In observance of the Year of Consecrated Life, The Monitor will dedicate a monthly feature, sharing stories of different individuals in our Diocese who have committed their lives to serving God as a religious priest, brother or sister. In the third of these monthly insertions, St. Joseph Sister Rose McDermott talks about how God “pursued” her to fulfill her vocation to both the religious life and to teaching.

By St. Joseph Sister Rose McDermott

Third in a Series

In grade school I loved the Immaculate Heart Sisters. My Mom cautioned my Dad, “she takes everything in the house to the sisters.”

The attractions of teen years took over, and I focused on boys, dating, parish dances, movies and all the distractions that interfere with the academic life of a teenager.  However, it was in senior English class at West Catholic High School that my vocation surfaced. Guided by a Sister of St. Joseph, we studied Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, and I realized that I was “fleeing Him down the nights and down the days … while those strong Feet followed, followed after.”

 I had the wisdom at seventeen to know that I would never be happy if I did not give religious life a try. Yet, the thought of departing my family, my friends, and the assurance of a position with the Federal Bureau of Investigation had me “sore adread, lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.” 

Entering Mount St. Joseph with some 40 other young women, I experienced peace and accepted the challenge of being formed as a Sister of St. Joseph. Postulancy and novitiate with strong emphasis on prayer and charity passed all too quickly, and I became a “mission novice,” poised for my encounter with some 55 third grade children in a Camden classroom.

At 20, I taught the youngsters supported by an experienced grade partner, took classes in methodology and classroom management on Saturdays, followed by college courses. Teaching 11 subjects in a “self-contained” classroom, I came to know “my” children. Some probably had the attention-deficit problems we know today, but I was too young and inexperienced to fathom such. I loved the youngsters, and they loved me. I taught them reading, writing, arithmetic, and to think for themselves (teaching, not testing). Above all, I instructed them in love of God and others. 

With so many vocations, assignments came often, and I departed my apostolates with regret and loss for the children I had come to love. Entering at such an early age, I had to go through the same maturation process as my friends who married. I searched for my child in the faces of the youngsters I taught; and realized that I, too, could have loved another human being and devoted my life to what was best for a family. A retreat master once observed that those who make the best priests and religious would probably make the best husbands and wives, and vice-versa. Deep down, I knew with absolute certainty that my love was directed to the “Hound” who remonstrated, “Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save Me, save only Me.”

A Sister of St. Joseph remains open to mission, and I am presently in my 16th assignment:  parochial and high schools, formation of young sisters, graduate studies, delegate for religious, and teaching at the graduate level consume my apostolic life. In the formation of our young sisters and teaching in seminaries and the School of Canon Law at CUA, I had the privilege of instructing those who eventually serve other members of the Christian faithful.

As an administrator for 19 years in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Diocese of Trenton, and as Interim Dean in the School of Canon Law, I came to realize that one can educate through ministries other than teaching.  I remain ever grateful to Cardinal John Krol and Bishop David M. O’Connell, C.M., for entrusting me with those positions.

At death, the final act of obedience a Sister of St. Joseph gives her Maker, I pray the Hound will smile and remind me what He taught a girl of seventeen in a senior English class:

“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in 
My arms
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee 
at home.
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”

St. Joseph Sister Rose McDermott, is Delegate for Religious for the Diocese.