(1944-2017)

Patricia Jean Seckel was born December 7, 1944 in Detroit, the middle child of seven.  Her parents, Robert and Ruth LaBell Seckel, lived in Detroit their entire lives. Both of her parents worked hard to provide for their family. 

Patty attended Our Lady Queen of Peace School and Madison High School, graduating in 1964. She felt a calling to work in the healthcare field. She worked for more than 25 years in nursing homes and with mentally and physically challenged children and adults.  

After her father died very suddenly in 1981, Patty lived with her mother in Clinton Township, Michigan. She cared for her mother and worked full time in nursing homes, urgent care facilities, and doctor’s offices. After taking classes for years, Patty graduated from the Carnegie Institute in 1988, earning a certificate as a medical assistant.

Read more about Patty (pdf) 

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

Leave your comments and remembrances (if you don't see the comment box below, click on the "Read More" link).

(1939-2017)

“We come with awfully heavy hearts this evening to celebrate the life of Jude, our sister, our friend, our aunt, our cousin. She was one of us for a long time, and she was taken very quickly.”

So began the remembrance of Sister Jude Van Baalen by her Chapter Prioress, Sister Kathleen Klingen, at the Vigil Service held in Adrian on November 16, 2017. The “heavy hearts” to which Sister Kathleen referred had been made even more so by the unexpected and sudden circumstances of Sister Jude’s passing: only days before, she had suffered a brain bleed and been taken to a Chicago emergency room. From there, she was brought to Adrian, where she died on November 14.

Born Judy Marie Van Baalen on November 6, 1939, in Detroit, Jude, as she always preferred to be known, was the second child of Edward and Susan Lucille Flanagan Van Baalen. She had an older brother, Paul, and over time four more children – Susan, Marc, Edward, Mary, and Ann – were born into the family. As more little Van Baalens came into the world, the family moved to successively larger houses around the city, and as a result, Sister Jude attended four parochial schools: Gesu, Blessed Sacrament, St. John the Apostle, and St. Philip Neri.

Her high school years, however, were spent at Dominican High School, which brought her into contact with the Adrian Dominicans and planted the seeds of religious life. She wrote to Mother Gerald Barry on March 3, 1957, near the end of her senior year at Dominican High, requesting entrance into the Congregation, and became a postulant that June. When she was received into the novitiate in December, it was with the religious name Sister Jude Marie. One of her sisters, Susan, followed her into the Congregation in 1959.

Read more about Sister Jude (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

Leave your comments and remembrances (if you don't see the comment box below, click on the "Read More" link).

(1945-2017)

When she returned to Adrian on November 18, 2016, to live out whatever remaining time God had given her on Earth, Sister Romona Nowak proclaimed herself there to work on her Ph.D: “Praying for a Happy Death.”

Sister Romona turned those weeks and months of facing incurable cancer into a ministry to others, regularly posting meditations on her experience to the Adrian listserv. “Romona epitomized Henry Nouwen’s Wounded Healer. She beautifully and consistently ministered out of her own vulnerability,” said Sister Mary Jane Lubinski, OP, Sister Romona’s Chapter Prioress, at the Ritual of Remembering held after Sister Romona’s death. “Few of us would tell our story so boldly, speak of death and hold open the wound so that others may gain strength. She is a model and a preacher…”

Born on July 19, 1945, in Chicago to Lucian and Jeanette Wysocki Nowak, Sister Romona and her brother, Robert, grew up in difficult circumstances. According to the stories that her chaplain at the Dominican Life Center, Rev. Cathy Johnson, set down in a biography, Lucian was a hardworking baker, and there was tension in the home made worse by the fact that her mother was hospitalized for depression. “Mona learned to play the piano and this offered her freedom of expression which she found helpful,” her biography read. According to her application for admittance to the Congregation, she also played the accordion.

Sister Romona attended elementary school at St. Mary Magdalene and then went to Aquinas Dominican High, during which time she worked in a shoe store and as a waitress, among other things. After earning her diploma, she enrolled at Siena Heights College, and it was there, during a retreat, that she was introduced to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. According to her biography, she “experienced a oneness with God and with earth. And this was when she knew she wanted to become a nun as a way to live her thank-you to God.”

Read more about Sister Romona (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

Leave your comments and remembrances (if you don't see the comment box below, click on the "Read More" link).

(1941-2017)

“A woman of generosity and gratitude, a lover of children, cats, and life.”

That was how Sister Mary Jane Lubinski, OP, Adrian Crossroads Chapter Prioress, remembered Sister Patricia (almost always known as simply “Pat”) Janowicz at the Vigil Service held after Sister Pat’s death.

Sister Pat was born on May 27, 1941, in Wyandotte (Michigan) General Hospital, the only child of Sigmund and Frances (Lisek) Janowicz. All four of her grandparents were Polish, and she grew up surrounded by rich Polish traditions. Pat remembered in her autobiography that she called her grandparents either the “Wyandotte grandma and grandpa” (her mother’s parents) or the “Detroit grandma and grandpa” (her father’s parents) so as to distinguish which set she was going to visit.

When Sister Pat was very small, the family moved from an apartment to a small house in Dearborn, Michigan, and from there, in 1945, to a larger home on Detroit’s northwest side. Sigmund worked as a truck driver, hauling sand to make concrete, and as a little girl, Sister Pat, a self-described tomboy, played not with dolls but with toy trucks and sand.

Read more about Sister Pat (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. Funeral arrangements are being handled by Anderson-Marry Funeral Home, Adrian.

Leave your comments and remembrances (if you don't see the comment box below, click on the "Read More" link).