Hundreds gather to mourn nuns
DURANT, Miss. — Hundreds of people filled a cathedral in Mississippi’s capital city on Monday to remember two nuns who spent decades helping the needy and were found stabbed to death last week in their home in one of the poorest counties of the state.
An initial court appearance was scheduled to take place hours later for the man charged with two counts of capital murder in the slayings of Sisters Margaret Held and Paula Merrill, both 68. It was not immediately clear whether Rodney Earl Sanders, 46, of Kosciusko, Miss., would be represented by an attorney in Durant city court.
Capital murder can be punishable by execution or life in prison, and the sisters’ religious orders have issued a joint statement against the death penalty.
Sanders confessed to the killings but gave no reason, said Holmes County Sheriff Willie March. Sanders had been living about 24 km east of the sisters’ Durant home.
Merrill and Held worked as nurse practitioners at Lexington Medical Clinic, where they often treated poor and uninsured patients with diabetes and other chronic conditions. Their bodies were found in their home after they failed to show up at work Thursday.
The killings shocked people in the small communities where the women committed their lives to helping the poor.
Bishop Joseph Kopacz and more than 20 priests from the Diocese of Jackson celebrated a memorial mass on Monday at the small but ornate Cathedral of St. Peter in downtown Jackson, about an hour’s drive south of Durant. The front pews were filled by family members and sisters from Held’s and Merrill’s religious orders, the Kentucky-based Sisters of Charity of Nazareth and the School Sisters of St. Francis of Milwaukee.
The Rev. Greg Plata, who ministers at the church in Lexington, Miss., where Held and Merrill led Bible study, praised them for their lives of service. He said that people in Mississippi sometimes have trouble understanding Catholic concepts like religious life.
“What they do understand and see quite clearly is Christian love in action,” he said. “That’s what the good people saw at the Lexington Medical Clinic, was love in action. We all recognized that love, and you couldn’t help but love them back.”