What's Happening

rss


close-up of the corner of a jail cell

February 22, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – A recent presentation offered by the Adrian Dominican Sisters Office of Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusion explored the lives of a population often cast aside or derided by the mainstream culture: prison inmates.

The February 7, 2024, presentation, Light from the Cage, also touched upon racism. “Culturally, we know that Black males are overrepresented in prison,” said Kevin Hofmann, Director of the Office of Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusion, in his introduction to the presentation. He challenged the audience to consider how their culture views prisons and prison inmates.

Judy Wenzel, author of the 2017 book Light from the Cage: 25 Years in a Prison Classroom, spoke of her experience as an adult educator who, seeking a substitute teaching job with Milan [Michigan] Area Schools, was called upon instead to fill an immediate opening as a teacher in the Milan Federal Correctional Institution. “That short walk across the hall totally changed my life,” she said.

Judy noted the diversity of inmates in federal prisons and her challenge as a white woman teaching them. “So a federal prison has people from all over the world, and when I [first] got there, my students were mostly white – and then the mass incarceration really kicked in,” she said. “So then what I had in the early ’90s were young Black men from Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Cleveland – young, in their ’20s. They just got swept up.” 

She ultimately learned how to reach her diverse group of students when a student told her they were uninterested in Van Gogh or Shakespeare. She reached them with Black spirituals, Black literature, and poetry.

But Judy soon came to realize the creativity of her students. One student in her a history class suggested that they create and perform a play. She invited others to attend the “Breakfast Theater,” which the audience loved. “Then we were off and running, so we did all kinds of plays the whole time I was there,” Judy recalled. “It was so much fun.” 

Through the years, Judy learned from her students: from one who took all of her classes and included a paragraph of wisdom in each assignment, from a group of students who held a mock election in 2008, and from the way many of them lived through long prison sentences for drug violations. “How do you come in and face 33 years?” she asked. “There are saints who live there.”

Judy also experienced the kindness of the men – to each other, as they faced years together in prison, and to herself when her father died, and later when she broke her ankle. When she finally returned to teach at the prison, she said, the men provided her with a table so she could teach while sitting down. “They flanked me down the hall so I wouldn’t fall,” Judy recalled. “They were nursing me back to health.”

Judy also spoke of the damage that prison does to inmates and society. “We have a terrible idea of who’s in prison,” she said. “Prisons do two things really well: they keep people in, and they keep the rest of us out, so we can’t get near them.” The system also devastates the inmates, taking away their agency and their ability to figure out how to lead a good life, and family members who suffer from the lack of their loved one’s presence in their daily lives. 

Watch the video of Light from the Cage.


Sister Patty, a while women with gray hair wearing glasses, a burgundy sweater, and a pink scarf, stands at the podium while a Black woman with short black hair and glasses wearing a gray sweater stands next to her holding a plaque

January 22, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – Sister Patricia Harvat, OP, received the Community Service Award on January 15, 2024, during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration in Adrian. The event took place in the Tobias Center of Adrian College.

In her nomination, Sister Kathleen Nolan, OP, noted that Sister Patricia has been an active member of the Adrian Human Rights Commission and “instrumental in creating a number of programs and events to engage the Adrian community in exploring the issues and promoting cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

Sister Patricia was involved in much of that work as a General Councilor for the Adrian Dominican Sisters from 2016 to 2022, charged with leading the committee that addressed the Congregation’s 2016 Enactment on Diversity and Relationships. In turn, a Congregational committee – Toward Communion: Ending Racism, Embracing Diversity – worked with both Sisters and Adrian Dominican Associates to help them become more aware of racism. 

“Sister Patricia’s dedication and passion … helped create a space where people, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity, can feel safe and are reverenced,” Sister Kathleen wrote.

“I am deeply grateful and truly honored and humbled to receive this award,” Sister Patricia said. “I accept it in the name of all the Adrian Dominican Sisters and Associates.” After learning she would receive the award, she said, “My head was filled with the wonderful people who mentored and accompanied me these years in working with the city of Adrian and with our Sisters and Associates.”

In particular, Sister Patricia paid tribute to a small group of local people of color who met with her beginning in 2016 to help her in her work focusing on undoing racism and embracing diversity. “They became not only my mentors [and] colleagues, but became my friends,” she said. “They not only taught me a wealth of knowledge, but they touched my spirit of what it meant to be strangers no longer.”

The group included Andre’a Benard of Christ Temple Ministries International in Adrian; Jeanette Henagan, President of the Lenawee County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Idali Feliciano of the Adrian Human Relations Commission; Rudy Flores, an advocate for migrants; and Dionardo Pizana, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Specialist for the Michigan State University Extension.  

In an interview, Sister Patricia said she wasn’t sure where to begin when leading the Congregation in living out the Enactment on Diversity and Relationships. “I reached out to people of color,” she said. The group met every two to three months. “We didn’t have a structure or an agenda,” she said. “We’d get together and start talking. We got to know one another … and then discussed how to educate the people in Adrian. We started to bridge the gap between people of color and people not of color understanding one another.”

Dionardo and Sisters from Pax Christi worked closely with the committee to discuss their experiences of race. “Members of the Toward Communion group came closer to one another,” Sister Patricia recalled. “We understood one another at a depth greater than ‘how are you?’ … It was respectful. We got to be seen.” 

In turn, the Toward Communion committee worked with Sisters and Associates to help them understand people from other ethnic groups and cultures. Kevin Hofmann, Director of the the Congregation’s Office of Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusion, continues the work that Sister Patricia started with Sisters and Associates. 

Before her election to the General Council, Sister Patricia served eight years as the Director of Lay Ministry Formation for the Hispanic Ministry Office of the Diocese of Cleveland. There, she worked with people from 23 Hispanic countries with distinct cultures. The people shared and celebrated their diverse cultures during an annual Faith and Culture celebration. 

“I learned the joy of diverse populations coming together and celebrating together,” Sister Patricia recalled. “There wasn’t one culture that was better than another. The Salvadorans were as respected as the Mexicans. The Guatemalans were as respected as the Venezuelans. They all had their distinctive food and language.” 

Sister Patricia also experienced the joys and benefits of diversity in her earlier ministries in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. One fond memory is professing her final vows in Puerto Rico among all the people she worked with and another is the work she did with children and their families in the Head Start program. Sister Patricia also spent time in the Dominican Republic visiting different parts of the island to teach theology to the youth workers.

Read more coverage of the Martin Luther King Celebration in the Daily Telegram, a newspaper in Adrian, Michigan.

 

Feature photo at top: Sister Patricia Harvat, OP, accepts the 2024 Community Service Award during the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration at Adrian College’s Tobias Center. Eugenia McClain, right, presented the award. Photo by Anna Marie Anzalone, used with permission.


 

 

Search News Articles

Recent Posts

Read More »