To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best I met Henri Nouwen on only two occasions. In each instance he impressed me as a driven, obsessive and possibly neurotic spiritual genius for whom traditional boundaries of thought and social networking were unappealing if not irrelevant.On the first occasion, I invited him to give the inaugural address at the opening of the Centre for Catholic Experience at St Jerome’s University in Ontario. He drew an extraordinary crowd. It was my first inkling that Nouwen’s following was both wide and diverse.On the second occasion, I was invited along with him to a ­wedding anniversary of mutual fr