves. When national policies based on fear proliferate, the church keeps its doors open, repeating, "Be not afraid."

Even within the United States, being Catholic helps us see beyond our self-imposed boundaries. For some Americans, hearing the Kyrie or singing a hymn in Spanish may be their only foreign-language experience of the week--and that's important. Visiting priests from Ghana and Colombia give the homilies. Parishioners collect food and medicine for churches in countries far away. Mass is said in Hungarian or Polish or French. And even if English speakers can't follow every word, we usually know where the "peace" will be.

The Russian word for peace--mir--also means "world." Can the two things ever overlap? Be synonymous? Flawed and struggling as it is, the church holds out hope that they might.

Light Sheahen is senior religion editor at beliefnet.com.