fbpx Skip to Main Content

Blog

Sister Janice Ryan receives 2018 Excellence Award

Posted on by Ellen Kane

Sister of Mercy Janice Ryan, a former President of Trinity College of Vermont in Burlington, received a 2018 Excellence Award from the New England Board of Higher Education at the University of Vermont Davis Center on Nov. 6.

“Sister Janice Ryan is a lifelong advocate for education, social justice and criminal justice reform. … Her work over the years has touched many lives,” said Michael Thomas, president of the New England Board of Higher Education.

Born in Fairfield in 1936, Sister Ryan joined the Sisters of Mercy and dedicated 40 years in education as a teacher prior to becoming president of the former Trinity College.

“Life has given me many rich opportunities all of which were interesting and filled with challenges,” she said. “Top among these was the privilege of 17 years at Trinity College serving its great younger and older students and giving them multiple ways to achieve their degrees. They in turn were often models to us in their perseverance and overcoming obstacles to obtain their degrees.”

After her service as president of Trinity College, Sister Ryan went to Washington, D.C., where she worked to promote fairness and justice. She served as director of justice education and interfaith relations with The Justice Project, education director for U.S. Sen. James Jeffords and project director of the Catholic Campaign to Ban Landmines for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Then, in 2003, she became the deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections and continues to work with prisoners.

“The appointment to Deputy Commissioner of Corrections was a life-changing event, working with persons in DOC who believed in and practiced restorative justice concepts in the prison and through Community Justice Centers in the community,” Sister Ryan added.

She was influential in the passage of the Vermont Special Education Law that was used as a prototype for Congress in developing the nation’s special education law.

“One of the many legacies of Sister Ryan is the founding of Mercy Connections in 2001,” said Lisa Falcone, executive director of Mercy Connections. “After the closure of Trinity College, Mercy Connections continued the groundbreaking entrepreneurship programs designed by Trinity back in the 1980’s to empower woman and improve their lives.”

Sister Irene Duchesneau RHSJ

Posted on by Ellen Kane

Sister Irene Duchesneau, a Religious Hospitaller of St. Joseph of the Fanny Allen community, died Dec. 5, 2020, having lived to the fullest of her abilities with which she was so richly blessed.

“Sister D,” as she was affectionately known, was a mighty force for good in a small package who let nothing stand in her way to help the less fortunate.  Anyone who tried, quickly learned that this diminutive sister was no pushover; mayors, governors, senators — no one could say no to her. I was blessed to call her friend and mentor when I took on her role as executive director of the Fanny Allen Foundation in 2009.

Many may know of her legacy as a leader at Fanny Allen Hospital in Colchester or director of the Jeanne Mance School of Nursing or her work in the community establishing and supporting nonprofit agencies such as COTS, Spectrum, Special Services Transportation Agency, Burlington Community Health Center and countless food pantries and shelters throughout the state. But what they may not know is how her faith and love for St. Joseph and the Holy Family shone through in her daily encounters with strangers.

From consoling family members visiting their loved ones as a volunteer greeter on the Fanny Allen Campus, to finding housing for someone she met on the bus, to dropping off meals for her neighbor who she knew was struggling, Sister D treated everyone as if they were part of the Holy Family.  She left her mark on the world not because she longed for recognition but because of her boundless desire to help those in need.

Sister D was called to dedicate her life to God at an early age and joined the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, an order with deep roots in Montreal and Vermont. The order was founded in 1636 in La Fleche, France, by Jerome Le Royer de la Dauversier, a devout Catholic and father of five. He saw his mission in life in simple terms: to serve in the imitation of Christ. He dedicated himself to St. Joseph and the Holy Family and saw Christ in the poor, the sick and the elderly.

In 1642, with the help of Jeanne Mance, a nurse dedicated to God from a young age, he gathered the resources to establish the first hospital in Montreal, Canada, the Hotel-Dieu. Jeanne was its administrator until the arrival of the first three Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph in 1659, who governed and administered this hospital. Today, the Hotel-Dieu has become part of the University of Montreal Medical Center.

In 1807, Frances “Fanny” Margaret Allen, the daughter of Ethan Allen, Vermont’s most famous patriot, joined the order against her family’s wishes after a mystical experience left her with no doubt of God’s will for her life. Fanny became the first Catholic sister from New England and a beacon to many former Vermont skeptics who converted to Catholicism. She was a model of prayerful service as she nursed wounded soldiers in Montreal amid great poverty and imminent threat of disease during the War of 1812. She died of tuberculosis in 1819 and is buried in the crypt beneath the chapel of Hotel-Dieu.

Burlington’s first bishop, Bishop Louis deGoësbriand, dreamed of opening a hospital for the poor. His successor, Bishop John Michaud, was able to carry out this vision with a donation of the Dunbar Hotel in Colchester from Michael Kelly, a former employee of Mary Fletcher (who established the Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington) located on the farmstead of Jabez Penniman, Fanny Allen’s stepfather.

