(1924-2020)

For me, teaching never became boring because each year was a new beginning and each class a special challenge. I will always consider it a real DOMINICAN MINISTRY.

Sister Mary Jo O’Hanlon wrote these words in her autobiography during the last few years of a forty-eight year teaching ministry that took her from one end of the U.S. to another as well as to the Dominican Republic.

Mary Josephine O’Hanlon was born in County Kerry, Ireland, on April 27, 1924. Her parents, Patrick and Julia (O’Sullivan) O’Hanlon, both originally of Ireland, married in America and had a son, Jimmy, but when Julia’s sister became ill and returned to Ireland, Julia accompanied her and remained there after her sister’s death because she loved her homeland and her own health was fragile. Patrick stayed in America to work but traveled as he could to Ireland. Not only Mary Jo, but her younger sister Joan, as well, were born in Ireland.

Julia died in 1929 at the age of just thirty-five, and Mary Jo’s grandparents took in both her and Jimmy while Joan was raised by an aunt. Jimmy died of an infection shortly thereafter; “my uncle carried my brother to the hospital from which he never returned and at that time I didn’t understand why he never came back to us,” Sister Mary Jo wrote in her autobiography.

Read more about Sister Mary Jo (pdf)

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

 

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