September 25-27, 2022 … January 1, 2023 … Nowruz, March 21-22, 2023 … November 27, 2022 … Chūjié, January 22, 2023 … Samvatsaradi, March 22, 2033 … January 14, 2023 …
A re you wondering about the names and dates we’ve listed above? (Perhaps you’re wondering about us!) Did you catch the hints in the list? If you did, you can guess what the names and dates have in common. Yes, they are all names and dates for a New Year from a sampling of faith traditions and from different parts of our world.
We are writing this letter after the First Sunday of Advent and before the civil New Year arrives, an in-between time, for sure. You’ll notice in the list above that at least one tradition’s new year begins at harvest time; others begin when the harshest spell of winter is ending or when spring is showing its first buds. Don’t these new years, these different times and names and seasons, suggest sentiments of gratitude and hope?
How many new years have you celebrated personally? as a family? as a vowed religious? with friends and dear ones or in quiet solitude? As you marked the beginning of another new year, did you look back over the year that had ended; were you blessed with gratitude for all it had brought you? And did you look ahead in hope? Doesn’t the virtue of hope often wear the disguise of “New Year’s Resolutions”?
Here we are, looking back with gratitude and ahead with hope. Your generosity, friendship, faithful support and prayer are among the many blessings we received in 2022. And we look toward the coming year with hope: for peace in our world, for welcome to those fleeing natural disasters, persecution, danger of any kind, for the healing of deadly illnesses and suffering, of social, family, and divisions of all sorts …we look forward the coming to fullness of God’s Reign and we know that you join us in hope. We trust that God’s “slow work” will bear fruit in God’s good time.
Charles Dickens’ words at Christmastime are familiar to all of us. We are happy to make his wish for a New Year our wish for you today and every New Year to come:
Sister Carol, Sister Kathee, Sister Joan
“A new heart for a New Year, always!”Sincerely,
Director of Mission Advancement and Communications
Since I first took on this role with the Sisters I have said more than once to my wife, Eileen, “I wish I had come here thirty years ago.” And she responds, “They never would have hired you. You didn’t know what you needed to do this job back then.” And of course, she is right. Our past prepares us for our future, one bears the fruit of the other.
We change. We grow. We adapt. We adjust. And that is as it should be. Hopefully, over time, we see a general direction slanted towards “progress”. And so, our pasts and our futures are linked, with our presents being the bridge between them.
In this issue we spend some time looking back and then looking ahead to tomorrow. The investment firms say, “Past performance is not a guarantee of future success,” …or words to that effect. Our future is not determined by our past, but it is often informed by it. And just as we want to avoid living in the past, we also must not charge blindly ahead, leaving the lessons from bygone days behind us. And so that interplay is an interesting one to explore.
For most of my life I have drifted on the currents of time, allowing them to move me in directions I may not have chosen had I been a bit more mindful. This issue has made me think more deliberately about the path I am on, the things I’m learning, and in what ways I am growing that will bear good fruit in the years to come. It’s common to see programs on TV in December looking back on the year which has just passed, and many of us make New Year’s resolutions as we approach January first. This year, I’m going to take a personal inventory and see if I can come up with a list of the things I have learned or experienced in the past year that will help me broaden the ways I can serve next year, then try to grow in at least one new productive direction. Pray for me for the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
May God shower you with blessings in the New Year, and may you use the knowledge, gifts, and experiences of your past to create a brighter future for yourself and others. Be Good!
The Holy Union Sisters is a 501(C)3 non-profit, tax exempt organization
In early November of 2022 eleven Sisters celebrated the 75th anniversary of the opening of our Juniorate/Preparatory school at Nanaquaket in Tiverton, RI. This remarkable property has played an important role for Holy Union, serving a variety of purposes over many decades. The property was purchased by the Sisters in 1928 and until its sale to a local family in 2005, it was used as a retirement home for Sisters, a school for girls, a house of formation, a vacation home, a field day destination for our schools, and a hospitality house for retreats of all types.
The land was originally sold by the local native American tribes to Captain Richard Morrise of Portsmouth, RI in 1651 for four coats, four hoes, and two axes. The property eventually became known as Nanaquaket in 1872 when its then owner, Captain Nathaniel Boomer Church, built a sprawling home for his family there. The twenty acres eventually held several buildings including servant quarters and a boathouse.
