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After 190 years, Loretto sisters still stake
out new frontiers
By ARTHUR JONES
Englewood, Colo.
It was 1852. They stepped off the boat in Independence, Mo., and
stepped into a Dearborn coach -- dainty looking, in-town buggy that was
predecessor to the huskier, necessity-bred Conestoga wagon -- and into
history.
They were four young women from Nerinx, Ky. The youngest was 28,
the oldest 41.
This quartet of Sisters of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross -- a
community co-founded in 1812 by three young women and a refugee Belgian priest,
Fr. Charles Nerinckx, when Kentucky was the frontier -- knew what they were
about.
The foursome was headed in the high-wheeled, leather-curtained,
mule-drawn Surrey-like vehicle on a one-thousand-mile, two-month-long journey
to Santa Fe, in New Mexico territory. The next frontier.
It could be perilous -- they had already lost their leader to
cholera. A companion, also stricken with cholera, stayed behind in
Missouri.
The nuns knew what they would be doing -- teaching
Spanish-speaking children at the invitation of the later famed Archbishop John
B. Lamy of Santa Fe (celebrated in Willa Cathers Death Comes for the
Archbishop). What the four didnt know, nor did their sisters
back in Kentucky, was what would sprout from the seeds they were about to
sow.
They didnt know that a century-and-a-half later, little
girls and boys in Lorettos St. Marys Academy lower school in Denver
would reconstruct their journey on a cardboard map. Opened in 1864, before
Denver was a diocese or Colorado a state, the academy was the work of three
Santa Fe Loretto sisters who took a stagecoach to the next frontier,
Colorado.
The academys first graduate, Jessie Forshee, in 1875
received the first high school diploma issued west of the Mississippi. In a
historic reach, Loretto Sr. Helen Sanders, who at 93 still attends gatherings
and listens to taped programs in the Kentucky motherhouse, knew Forshee, who
also became a Loretto.
And last year, Sanders -- St. Marys refers to her as the
academys own Queen Mum -- marked her own 75th anniversary of
graduation from the school by presenting the Forshee gold medal to an achieving
student.
At Nerinx, one of Sanders nonagenarian companions is the
renowned Loretto Sr. Mary Luke Tobin, also 93. Tobin preceded Sanders as
president (1958-70) and was the only American Catholic woman invited as an
observer to the Second Vatican Council, 1962-65.
It was Sanders, a farsighted Loretto president (1970-78) at a time
when there were Lorettines in 20 states, who encouraged the sisters of the
post-Vatican II church to reach beyond their traditional teaching roles into
new fields.
Work born in prayer
The prescient Sanders made this possible when she dipped deeply
into Loretto reserves to bring the sisters into the national Social Security
system and then began a retirement fund that turned into a charitable trust.
The combination for retired sisters of a Social Security check and income from
the retirement trust, said current Loretto president Sr. Mary Catherine Rabbitt
(the name is Irish), freed a lot of younger sisters such as myself to do
meaningful work rather than be tied to jobs purely as income producers to
support the retirees. Rabbitt became a crusading lawyer on health care and
corporate responsibility issues.
These arent secular do-gooders. This is work born in a
prayer life that keeps before it Jesus example in the Word and the
eucharistic celebration.
In that spirit, Tobin and Sanders re-emphasized what all Loretto
women instinctively knew -- that the sisters were about working with women at
every level. They educated women at private schools and in innovative
inner-city programs; defended them on health care access and poverty issues;
walked with them in homeless shelters and public housing projects; marveled
with them during environmental and spiritual encounters.
Sanders consolidated the orders finances to provide an
underpinning for the future. And that future is now: The median age of the
340-plus sisters is 77; there are six sisters under 50, and three dozen under
60. Two sisters made final vows in 2000. The newest Loretto is Sr. Carol
Kaiman, a registered nurse who has just finished her canonical year. Sisters
transferring in from other orders have included Faith Matters radio
talk show host Sr. Maureen Fiedler, and New Ways Ministry cofounder Jeannine
Gramick.
As the community celebrates its 190th birthday, in Denver alone
the spiritual sister-descendents of the Nerinx foundation are still staking out
new frontiers -- though now these are socio-economic frontiers.
On those frontiers -- visited by NCR during a two-day
Denver odyssey -- the Lorettines help marginalized women to organize,
co-sponsor with Jesuits the dual-language neighborhood Catholic school, with a
Dominican sister develop organic gardening plots and environmental programs and
trips for the homeless. Sisters work with the homeless, and in a little house
on West Hillside Place, one sister lives in the home the sisters have helped
create for eight developmentally disabled women.
Colorado to Kentucky
Nationwide these days the Lorettines have four main centers.
In addition to Denver, in Nerinx, Ky., theres the
motherhouse, with a farm, retreat center, hermitages in woods, and sisters
doing rural ministry and running a daycare center in Marion County, where the
sisters are a major employer. (The Knobs Haven retreat center and Cedars of
Peace hermitages are offered free to those released from jail terms for
protesting the School of the Americas.)
