2025 Jubilarian Celebrating 60 Years
I am a Philly girl from St. Joachim’s Parish in Frankford. I attended St. Joachim’s grade school and Little Flower High School. The missions attracted me since I was a child. Like many Catholic homes of that era, we received Maryknoll Magazine. I found the stories and photos interesting, intriguing, and inspiring. Religious life was far from my thoughts then, but I do remember something stirring within me, a sense of call, at our High School Senior Retreat at the Dominican Retreat House in Elkins Park. After High School, I worked in Center City Philadelphia and went to St. Joseph’s University at night. I often traveled on the bus with MSBT, who, like me, were studying on the bus and heading to night classes. During that time, one of the young priests at our parish, St. Joachim’s, gave me Thomas Merton’s book, Seven Storey Mountain and it impacted me. My sense of call was transformed from a stirring to a flame.
Aside from a memorable encounter at a Girl Scout Marian Award ceremony on the MSBT Motherhouse Grounds when I was about 10 years old, I never met any of the sisters personally. Their ministry as missionaries to America caught my attention.
It is amazing to reflect on the privilege I have had to serve and collaborate with so many over these many years. From Trenton, New Jersey, to Rochester, New York, to Centerville, Massachusetts, to Lakewood, New Jersey, to Lower East Side, NYC, to Buenavista Tomatlan, Santa Ana Amatlan, Michoacán, Mexico, to Chimalhuacan, Mexico to Quincy, Florida to back home to Philadelphia, as well as intra-community ministries such as Vocation/Formation and serving on the General Council. The majority of years have been with the Latino/a Community and in particular the immigrant community. The ministries were pastoral ministries, youth ministry, advocacy, catechesis, small faith communities, outreach, evangelization. In almost all these ministries I have tried to introduce retreats as a means of evangelization and a personal encounter with the Living God.
One of the wonderful things about the charism of our community is that we are a Missionary Family in the Church, comprised of four branches, encompassing religious women and men, priests, and lay men and women within one religious family. I have had the joy of working with the various branches in several of my ministries. That has been so enriching.
When I first entered, I was captivated by our Founder, Father Judge’s vision of the power of the laity to be missionaries. He would say, “Every Catholic a missionary.” I want to share a quote from Father Judge which for me helps to shed on that insight.
“What can be done to inspire, to provoke, to lead the everyday Catholic into the missionary work in the providence of his everyday life? What is meant by the providence of his or her everyday life? You meet certain people, you have contact with certain persons or places, your life has a certain circumscription, God overshadowing and intervening in all. This is called your daily providence. It is yours indeed; it does not belong to anybody else. Like the skin on your face it is yours personally, nobody else ever had it, nobody else ever will have it. Everyone of us is a center of a particular bit of Divine Providence.” Father Thomas A. Judge, C.M. (MCM p226)
Another quote which is particularly relevant today from him is:
“Live more in the Presence of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Realize more and more that every human being whom you meet is the living image of the Blessed Trinity. Respect and honor all as a consequence.”
Father Thomas A. Judge, C.M. (MCM p3)