On November 3rd, the Province Leadership Team joined Sisters Helen McPeak, MaryEllen Ryan, Eileen Davey, Frances Cavey, Pat Deasy, Ann Kernan, Gretchen Marlatt, who enjoyed a celebratory lunch at McGovern’s Restaurant in Fall River before driving to Nanaquaket, RI to again walk the grounds of their youth when they were discerning their vocation and being formed in the faith. We are so grateful to the
current owners of the property, who were gracious enough to allow us visit and enjoy so many wonderful memories where the fresh waters of the Sakonnet River meet the salty Atlantic.
It was a spectacular sunny Fall day, as the Sisters walked down the familiar wooden stairs to the water’s edge and then returned to the pavilion where they gathered to sing “The Bells of Nanaquaket.” This is a remarkable location, where for decades, scores of young women charted a course for their lives which included educating the children of poor immigrants, traveling to other countries to do missionary work, ministering to the abused, imprisoned, disabled, and so much more. Their impact on our communities and the world is difficult to measure, but the lessons learned here helped them to change the worlds of countless people they served, and will continue to do so for many years to come.
The day conjured so many warm memories for the Sisters, with Sr. Helen McPeak encapsulating her feelings, “HEART OF MY HEART, how I love the memories! LOVE THE MEMORIES!!!!” Her time at Nanaquaket set her on the path she continues to travel today, counseling children and youth who have come from difficult family situations at St. Vincent Services.
After completing the novitiate, Sisters Fran Cavey and MaryEllen Ryan spent decades teaching and doing missionary work in Africa and Appalachia. Today, they are both members of Holy Union’s podcast team shaping and forming this new form of ministry using their life experiences and insights gained from their work to help listeners grow in their relationship with God and each other.
Reflecting on her first visit to Nanaquaket, Sr. Fran said, “From the first moment I saw Nanaquaket when my Mom and Dad drove me there as a 14-year-old incoming freshman, I felt it as a place of beauty and healing. That response deepened 2-months later when my Dad having died unexpectedly at home in Baltimore, both my Mom and I returned. Both of us experienced
healing in the beauty, love and support we found there. When I returned this past November and sat by the water, it was the same. Sixty-three years had passed; much had changed, and yet it was the same. There was beauty, healing and so many memories.”
After years teaching Sr. Eileen Davey established a nutrition center for the children in Haiti, and today works with UNANIMA International focusing on eliminating human trafficking and the abuse of women and children around the world. Hers is also a lifetime of work based on formation at Nanaquaket which continues into tomorrow.
Sr. Ann Kernan said, “Returning to Nanaquaket with classmates who shared that sacred space and helped broaden my teenage years in the early '50s recaptured special memories. As I sat near the Sakonnet River once again I thought of the sunsets, the waves, the seagulls, the wind and snow. I remembered my companions who explored this new world with me and our dedicated teachers, the sisters who helped expand our love of God and neighbor and knowledge. Deep gratitude was mine as I recalled all that shaped my life at the Juniorate, and continues to this day.”
We hope to return again someday to the grassy lawns and rocky shoreline that all still feel so very familiar. What a blessing to have had the chance to visit it once
If you have a family member, a friend, or a colleague who’s a Holy Union Sister, and she’s told you “We’re having a Collegial Assembly this summer,” maybe your conversation unfolded like this:
“Oh … What’s a Collegial Assembly?”
“It’s what we Holy Union Sisters call a General Chapter”.
“Oh… But what’s a General Chapter?”
Clearly an explanation is in order! We Holy Union Sisters are having a Collegial Assembly this summer and we want you to know about it and support it with your good wishes and prayers.
General Chapters are time-honored, really centuries-honored, instruments of governance in religious congregations. A General Chapter is a gathering of vowed members of a congregation, elected as delegates from their particular geographic area but forming together, when they assemble, a microcosm of the entire (the “general”) congregation. But what to the delegates do when they get to the Chapter? They review the life and mission of the Congregation since the last Chapter (for us, a six-year period), discern the way forward for the next six years, and elect the global leadership group, the General Council, for that period.
Our Constitutions describe a General Chapter as a “collegial assembly representing all members of Holy Union” and in recent years we have come to call our General Chapters a Collegial Assembly. Collegial means that every member of the group has equal authority, from the youngest, newest elected delegate, to the older “veterans,” to the congregation leaders elected at the last Assembly.
Preparation for our Collegial Assemblies involves the whole congregation. An Assembly Planning Group was formed last year and includes two sisters from the General Council, one each from Ireland and Cameroon and our own Mary Lou Sullivan. The group met in Rome in March and December 2022, with Zoom meetings in between. Reflecting on the group’s work, Sister Mary Lou tells us, “It is
a privilege to be part of our multicultural Collegial Assembly Planning Group and to experience the fruits of the wholehearted participation of Sisters throughout the Congregation. As we move through each phase of our ongoing discernment there is an ever-deepening sense of our oneness as we seek together where God is calling us as Holy Union for the future of mission.”
