By Christina Leslie | Correspondent

As evangelists, Christ’s apostles made it their mission to travel widely to share his message of faith. A modern-day descendant of these noble men and women, Servant of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Mary Agnes Ryan, is following in their footsteps as she assumes her new responsibilities as diocesan director of the Ministry of Catechesis and Evangelization.

“My goal for our office,” she noted, “is for a three-pronged evangelization: to reach the people in the pews, those who have wandered from the Church, and those who have not met Jesus Christ.”  The new director, who this month celebrated 49 years as a religious, is up to the task.

Mary Agnes Ryan was born in Deadwood, S.D., the oldest of three children born to Margaret and the late Eugene Ryan. The family moved often during her early years, but settled in suburban Philadelphia. She attended Sacred Heart Elementary School, Manoa, Pa., and graduated from Archbishop Prendergast High School for Girls, Drexel Hill, Pa., in 1965. That September she entered her religious community and made her final profession on June 24, 1968.

Sister Mary Agnes received her bachelor’s degree in English and Theology from Immaculata College (now University), Immaculata, Pa., and a master’s degree in religious studies from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies in Religious Education, Middleburg, Va. (the American campus of St. Thomas Aquinas Pontifical University, Rome.)

During the course of her nearly half-century in ministry, Sister Mary Agnes has enriched the faith lives of Catholics of all ages around the country. For her first 17 years as a religious, she taught Catholic elementary school students in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the dioceses of Camden, Miami and Atlanta. “My goal was to get my big toe into each of the 50 states,” she remembered with a smile. “So far, I’ve been in 33 of them.”

Sister Mary Agnes has served as director of religious education in numerous parishes and in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia; offered workshops and career retreat days for elementary school teachers around the country, was a presenter at multiple Catholic Life Congress meetings, and conducted in-service workshops in Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, N.M.  Before she assumed her role in the Trenton Diocese, Sister Mary Agnes worked in the Diocese of Raleigh, N.C., as parish pastoral associate and an assistant in that Diocese’s Office of Divine Worship.

Sister Mary Agnes’ plans as new director involves, not surprisingly, even more travel, this time throughout the four counties of the Diocese of Trenton.

“My hope it to visit every Catholic elementary school and high school in the Diocese this year, and about half the parishes,” she said. “I need to be out on the road. [Religious instructors] are the face of the Diocese.”

Sister Mary Agnes is not planning on sightseeing, but rather continuing to instruct students and adults in the Catholic faith. “Our schools should be the best they can be, the teachers the best qualified,” she said. “What can we provide to help you in this?”