In 1894, three Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph came to Vermont from the Hotel-Dieu in Montreal to transform the Dunbar Hotel into a place of healing. Fanny Allen Hospital was inspired by the memory of “Fanny” Allen and opened with a special mission to care for those that did not have access to medical care.

Sister Irene Duchesneau’ legacy lives on through the Fanny Allen Foundation that she helped establish and represents the mission of her and her religious sisters in its grants to nonprofits that care for the poor, the sick, the homeless and the elderly.

—Originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of Vermont Catholic magazine.

Sister Dorothy Stang helped landowners see forest through different eyes

Posted on by Catholic News Service

The ads were irresistible: The Brazilian government was selling large tracts of property along a new highway in the heartland of Brazil, offering bargain prices to small-scale farmers willing to work the land.

Maria Rosaria Souza Guzzo jumped at the chance. It was 1976, and she and her husband were newlyweds, drawn by the vision of a bright future on the Brazilian frontier.

“They made it sound like paradise,” recalled Guzzo, now 60.

So she and her husband, along with her sister, took off for the promised land.

“But none of what they promised existed,” she said. “There was no paved road, no school, no health center. Nothing. Only bugs and malaria.”

There were just a handful of houses where the town of Anapu is now. The Trans-Amazonian Highway, which would open the Amazon to loggers, miners, ranchers and land speculators, was only a dirt track.

“Working the land” meant hard labor — felling trees to clear a field for crops or a pasture for cattle, then burning the tree trunks and planting. Disillusioned, Guzzo’s sister returned home.

Guzzo and her husband would have done the same, but they had sold everything to buy their land. They tried to sell it but could not find a buyer.

There were conflicts from the very beginning. Disputes over land make the state of Para, the eastern gateway to the Brazilian Amazon, one of the most violent rural areas in the country.

In some cases, the same tract had been sold to three or four people, Guzzo said. Overlapping claims — and sales by people who do not actually have rights to the land — are still a source of conflict today.

“They were five years of suffering and fear,” she said of those early days, as they carved a home out of the forest.

In 1982, she met Sister Dorothy Stang, one of a team of Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur who had moved to Anapu to accompany the farmers. A native of Dayton, Ohio, Sister Stang had worked in Brazil since 1966 and was a representative of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission.

“She was very kind and very charismatic,” Guzzo said. “She said that if people organized, this green hell could be transformed into something nice.”

As she listened to the parish team talk about the importance of the Amazon forest for the life of the people living there, Guzzo began to see the land with different eyes.

The farmers organized in an area known as a sustainable development project, or PDS in Portuguese. They would clear one-fifth of their land for farming and leave the rest in forest.

“The idea was to have a collective area that would be easier to defend against invasion” by outsiders, Guzzo said.

But other people also had their eyes on the region. As families like hers cleared their small plots, loggers, ranchers and land speculators began to arrive and force them off their land.

There were other murders before Sister Stang was killed by hired assassins in 2005, but that did not prepare Guzzo for the news of the nun’s death.

“I knew about the threats,” she said, “but I didn’t believe that they would kill her.”

Justice was slow to come in the case of Sister Stang’s murder, just as it is slow — or beyond reach — for many poor Brazilians. Not until 2010 was the person accused of ordering the crime convicted. He was jailed, then freed, and finally ordered back to prison in April 2019.

Guzzo now lives just around a bend in the road from the parish training center where Sister Stang is buried. On their land beside the river, she and her family have built a house and a business — a water park, with swimming pools, waterslides and a snack bar.

She recalled many families who arrived as she and her husband did, some with small children, and who struggled to make a living on the land.

Sister Stang “had great love for the people here,” she said. “She left us a great thing — knowledge of the importance of nature. She helped many people understand that we have to be united in the defense of life.”

– Barbara J. Fraser

Fourth in a 13-part series

Sister André, a Daughter of Charity and oldest known person in world, dies in France at age 118

Posted on by Our Sunday Visitor

Sister André, a Daughter of Charity and the world’s oldest known person, died at age 118, a spokesman of the nursing home where she died told AFP agency on Tuesday.

“There is great sadness but … it was her desire to join her beloved brother. For her, it’s a liberation,” David Tavella, speaking for the Sainte-Catherine-Labouré nursing home, told AFP.

Sister André, a Catholic convert raised in a Protestant family, was born Lucile Randon Feb. 11, 1904. It was 10 years before World War I, Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States, New York opened its first subway line and U.S. Army engineers began work on the Panama Canal. She also lived through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and through 10 pontificates.

Sister André died Jan. 17 in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon, on France’s Mediterranean coast, Tavella said.