On June 24, 2022, Sister Paula Coelho, our congregation leader, announced the date and location of our next Collegial Assembly (July 23-August 10, 2023 in Nemi, Italy) … and the Year of the Collegial Assembly was underway!
During the first two phases of the Year, sisters throughout the congregation prayed and pondered on the theme of the next Assembly, its logo, and the Assembly prayer and on our response to the direction given us in 2017. We met in local community and cluster groups to share our reflections on the questions the Planning Group posed to us: What in the 2017 Vision Statement moved me to action? What do I want to celebrate? To what do I wish I had paid more attention? A special feature of this phase was a series of Zoom conversations across the congregation, engaging and mixing sisters from different areas for reflection and sharing together, complete with simultaneous translation! The fruits of all these conversations is now in the Planning Committee’s hands and the third phase of our Year of Assembly will begin in January. We’ll soon see what will be asked of us then, though we already know that each area of the congregation will elect its Assembly delegates by March 1st.
Please join us in this season of prayer and discernment as together we seek to discover how God is leading us now to “respond anew in mission and engage with the diverse changes in our world” (CA 2023 theme, adapted).
The death of a loved one is never easy. And our Province was blessed to go a full year without a single Sister leaving us. But this past November two of our Sisters went home to God within a few days of each other.
On November 7th, Sr. Ann Boland died after a brief illness and hospital stay. Sr. Ann was a Holy Union Sister for over sixty-seven years, and taught in Baltimore, MD and Astoria, NY, living in recent years in Brockton where she taught adult literacy and religious education classes (via Zoom for the past year), and was active in many ministries including consulting on the creation of religious education text books, working as a geriatric social worker, and most recently developing our Holy Union Podcast. We will miss her creativity, can-do attitude, and warm loving smile. Her full Biography is found on our
website at https://www.holyunionsisters.org/srann-boland-april-14-1937-november-7-2022/.
Just a few days later on November 12th, Sr. Ruth Beaudoin went home to God at the age of ninetyfour. Sr. Ruth’s health had declined slowly over the last several years. She is warmly remembered by so many students from Cambridge, Concord, and Lawrence. Her contribution to revising the Holy Union Constitutions as well as serving as Administrator of the Generalate Community while in Rome are testimony to her wisdom and willingness to serve. Her joyful spirit and ability to establish long lasting relationships with students, Sisters, and almost anyone she met are familiar to anyone who knew her. Her full biography is found on our website at https://www.holyunionsisters. org/sr-ruth-beaudoin-may-3-1928-nov-12-2022/.
Sr. Marilyn Gignac (Sr. Agnes Celine)
At a humble church in the small village of Bare, Cameroon, three young women, Marie Martine Djoumessi, Bridget Nkuo and Genevieve Yano, pronounced their First Vows as Holy Union Sisters. This was a very happy culmination of my role as an instrument in the hands of God during the formation of these first three African women to enter our Congregation. By God’s grace, they have persevered for forty years and they, along with more than 70 others, are carrying on works begun by our missionary sisters from the U.S. and other countries and have added many more.
My hope is that their number will continue to grow and that Holy Union will flourish, “revealing God’s love” in that part of the world and wherever they may find themselves in the future.
My fondest memory is of my parents and my sister, Isabelle, on the day I entered the convent. I know it was a great sacrifice for them to allow me to pursue religious life at a time when the custom was that we would never be allowed to go home. The look on their faces was a beautiful combination of surrender and peace.
My greatest hope is for a renewal of religious faith across all churches, that people of all faiths will have a change of heart such that they can remember the power and beauty and strength of religious belief.
I’ll have to combine two fond memories. I was fortunate to counsel and tutor at a wonderful high school in an affluent area in Florida. We had the best of everything and as such we could provide every material thing any student needed. That experience was followed immediately by a very different one, working with children who had come from very difficult family situations at an organization which worked on a shoestring budget. And there we were able to provide what those children needed most, love. I’ve served there for over 30 years now and it has been the most rewarding experience of my life. What a great blessing to have had the opportunity to serve in such different ministries where the greatest need was the same: love.
As for my greatest hope for tomorrow, I’d simply hope that God grants me the ability to continue to do the work I am meant to do, no matter what that is.
