(1928-2019)

“Looking back over these fifty-two years of life, I am overwhelmed and awed by the presence of the Lord in every moment, at every turn of the road.”

This was the opening sentence of Sister Ann Romayne Fallon’s St. Catherine letter of September 19, 1980. Her second such letter, on October 1, 1980, expanded on that thought: “The years have brought many experiences — some pleasant and others difficult. All have been a means of growth for me, and I feel my friendship with the Lord has been strengthened through each new opportunity to share in the ministry of His Church.”

Mary Patricia Joan Fallon, who went simply by Joan until entering religious life, was born on August 29, 1928, in Detroit to Joseph and Anne (Gough) Fallon. Both Joseph and Anne were born in Ontario, Canada, he in Norwood and she in Belleville, and met in Detroit. Anne’s family had moved there in the 1920s, and when Joseph, who was a tool and die maker, came to the city looking for work, he lived with a friend who introduced him to Anne.

There was a ten-year difference in their ages, but that “was no obstacle to a wonderful marriage,” Sister Ann Romayne wrote. The couple went on to have five children, Joan being the oldest. Margaret followed five years later; Sister Ann Romayne said in her autobiography that Margaret “always claimed that her parents needed five years to muster up the courage to have another child.” After that came Kathleen, then Gerald, and nine years later Virginia Marie, who died of pneumonia in infancy.

(1958-2019)

Remedios Deraco Basilio was born on October 21, 1958, to Elias and Belen (Deraco) Basilio in San Fernando, Pampanga, the Philippines. She was one of five siblings born to the couple; the other Basilio children were Cristina, Dolores, Edgardo, and Jesua.

Sister Remedios graduated from Jose Abad Santos High School in San Fernando in 1975 and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in agriculture/crop science from Pampanga Agricultural College in 1981. She entered the Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of Remedies on October 26, 1986 and was received as a novice in November of the next year.

Immediately after entering, Sister Remedios, who became known as Sister “Medz,” served in pastoral ministry in Santo Tomas until January 1987 and spent the rest of her pre-novitiate year (February-November 1987) as a catechist in Santa Lucia, San Fernando. She was received as a novice on November 7 of that year, and once her canonical novitiate year was complete, she spent eight months (December 1988-August 1989) in pastoral work in Arayat, a city in Pampanga.

She made first profession on November 7, 1989, and began a ministry in social action that took her to the cities of Mabalacat, Pampanga (November 1989-May 1993), Floridablanca, Pampanga (June 1994-May 1997), and San Fernando (June 1999-May 2001. From June 1997 to May 1999, she was treasurer of a school in Guagua.

(1936-2019)

In Sister Charlene Cote’s autobiography, she wrote of the point at which she knew definitively that she was going to become an Adrian Dominican Sister:

I had been thinking of entering the convent ever since high school. One day, in the spring of my sophomore year at Siena, I met Sister Ann Joachim in front of Benincasa Dining Hall looking at the bulletin board. Standing next to me she softly said, ‘”Sister Charlene; we don’t have a Sister Charlene,” and off she went! I knew at that moment I was going to enter the convent!

Sister Charlene was born on June 26, 1936, in Chicago to Napoleon and Harriet (Martineau) Coté. Napoleon and Harriet both came from Manistee, Michigan, meeting when Napoleon was a high school senior. He originally planned to go to college with the money he made working in the summertime on the freighters that plied Lake Michigan, but he ended up getting a job right there in Manistee and never did attend college.

Eventually, he moved to Chicago to find a better job, and after Harriet joined him there the two were married and settled down in St. Laurence Parish on the city’s South Side.

Two girls came into the family: Harriet Marie, named for her mother and called Marie to avoid confusion, and then Charlene three and a half years later. About a month after Charlene was born, their father had the family’s surname changed to remove the accent over the e. “I suspect that it was Mom’s idea,” Sister Charlene wrote.

Read more about Sister Charlene (pdf)

(1931-2019)

As Sister Theresia Scheuer’s funeral Mass drew to a close, those gathered in St. Catherine Chapel sang a closing song that surely summed up Sister Theresia’s life: Robert Lowry’s “How Can I Keep from Singing?”

Music was intertwined with Sister Theresia’s life from her earliest days as a piano teacher’s daughter all the way to her last years, during which she shared her gifts as a singer, cantor, pianist, and organist with her Congregation. In between, she taught music at several schools in Ohio and Michigan, and her last twenty years in active ministry were spent as the music director at St. Alphonsus Parish, Deerfield, Michigan.

Sister Theresia was born Mary Susan Scheuer in Adrian on March 28, 1931, to Edward and Opal (Ott) Scheuer. She was a twin, but the other baby, also a girl, did not survive.

Despite her baptismal name, from early on she was known simply as Susie. She was the youngest of three Scheuer daughters, after Ahlene, the eldest, and JoAnn.

Ahlene “did not at first fancy the idea of another one in the family,” Sister Theresia wrote in an autobiography that dates back to her early high school years. “But gradually she became accustomed to the idea and didn’t think me quite so bad after all. JoAnn, who is between Ahlene and me in age, was quite thrilled.”