Fifty-two weeks a year, our Sisters reach out in love to meet the spiritual and social needs of our dear neighbors in these times, praying for peace, advocating for justice, caring for creation and accompanying people of all ages on their spiritual journeys.
But for one week, March 8-14, we pause to reflect on their mission, ministries, and life in community, giving thanks for the many ways God has worked through them.
Catholic Sisters Week began in 2015 as a part of National Women’s History Month.
Because I am a Nurse Practitioner, I have to work in the field in order to keep my licensure. My job at Duquesne allows me to have a “Practice Day” and so I volunteer every Tuesday at a Free clinic in Steubenville, Ohio with one of my colleagues. Together, we provide healthcare for people who are uninsured and underinsured.
It is incredibly rewarding as people come to us with chronic diseases that are well advanced and we are able to provide care, medications and whatever they need to gain better health and thrive.
I also volunteer several Saturdays a month with Project Hope in Wheeling, West Virginia. I started doing this about 6 years as a clinical experience with a physician I was working with and have continued ever since.
Here, we meet people who – for a variety of reasons – find themselves with no shelter but a tent. Although many do qualify for Medicaid, they are so mistreated within the healthcare system that they do not seek medical help. We go out to the places they live, mostly tent cities and under bridges and offer them food, water and healthcare.
Both of these experiences are the purest forms of healthcare I have ever known. I am so grateful for both of these experiences.
Our Constitutions state: In order to achieve this union {of neighbor with neighbor and neighbor with God}, the sisters undertake, in a spirit of self-emptying humility, and with the greatest possible excellence, all the works of justice and mercy, both spiritual and temporal, of which they are capable (#12).
I was given the gift of being able to study to become a nurse and this ministry along with my full-time ministry at Duquesne University allows me to bring the gifts of justice and mercy to those who are not able to receive healthcare they desperately need.
We are not compensated monetarily for Ohio Valley Health Center or Project Hope, yet I feel that the work blesses my life every day as I watch in real time people receive what they need and begin to thrive.
At Project Hope we provide healthcare and so much more. We work to find them housing, we work to get them into drug rehab, we seek to provide mental health care so desperately needed.
I am so grateful for the good health and energy I enjoy and can think of no better way to use those gifts to bring light and life into my patients, and in the process find light and life in my own heart. It is hard, it is not always pleasant, and there is no where on earthy I would want to be!
I am energized by the relationships with people in the Hill District whom I live and have had the opportunity to work with and serve through community gardens, being a member of St. Benedict the Moor Parish, visiting our neighbors in need with St. Vincent de Paul Society and just being a neighbor.
I really don’t think about my vocation as a Catholic sister. Vocation to me is about the call/relationship of God in our lives, and so vocation is about my relationship with God.
I always felt called to work with the poor and I wanted to do that with like minded people – with friends. Religious life has help me cultivate that original call and in a sense has make that easier.
I am energized through my interactions with patients and their families, especially as I walk with them toward the end of life. It is a privileged place to be. It is often challenging, but as I share often with the staff, when it gets easy, it’s time to find a new job.
Even in the midst of the grief, I work to give people hope. I encourage them to invite their loved into all their celebrations – on their birthday, to have a cake, and for December holidays, to prepare a box of items that were a part of their lives together to open last, after all the gifts, and tell stories connected with the items.
Sometimes they’ll laugh and sometimes they’ll cry, but that way you take away the fear of a conversation about the person, because everyone is thinking about them anyway, so you make it real.
I know I would not be able to do this without my commitment as a vowed member of the Sisters of St Joseph.
