they returned. A ship from San Francisco carried a petite, 100-pound, steadfast, courageous nun from New Orleans, Sr. Celina Seghers, my father’s great-aunt. She too, like Bourgeois, was headed on her own blind mission a world away and was photographed sporting her “flying nun” habit as she departed the mainland. In April 1942, Sr. Celina was at the mission in Yukiang, helping to take care of 200 orphan girls. When I read the stories about Sr. Celina from the documents my father gave me, I was moved in the same way Drez was, knowing I was holding on to a story that needed to be told someday— but when? As fate would have it, my daughter was in a play last year, and my 85-year-old father noticed that one of the cast members had the name Seghers. He reminded me of the story he had put in my hands years before. So I dug it out and contacted the girl’s father, who turned out to be an acquaintance of mine, a well-known Catholic author, speaker and radio host named Jimmy Seghers. I couldn’t believe this man I had long
admired was my second cousin. What a special day that was when I invited him over to meet my father to reminisce about their family days on Napoleon Avenue across from St. Stephen’s Church. They recalled how much they admired their Aunt Celina and how they learned about the remarkable life she led from newspaper articles and from stories told on the front porch of their childhood homes. A story from the Daily Quill newspaper in Missouri quotes Sr. Celina as she recalls events following the Doolittle Raid. “Five of the American flyers who had bailed out of their planes dropped right into our yard, and of course we helped them. The boys who came down in our dooryard, as well as all of the others, lost all of their belongings, and their clothing was torn and soiled. One had even lost his shoes. We gave them all kinds of supplies, including tooth brushes and paste, towels, and numerous other articles, and we washed their soiled clothing and did all we could to make them comfortable. “I asked them how long they were over Tokyo