'How many of us will be left?' Catholic nuns face loss, pain

GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP) — At the front desk, the kindly nun who greeted visitors is missing, and in the chapel, where stained glass paints the walls with pastels, she no longer waves hello from the last pew on the left. In the convent’s living room, Sister Mary Evelyn Labik isn’t resting in a tan recliner, and on its porch, she isn’t relishing the hummingbirds.

The heart of this little convent is gone, alongside 20 other Felician Sisters around the U.S. And as the world around them ebbs into normalcy, surviving sisters are feeling a wrenching grief over their losses and a nagging need to know what it all means.

“There’s got to be a reason,” Sister Mary Jeanine Morozowich says of her survival. “What is God asking me to do?”

Among hundreds of communities of Catholic sisters, the Felicians have neither the ubiquity of bigger ones like the Salesians, nor the singular focus of those like the School Sisters of Notre Dame, nor the repute of women following in Mother Teresa’s footsteps in the Missionaries of Charity. But they are scattered like mustard seeds across the continent and beyond, from a clinic in Jacmel, Haiti, to a preschool south of the Arctic Circle in Tulita, Canada, running affordable housing, ministering to inmates, teaching in schools and, time and again, focusing their work on the poor, disabled and sick.

Around the Felician world, gripping news trickled out from their convent in Livonia, Michigan, last March, of sisters becoming sick and being hospitalized.

By Good Friday, Sister Mary Luiza Wawrzyniak became the sisters’ first casualty there, and three days later on Easter Sunday, two more died. By the end of the first week, the toll was five, and by the end of the second week it was a staggering 10.

These were women who held the hands of the dying and who raised the unwanted, who...