As I pondered this question a powerful memory came to me over and over again. In the year before my final vows, I began to have many doubts about whether I could live the life of a woman religious. At the age of 26, I was experiencing new desires of having a family and being loved as both wife and mother. These questions encouraged me to share my doubts with a wise woman, Mother Anna Gertrude, who was my local superior. I can still see her beautiful face as she gently guided me on how these desires could be used to bring warmth and tenderness in both my community living and my daily work. Her wisdom opened up a new understanding of what a woman religious can bring to both the church and the world. This fondest memory has become a lived reality taking on new dimensions as the years have come and gone in our beautiful but fragile world.
My hope for the future flows from what I have shared above. During the many years of living religious life there were always others who shared their spiritual life with me. These times of encounter enriched and inspired my life. With God’s grace this legacy of accompaniment will continue into the future.
As we celebrate our eight Jubilarians this year, we asked them to answer the following question: What is your fondest memory as a woman religious, and what is your greatest hope for tomorrow?
Sr.
On a Friday afternoon, I wrote my honest attempt to describe what had struck me in my life as a woman religious. However, a visit from a young teen that Saturday morning changed the entire scenario! I had met Joshua when he was just a little boy which seemed but a short time ago! However, he was now taller than I. As a young boy, he would visit the parish when his grandmother was the receptionist. If I was around I would be asked to come to say "Hi". Evidently those few times really meant something to him, for after a recent breakfast with Grandma, he asked to go to see Sister Alice. As it happened, I was working at St. Vincent de Paul giving out food. A scene such as this has happened a few times and it always takes me by surprise, because at the time it seems so little. But sometimes a little attention goes a long way!
My hope for the future is with our young people! So many of them are really close to God and that has a way of shining out, although we do not always have the eyes to see their goodness! My prayer is that God may stretch us to see the goodness in the people (and our teens) whom we sometimes have seemingly "dismissed."
Over the years I have noted and often been amazed at how a simple word, greeting or act of kindness can bring peace and joy to someone. I believe it is simply God's Spirit working through His creatures, and leaves countless fond memories behind.
My hope for the future is that we continue to reveal God's "love in our world." The Holy Spirit is continually with us, leading the way to an unknown future, and remembering Jesus' promise that the Holy Spirit will be with us until the end of time!
I very fondly remember the changes which came about from the Second Vatican Council which impacted religious congregations. The changes brought about the beginning of renewal, including things like using your given name rather than your religious one, making the habit optional, and the ability to pursue the ministry you felt called to instead of being assigned one. All of these changes allowed us to enlarge the ways in which we could engage with those in need at the heart of the world by helping to reveal Gods love.
My greatest hope for tomorrow is that God gives me the grace to continue in my current ministry with kindness, wisdom, and joy.
What I am most grateful for is the love and support that I received when I needed to transition to care for my Mother. First I moved from Massachusetts to Maryland and later to Kentucky, where I rented a house so that my mother could come and live with me. That last move of almost 10 years was a blessing not only to me and my Mom but also a powerful witness for all the people to whom I ministered.
And my greatest hope for tomorrow: that we would recognize and celebrate the oneness of all peoples, all creation in the one HOLY UNION that is God’s desire for us all.
This past July, after twenty-two years working from our offices in Milton, MA, we packed our belongings and moved south, back to where we first arrived in the US; Fall River, MA. We spent several months putting away files, bringing systems back online, and generally settling into our new surroundings. We’re very much feeling like we are home again, with most of our Sisters just a few minutes’ drive to our new location at 205 Bedford Street. We love our new space, and have welcomed each week several visits from Sisters who can now stop by for this or for that.
On December 18th we held an Open House in our new offices and were delighted to show people around. Refreshments were available and given the time of year, everyone was filled with a joyful spirit. Everyone is happy to again have us “in the neighborhood”, and the Fall River community has been very welcoming.
Our new space is better scaled to our needs, with most offices shared by two people, plus we have a small kitchen, file room, and conference room. It is handicapped accessible and on the first floor, with plenty of large windows to make our surroundings bright and sunny.
We hope you enjoy these pictures from the day, and the space we now inhabit.
January 14, 2023
February – March 1, 2023
Spring 2023
US Province Leadership Elections
Election of US delegates to Collegial Assembly
Regional Donor Appreciation Brunches (Locations and dates to be announced soon)
July 24 – August 10, 2023
September 1, 2023
Collegial Assembly of the Congregation Nemi, Italy
New Province Leadership Term Begins
For information on making a Planned Gift or a Bequest for Holy Union please contact Ken Gustin at ken.gustin@holyunionusa.org or 617-696-8765.
Visit our website at www.holyunionsisters.org
You can listen to our podcast, "Called to be...", right from our website, or on your smartphone on all the major podcasting platforms.
