Gaining insight into my favorite nuns
All the nuns who taught me in Catholic high school have died and gone to heaven.
Well, I assume they all earned an eternal reward after putting up with punks like me in the classroom.
The service records of these good women are part of the School Sisters of Notre Dame North American Archives that opened last week at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee. It’s a repository of historical documents dating back to the establishment of the congregation in the United States in 1847 by nuns that came over from Germany.
The records, capturing the life and mission of the religious community, were scattered at nearly a dozen sites across the U.S. and Canada. Now, they’re consolidated in rows and rows of boxes in a climate-controlled room at Mount Mary’s Bergstrom Hall.
Archivist Michele Levandoski said the collection is open to the public by appointment only. The phone number is (414) 9302706. In the first week or so, she received 40 requests for information from genealogy buffs, academics and the curious.
“This is going to be a well-used archive,” she said. My interest would fall into the curiosity category. Many of my favorite teachers at Messmer High School in Milwaukee from 1968 to 1972 were School Sisters of Notre Dame. But as a self-absorbed teenager, I didn’t bother to learn much about their lives back then. They were authority figures, and I was a kid they were trying to teach.
So I asked Levandoski to look them up for me. When I arrived at Mount Mary this week, she placed their folders on a table in front of me.
For the first time, I was seeing these sisters as real women with surnames and even first names I never knew. With birthplaces. With parents and siblings. With college degrees. With careers that spanned decades and many schools besides Messmer.
Sister Noraleen Retinger helped teach me to write and handed back my work with lots of corrections in red pen. She made the mistake one day of telling us kids that she once had a childhood sweetheart, and we kept pestering her for details.
Now I know her first name was Helen. She left Messmer eight years after I graduated and then taught violin until she died of a stroke in 1991. I wish I had looked her up and thanked her.
Sister Cecil, last name Rickert, was a whiz of a math teacher who favored the overhead projector. Her records tell me she was born on a farm in Rubicon, Wis., to Hungarian immigrants. Her name was Anne. Like many of the sisters, she attended Mount Mary.
She and Sister Ara Coeli, a sharp, no-nonsense nun who also taught math, inspired me to declare that subject as my major when I started college. But I hated calculus and wound up eventually stumbling into journalism after a detour as an auto mechanic.
Ara Coeli struck me back then as an exotic name. From her folder I learned she was born in Milwaukee and named Rosemary Stoll by her plumber father and homemaker mother. Five of their seven kids became priests and nuns. Sister Ara Coeli left Messmer in 1977 and taught in Africa until she got cancer in 1994.
There was speech teacher Sister Roman. I remember one day an angry student told her off and stomped out of the room, and Sister Roman proclaimed it to be the girl’s best dramatic work of the year. Born Alexandra Obremski, this nun lived to be 100.
There was Sister Angelo, my German teacher who was happiest when she had us singing songs like “Ist Das Nicht Eine Schnitzelbank?” The fifth of 10 kids, she seemed so old to me then, but she was the age I am at now.
And don’t forget Sister Gilbertine and Sister Faustine and Sister Alanna and tiny but legendary Sister Immanuel, who taught my dad at Messmer in the 1930s and was still there working in the office when I showed up.
With half a century gone by, it was good to finally get better acquainted with these remarkable women. They and 9,000 other departed sisters live on in the archives, and I humbly hope this article joins them there.