Catholic nuns face loss, pain

Surviving sisters struggle with grief over the deaths of their fellow Felicians

At the front desk, the kindly nun who greeted visitors is missing, and in the chapel, she no longer waves hello from the last pew on the left. In the convent’s living room, Sister Mary Evelyn Labik isn’t resting in a recliner, and on its porch, she isn’t relishing the hummingbirds.

The heart of this convent is gone, alongside 20 other Felician Sisters around the U.S. And as the world around them ebbs into normalcy, surviving sisters are feeling a wrenching grief over their losses and a nagging need to know what it all means.

Around the Felician world, gripping news trickled out from their convent in Livonia, Mich., last March, of sisters becoming sick and being hospitalized.

By Good Friday, Sister Mary Luiza Wawrzyniak became the sisters’ first casualty, and later on Easter Sunday, two more died. By the end of the first week, the toll was five, and by the end of the second week it was 10.

These were women who held the hands of the dying and who raised the unwanted, who pushed chalk to slate to teach grammar and, through their own example, faith.

And, in an instant, they were gone.

Confined to their rooms as they desperately tried to stop the spread, the Livonia sisters cracked their doors in the morning and peered down the hallway to see if a new sign appeared bearing the news that the night had taken another.

When it did, they absorbed it alone, pinching rosaries and mouthing the same words again and again.

“May our sister,” they asked, “enter the kingdom of peace and light.”

By the end of Livonia’s outbreak, 13 were killed, but summer seemed to bring an end to the crisis.

But reprieve wouldn’t last for the Felicians. A second wave of infections robbed them of sisters in Buffalo, Enfield, CT.; and in Greensburg.

At first, it seemed like Labik had nothing more than a cold. But soon, the 78-year-old was taken away by paramedics, making the sign of the cross as she was led to the ambulance.

From the hospital, by phone, she was lighthearted and laughing. They made plans for when she would return before, suddenly, she took a turn for the worse.

When word of Labik’s death reached the convent, her six sisters went to the chapel, where they prayed and cried. She was later placed in her casket barefoot, in the Franciscan tradition, and buried in her brown habit and black veil.

The order ended the year with 455 sisters across the continent. Fifteen sisters died of varied causes, in addition to the 21 who died of COVID-19. Labik was the only sister to die in Greensburg.

“Everywhere we go,” said Sister Amala Jose, “we remember her and we miss her.”