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April 13, 2023, Adrian, Michigan – She is a joy to be around. Her constant, prayerful presence, sitting and keeping vigil with many of the Sisters as they lie dying. Her great smile lights up every room she enters. She is committed to showing up every day with joy and gladness. She always looks out for everyone.
These are some of the many ways that Adrian Dominican Sisters, Associates, Co-workers, and friends to describe Sister Miriam Joseph Lekan on the occasion of her 100th birthday. The spirit of gratitude, admiration, and love was present April 12, 2023, during a birthday celebration, which began with Mass in her honor.
Birthday Celebration
Sister Sharon Spanbauer, Mission Prioress of Holy Rosary Mission Chapter based in Adrian, greeted the assembly, noting that Sister Miriam Joseph was joining the ranks of beloved Adrian Dominican centenarians. “We pray that Sister Miriam Joseph’s heart will be overflowing with joy, knowing the countless ways she blesses our daily lives,” Sister Sharon said.
In a reflection on the Gospel story of the risen Jesus’ encounter with two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Sister Judy Friedel, OP, Chapter Prioress of Holy Rosary Mission Chapter, noted the similarity between Jesus’ outreach to the disciples and Sister Miriam Joseph’s to the people she encounters. “Jesus and Miriam enjoy the vitality and wonder of communion with God’s people,” Sister Judy said. “May we endeavor to do so as well, even more consciously and eagerly these Easter days.”
Left: Sister Judy Friedel, OP, Chapter Prioress of the Holy Rosary Mission Chapter, offers a reflection during a special Mass on April 12, 2023, marking Sister Miriam Joseph Lekan’s 100th birthday; Center: Father James Hug, SJ, priest chaplain for the Adrian Dominican Sisters, greets Sister Miriam Joseph Lekan; Right: The assembly at Mass offers the traditional Dominican Blessing to Sister Miriam Joseph Lekan
During the afternoon celebration, Sister Judy read some of the many responses to the question of the importance of celebrating Sister Miriam Joseph’s 100th birthday. Sister Miriam Joseph also received a proclamation from Angela Sword Heath, Mayor of Adrian; a Pontifical Blessing from Pope Francis; more than 100 birthday cards; and two bouquets: one from Holy Rosary Mission Chapter and the other from St. Augustine Health Campus, a senior living facility in Cleveland where Sister Miriam Joseph ministered for many years.
Sister Elise D. García, OP, Prioress of the Adrian Dominican Congregation, also paid tribute to her. “Such great love we have for you,” she told Sister Miriam Joseph. “I think you can feel that deep gratitude to you for the life you have given to so many of us and to so many people on God’s Earth.” Sister Elise also spoke of the blessing she received from Sister Miriam Joseph’s presence during daily Mass and her loving presence to the Sisters who are dying.
Sister Miriam Joseph responded with heart-felt thanksgiving to all assembled for her birthday.
Left: Sister Judy Friedel, OP, Chapter Prioress of Holy Rosary Mission Chapter, presents a proclamation from Adrian Mayor Angela Sword Heath to Sister Miriam Joseph Lekan; Right: Sister Elise D. García, OP, Prioress of the Adrian Dominican Congregation, offers words of gratitude and appreciation to Sister Miriam Joseph Lekan.
Sister Miriam Joseph’s Early Life
“Living a religious life is all planned for me, [involving] complete trust in God in every challenge that came up,” she said in an interview before the celebration. She expressed her “deep appreciation for all the friendships and the assistance that I had throughout all these years – and it doesn’t feel like 81 years as a nun and 100 years chronologically.”
Born on April 10, 1923, in Cleveland, Ohio, and baptized Josephine Bernadette Lekan, she was the ninth of the 12 children of Joseph and Frances (Perko) Lekan. Like most men in their neighborhood, Joseph worked in the American Steel and Wire Company. “Growing up during the Depression years, we all learned what it meant to live a life of hardship,” Sister Miriam Joseph said.
The family was very happy when Josephine entered the Adrian Dominican Congregation in June 1942. “I went to school with Adrian Dominican Sisters for eight years” at St. Lawrence in Cleveland, Sister Miriam Joseph recalled. While attending Holy Name, a co-ed high school with the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, she felt a call to religious life. She delayed entering the Adrian Dominican Congregation for a year so that she could spend time with her oldest brother, who was returning home from the seminary in Switzerland.
Years in Mission
She took her religious name, Sister Miriam Joseph, when she was received into the novitiate on December 31, 1942. She professed first vows on January 4, 1944, and final vows on January 4, 1949. Sister Miriam Joseph received a bachelor's degree in Latin from Siena Heights College (University) in Adrian in 1952 and a master's degree in Latin from DePaul University, Chicago, in 1959.
Sister Miriam Joseph spent the first 37 years of ministry in education and recalled the years when Adrian Dominican Sisters received an assignment to ministry every year in August. “Each appointment was kind of a challenge – not knowing what that new appointment was going to be and yet it always ended up in a happy ministry, wherever it was,” she said.
Education ministry took Sister Miriam Joseph to classrooms in Illinois, Michigan, Florida, and Ohio. While she enjoyed her time in all of the schools, two stand out in her memory. She was one of two Adrian Dominican Sisters sent to Grand Ledge – near Lansing, Michigan – to open St. Michael School. “I couldn’t believe when I was assigned to open a school,” she said. “The first summer I had to come to Adrian and take administration classes.”
She also has special memories of Bishop Quarter, a boarding school for boys in Oak Park, Illinois. “If you know anything about boarding school, you’re on duty 24 hours out of 24,” she said. She worked with the first- and second-grade students. She recalled one young student still awake after 10 p.m. because he couldn’t go to sleep. She asked if he was feeling lonesome. “He sat up and threw his arms around me,” she recalled. “That’s all he needed was giving a hug to someone besides his mother.”