An avid listener of Vatican Radio, the French nun sent well wishes to the radio operation on the occasion of its 90th anniversary in 2021. Sister Andre, who was blind, was a “dedicated listener of the radio that offers her a window of the world” and supports her prayer life, Vatican News reported Feb. 11, 2021.

Last year, for her 118th birthday, Sister André received a birthday card from French President Emmanuel Macron.

In April 2022, she met reporters over tea in the house where she lived.

“People say that work kills. For me, work kept me alive,” she said. “I kept working until I was 108.”

Sister André used to say the biggest joy of her life was when two of her brothers returned home from World War I.

Sing We Now Noel

Posted on by Submitted Article

Sing We Now Noel — a celebration of Christmas and seasonal music – will be presented at three different locations with Dr. William Tortolano as organist. The 92-year-old Saint Michael’s College Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts and Music continues to avoid retirement.

The acoustic and tonal resources of the different Vermont spaces will bring a wide variety of organ music and vocal soloists. The audience will have an opportunity to sing favorite carols from many countries, including a Native Huron carol. Organ solos are by J.S. Bach, Pachelbel, Brahms, Yon and Rowley.

Different vocal solos, at each church will include O Holy Night, The Schubert Ave Maria; He Shall Feed His Flock from The Messiah; and the Italian carols, Gesù Bambino and Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle. Soloists are Jake Barickman and John Schreindorfer at St. Mary’s Church on Dec. 5 in St. Albans; Jerry Proulx at St. Michael’s College chapel in Colchester on Dec. 12; and Elizabeth Ortiz at Blessed Sacrament Church in Stowe on Dec. 19. All concerts are at 2 p.m.

Tortolano has enjoyed a long career, 61 years of it in Vermont. Recognized as an expert in Gregorian chant, he was honored with the Papal medal, Pro Ecclesia Et Pontifice, by Pope Benedict.

The concerts are free and open to the public. An optional free will offering will be available.

 

 

‘Sincerely’ devoted to St. Joseph

Posted on by Father Lance Harlow

On Dec. 8, 1885, Burlington Bishop Louis deGoësbriand completed an historical work of famous Vermonters and New Hampshirites entitled “Catholic Memoirs of Vermont and New Hampshire.” It is a 166-page book in which he recounts the conversion of notable Catholic converts of the 18th and 19th centuries with whom his contemporaries would have been familiar.

While some names have fallen into obscurity for us, one would hope that, at least, every Vermonter would be familiar with the name of Sister Fanny Allen, a Religious Hospitaller of St. Joseph. The bishop’s primary objective, however, was more than just historical. He wrote, “The following pages have been written with a view to promote devotion to St. Joseph and also with a desire to preserve the memory of graces received through his intercession in the Diocese of Burlington.”

In the pastoral solicitude, for which he is renowned, he emphasizes devotional aspects of veneration of St. Joseph throughout the various strata of Vermont society: “It thus happens that all the memoirs of St. Joseph are full of sweetness to well-instructed Christians. Fathers and mothers love to place their children under his protection. The laboring men who earn their bread at the sweat of their brows, consider him, as it were, one of their own. They who are tried by poverty trust in the prayers of Him who was the purveyor of the Holy Family, and the sick and the dying feel that the foster-father of Jesus and husband of Mary cannot fail to obtain for themselves a happy death. There is another class of persons who love to implore the protection of St. Joseph. We refer here to missionary bishops and priests and to religious communities who devote themselves to the introduction and preaching of the Gospel in foreign countries.”

Bishop deGoësbriand enumerated the blessings of devotion to St Joseph dating back to the establishment of St. Mary Church in Burlington by the missionary priest Father Jeremiah O’Callaghan who maintained a statue of St. Joseph, which still was preserved in 1885. After building the original Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in 1867, Bishop deGoësbriand dedicated an altar to the Holy Family.

St. Joseph even had his own “property” in Burlington, called St. Joseph’s Hill, where the former St. Joseph Church had been built in 1852 for the French-Canadian Catholics. This is the area around what is now St. Joseph’s Home off North Prospect Street.

In 1854, when the Sisters of Providence opened the original St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum, the children prayed daily the Litany of St. Joseph to obtain his protection but also the necessary funding to run the orphanage. As patron of the dying, two cemeteries on St. Joseph’s Hill are named after him. The bishop also states with pride that many religious and priestly vocations found their birth at St. Joseph Church and school up on St. Joseph’s Hill.

Finally, the bishop, viewing the construction of the present Cathedral of St. Joseph from his rectory on Cherry Street, wrote: “But as we write these lines the congregants of old St. Joseph’s Church are erecting a new St. Joseph’s Church edifice, which cannot but be seen by anyone who approaches Burlington. … The great dimensions of this building and the privations which the people cheerfully undergo to complete it show to evidence how sincerely devoted all our people are to St. Joseph.”

—Father Lance Harlow is rector of St. Joseph Cathedral in Burlington.

—Originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of Vermont Catholic magazine.