Profile

Sister Elizabeth Kelly

Still serving her Huyton community

By Simon Hart

Next year brings the 50th anniversary of the first arrival in Huyton of Sister Elizabeth Kelly. Today she is such a fixture at her parish, St Agnes and St Aidan’s, that there is even a meeting room named after her. It wasn’t her choice – ‘If I’d been consulted, I wouldn’t have wanted it!’ – yet it is an acknowledgement of her deep engagement with her adopted community. ‘Father Anton often calls me Sister Google because I’ve known so many people,’ she jokes, referring to parish priest Fr Anton Fernandopulle. And an anecdote she tells suggests the moniker is well-earned, weaving as it does her efforts today with the parish’s newly bereaved with her founding of a mothers and toddlers’ group back in the 1970s. She begins: ‘Yesterday Fr Anton phoned me and asked if I’d do a funeral. Someone’s husband had died and she’d asked for me. My first contact with that woman was when she came to the “pram club”, as I called it, with her first baby. This happens often – I’ll meet people and they’ll say, “Are you Sr Elizabeth? We came to the pram club”. ‘Before coming here I’d worked in Brent as a social worker and met mothers who were at home with their children and were so isolated. My thinking was “If the mothers are okay, the children are okay”.’ Back to the present and the work Elizabeth – a religious sister of the Helpers of the Holy Souls – has carried out for 12 years meeting bereaved families and arranging funeral services. ‘I meet the family and we prepare the service together. Very often the evening before I say a rosary or have a prayer vigil with the family. ‘It’s very much in keeping with our charism. We’re the Helpers of the Holy Souls, praying for the dead and meeting people in their bereavement. It’s about just being with people.’ Elizabeth joined the order aged 26 in 1960 and arrived in Huyton in 1973 when the Sisters established their novitiate house here. A native of the West of Scotland, she felt immediately at home in Liverpool. She recalls how on her first visit, a stranger guided her from Lime Street Station to the right bus stop for Huyton. ‘There’s just something about the people here – almost a natural community atmosphere.’ Her involvement with her local community has been varied: a spell working in a girls’ approved school; taking Holy Communion to the sick; running an RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) programme; and organising First Communion and Confirmation preparation. The term ‘Ignatian spirituality’ crops up as she reflects on the ‘open-ended charism’ of her order. ‘Our foundress’ vision of purgatory wasn’t just after people died, it was with some of their experiences in life and it was accompanying people and working with people, whatever was needed.’ Today only she and Sister Mary Rose Fitzsimmons remain in the diocese, with another 12 elsewhere in the country. The order has a strong international community and she retains optimism about the future. ‘Although there are so few of us left in Britain, we know that our charism will not die. There are people throughout the country who live our charism. I don’t believe this is just given to a religious order.’ And she says something similar of St Agnes and St Aidan’s. ‘The atmosphere in our parish at present is conducive to community. I look at the amount of volunteers we have and the rotas for different things. I’m on rotas for welcoming on Sunday morning, for being a reader, and doing my turn at the Sacristy laundry.’ All this at 88. And she still wonders why that room is named after her.