During her last teaching assignment at St. Francis Xavier, Medina, Ohio, Sister Miriam asked for – and received – permission to train to be a licensed practical nurse. She studied at Lakewood School of Practical Nursing in Lakewood, Ohio, and, when she had passed the Boards, was hired at St. John Hospital in Cleveland. She worked there for eight years – until the hospital closed. She then worked for the newly established St. Augustine Health Campus, a senior living facility, until her retirement in July 2000. “I loved both teaching when I did it and I liked nursing,” Sister Miriam Joseph said. “It might be my inner liking to serve people.”
Sister Miriam said she was surprised to be turning 100. “I don’t look at the numbers,” she said. “I don’t think of it as 100. I’m just so grateful for these 81 years that I’ve been an Adrian Dominican. God was just in the divine plan for me, 81 years ago.”
View highlights from the celebration below.
April 12, 2023, Suttons Bay, Michigan – Sister Susan Gardner, OP, was recently invited to serve on the national Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project (AHP) and on its Listening, Learning, and Education Subcommittee. The project’s goal is to bring about healing and accountability with Native American Catholics in response to the Church’s sin of attempting to eradicate the culture and language of Indigenous children through boarding schools.
Last month, the subcommittee offered two webinars to educate people in the United States about the boarding schools: “Native Boarding Schools: Learning from History to Promote Healing” and “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma and Resilience in First Nations Communities.”
Sister Susan’s service on the committee is the latest aspect of her many years of ministry with Indigenous Americans. She served with First Nations peoples in the Archdiocese of Keewatin-le Pas – encompassing parts of the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. She currently ministers at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish, which includes numerous Native American parishioners, in Suttons Bay, Michigan, and as the Director of the Native American Apostolate for the Diocese of Gaylord, Michigan.
Sister Susan said the AHP Committee is made up of people from across the United States: Indigenous people, single and married people, women religious, and priests. The goal of the subcommittee, she said, is to “educate the Catholics in the pews” who never heard of Catholic institutions such as boarding schools for Native American children. In the videos, she said, “we try to emphasize how really horrible it was.”
Boarding schools for Native American children were instituted by the U.S. government about 150 years ago in an effort to teach the ways of the new U.S. culture and to eradicate the students’ own culture and language. The schools were run by religious groups, including the Catholic Church in the United States.
The injustice of the boarding schools was brought forward in the subcommittee’s first video by Father Michael Carson, Assistant Director for Native American Affairs Committee on Multicultural Diversity in the Church for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He called the Church’s role in boarding schools a sin, Sister Susan said. “Our sin was that the Church has taught from the beginning of time that it’s the parents’ responsibility to teach the children – and we pulled the children from their homes,” Father Michael said in the video. “We should never have allowed that to happen or the abuse to happen. It was racist.”
Sister Susan emphasized that the children who attended the schools – and their parents – suffered trauma from the experience. In the subcommittee’s second video, she said, presenter Amy Bombay, MA, PhD, spoke of how trauma is handed down from one generation to the next. “Children who went to the school didn’t have a parenting model – they didn’t know how to love,” Sister Susan explained. “If they smiled or waved to their sisters or brothers [while at the boarding school], they were punished. It broke down all the family ties. When they became parents, they didn’t know how to love their children.”
Sister Susan noted that many of her parishioners were affected by Holy Childhood of Jesus, a boarding school in Harbor Springs, Michigan, open from 1829 to 1983. The suffering that the children endured still affects some former students today. She recounted a recent incident in which a funeral was held at the school. One woman could not go to the hall for the funeral luncheon because of the painful memories. “That was where the children were punished so severely,” she said.
Sister Susan is enthusiastic about the Gaylord Diocese’s upcoming approach to healing people wounded by the boarding schools. On Saturday, May 20, 2023, her parish will host a ritual to return the names of the children who attended Holy Childhood of Jesus back to their families. “Children’s names were taken from them when they went to the boarding school,” she said.
Invitations to the Giving Back the Names ceremony were sent to the Tribal Councils of six tribes. “Five tribes responded with total gratitude and can’t wait to come,” Sister Susan said. “We’ll be in a circle with each group to say we’re doing this because we’re deeply sorry for what happened and we want to hear their stories.”
During the ceremony, “each set of names [listed in a large book] will be smudged,” following a common indigenous ritual in which herbs such as sage are burned and used to cleanse an object or space, Sister Susan said. Bishop Jeffrey Walsh of the Diocese of Gaylord will present the book of names from each tribe to the Tribal Chairperson, who will be invited to speak.
While the Giving Back the Names ceremony is a new approach – Sister Susan believes that the Diocese of Gaylord is the first to hold this ceremony – many other Catholic groups that have been involved in boarding schools have sought reconciliation as well. Communities of women religious, for example, are apologizing to the communities whose members were taught in the boarding schools they ran.
While Sister Susan and members of the Healing and Reconciliation Project are working with Indigenous people to acknowledge the sins of the past, she and her subcommittee are also working with the public to make more people aware of the boarding schools and the suffering they brought about.
“My hope is that we continue to reach people,” Sister Susan said. She most often hears the argument that most of the boarding schools were in place a long time ago and don’t need to be discussed. “My response is usually that the Holocaust happened a long time ago and yet we do not doubt the stories of the Jewish people,” she said. Just as the Holocaust was a trauma for the Jewish people, so are Native Americans still traumatized by the boarding schools.
“The message I want to give is to please listen with open hearts and minds to anything [Native Americans] say, because healing can only happen when we listen and understand and believe,” Sister Susan said. “I just hope that healing can really begin and make a difference.”
Read more about Catholic involvement in boarding schools in this article from The National Catholic Reporter’s Global Sisters Project.