Results

“You enter community and spend three years learning who you are,” Sister Joni said. “The masks that we build start to peel away and you become the person God created you to be.” In her new ministry Sister Joni is reconnecting Saint Patrick School in Terre Haute with the Sisters of Providence, the order that founded the school in 1882.

Sister Joni Luna reflects on religious life

We are used to thinking of saints in the past tense. It seems incredible that saints might walk among us today, but they do. What do they do that the rest of us don’t? Not much, really. Sainthood is less a way of doing than a way of being. As Mother Theodore said, “Let us never forget that if we wish to die like the Saints, we must live like them. “

It was fitting that our discernment weekend for women interested in knowing more about religious life was during the FEST. It energized me to have seven women who came from Georgia, California, Michigan, and Indiana to have closer interactions with sisters, especially our sisters in initial formation and our sisters who minister in new membership.

May our compassionate God provide you and Rosalynn with those graces you most need and desire.

Through the years, I have seen that the Sisters of Providence are keenly oriented toward both translating the virtues of heaven and toward the pursuit of justice itself. In seeing this, I have sought to join them — and so it is here and now that our paths converge.

So, I ask myself, why would I want to retire when there are still so many possibilities of God’s Providence yet to enjoy just beyond the next horizon? It’s a no-brainer – I will just keep on listening to God’s invitations and saying “yes!”

‘Teaching is in my blood’

Sister Dina Bato, a woman in formation with the Sisters of Providence, shares what Foundation Day means to her. In Sister Dina’s words, “Mother Theodore brought all of who she was into this mission. That’s what we’re called to do.”