The St. Louis Lorettines have established Pillar Place. It is
subsidized low income housing for 40 families in a former school, with an
extended-hours daycare program, job training and counseling. Theres
Nerinx Hall, a four-year womens high school, and Loretto involvement in
the new inner-city Marian Middle School for girls. El Pasos Loretto
programs include a retreat center, and Loretto Academy, which offers a co-ed
kindergarten through 8th grade program and a high school for young women. In El
Paso, too, the Lorettines have joined with the Daughters of Charity in
operating Nazareth Hall Infirmary for the elderly.
The Lorettines have informal links with the Holy Family Sisters in
Guatemala and the Daughters of the Blessed Trinity in Ghana. In Africa Loretto
Sr. Marie Ego directs the Loretto Africa Project, and works as a counselor with
indigenous religious communities and with an AIDS programs. Loretto Sr. Pauline
Albin travels widely to teach as assistant director of the catechetical office
for the Sunyani, Ghana, diocese.
More than a dozen U.S.-based Loretto sisters have flown to Africa
to provide short-term courses in English and computer science for the Daughters
of the Blessed Trinity. Loretto Sr. Mary Ken Lewis and Fr. Martin Lally, a
Denver priest and Loretto co-member, have given team retreats and theology
programs to groups of Ghanian religious.
In Guatemala, Loretto sisters have accompanied native sisters in
isolated areas doing human rights, catechetical work and education.
Whether these bonds to the Holy Family Sisters and the Daughters
of the Blessed Trinity will lead to a more formal connection is undetermined,
Rabbitt said. As with their own future, the Loretto sisters have definite plans
in some areas, and a great deal of flexibility in their approach to other
potential developments.
One step at a time
With this in mind, President Rabbitt and three of her six-member
executive team sat around a table in their rented administrative offices in
Englewood, a Denver suburb, and looked to their future. Sr. Susan Swain holds
down a second job as lower school principal. Sr. Eva Marie Salas, who has
worked in Bolivia and Southern Colorado (where she was principal of a public
school), is the primary contact with the Holy Family Sisters. Sr. Denise Ann
Clifford, the vice president, handles development, and, like other executives,
serves on various Loretto boards.
The team works on its current six-year plan Imagine 2006 one step
at a time. Rabbitt, whose term ends in 2006, said her main priorities are the
preferential option for the poor, ecological issues and the promotion of human
rights.
With their bicentenary only a decade away, how would they feel,
they were asked, if there were a 250th anniversary that did not include
professed sisters?
Therell always be some, replied Salas, who
thinks the Loretto tradition will continue in modified form. We began
with three, she said, implying that though the numbers dwindle
therell always be a core group.
What Loretto is open to, said Rabbitt -- and the community has
always been innovative -- is a range of possibilities and fresh associations
guided by the signs of the times. One example of that, she said, is
a forthcoming meeting with a dozen young women who have asked to strengthen
their ties to Loretto. Theyve already served as Loretto Volunteers or
know the community in other ways.
Well be listening to how they envision ways of
connecting -- outside of the formal and traditional methods of the past.
And if that means, for example, short-term commitments, such as temporary vows,
the community would be open to working out new patterns of association.
Just as the Conestoga wagon succeeded the Dearborn when Americans
headed for the frontier, the Sisters of Loretto are ready to adapt to new
vehicles to carry on their frontier work.
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address
is AJones96@aol.com
Lorettos at-a-glance
Founded in Nerinx, Kentucky in 1812, the Sisters of Loretto
at the Foot of the Cross (initially the Friends of Mary at the Foot of the
Cross) are one of the first three orders of women religious to spring from
American soil. The others are St. Elizabeth Setons Sisters of Charity
(1809) and the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, also founded in Kentucky in
1812.
The three founding sisters, under the guidance of their
priestly collaborator, the Belgian-born Fr. Charles Nerinckx, pronounced their
vows in 1813.
They were to teach, and their first school was a log cabin.
But they were frontier nuns: 1823, Missouri; 1825, Louisiana; 1838, Arkansas;
1847, Kansas; 1852; New Mexico; 1863, Illinois; 1864, Colorado; 1874, Alabama;
1879, Texas; 1897, Toronto, Canada; 1899, Arizona - and on they went.
From a peak of some 1,200 sisters around 1960, there are
some 340 today. They have always been in the forefront of exploring the new --
and were quick to examine and adopt the reforms of the Second Vatican Council
(1962-65). |
Related Web sites
EarthLinks www.earthlinks-colorado.org
Escuela de Guadalupe www.escuelaguadalupe.org
Havern Center www.havern.org
Loretto Community www.lorettocommunity.org
St. Marys Academy www.smanet.org |
National Catholic Reporter, April 12,
2002
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