S. Camilla Gertrude
S. Margie Gillis
S. Judith Rollo
S. Cecelia Sacca
S. Doris Schoner
S. Fleurette Sweeney
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Piano Lessons: A Story of Yearning, Generosity and Lasting Love
Originally appeared in the January 2004 issue of Charity Alive
by S. Marie Gillen
On Sunday mornings I frequently listen to CBC’s The Sunday Edition, hosted by Michael Enright. September 21 of this year was not one of these Sundays, so I didn’t hear the essay entitled Piano Lessons. Fortunately, S. Paule Cantin heard the essay, recognized the name of the student, the school and the music teacher. She thought this wonderful tribute should be in the archives; our archivist agreed and ordered the tape. The author of the essay, the music pupil, was Bernadette Griffin, who went to the Leonard School in Quebec with S. Paule, and the music teacher was S. Camilla Gertrude, a member of our Congregation who died in 1971. It was a heartwarming and very moving story beautifully narrated. The tape is a wonderful tribute to one of our many devoted music teachers over the years. In his introduction, Michael Enright notes that there is often a very special connection between the piano teacher and the pupil and this happens in the making of beautiful music together.
In the 1940s, Bernadette was a six-year-old grade one pupil at the Leonard School. She developed a deep yearning to learn to play the piano. Every morning when the school bell rang outside and the doors of the school opened, she would see S. Camilla Gertrude stationed at the upright piano in the lobby where she “hammered out a thunderous version of The Maple Leaf Forever” as the pupils solemnly marched two-by-two up the steps and into their classroom. She soon began pestering her mother for piano lessons. When the reply, “no money for that here,” was always the answer, she stopped asking until one day she decided to ask again. Her mother, probably exasperated and hoping that a few lessons might cure her, handed her four five dollar bills. The next day she knocked on S. Camilla Gertrude’s door and proudly handed her the money; the music lessons began. Every day she came to school at 7:30 a.m. to practice on one of the school pianos. Soon she needed more money, but her mother told a sad little girl that they had too many mouths to feed and that the piano lessons would have to cease. On the way to school the next day, she rehearsed what she would tell S. Camilla Gertrude. She knocked on the studio door, stood there and wept. She was ashamed for not having the money and ashamed for the tears. Sister gathered the little girl into her “swishy black skirts” and wiped her tears with her huge white handkerchief. She then very softly said, “Come to your lessons anyway!”
Bernadette continued her lessons for 11 years. Following graduation she worked for two years, saved her money, and then enrolled in nursing school. Five years later as a young registered nurse she was “swishing along in her white starched uniform,” making the rounds of the orthopedic unit and visiting new patients. She entered room 202, and to her surprise, “There she [was], S. Camilla Gertrude lying on a stryker frame with both legs suspended in the air.” She had fallen through a rusted-out fire escape balcony at the convent and fractured a hip and both legs. She looked “fragile and almost child-like...When she said, ‘Oh, it’s you Bernadette,’ with that imploring look you often see in patients, all those years with her came racing back — most of all I remembered how she gathered me into her swishy skirts that miserable day and said, ‘Come anyway!’”
Bernadette nursed S. Camilla Gertrude while her bones knit. “I lifted her off the stryker frame and gathered her into my swishy uniform as she took her first faltering steps on spindly legs and when she wept, I wiped away the tears. In a way, her few months with me and my 11 years with her created a kind of equilibrium like a sonata when a theme invoked in the first movement returns again in the last — the first utterance now transformed by what has happened in between giving a sense of proportion, finality to the whole piece.” The theme in this case is “lasting love” grounded in a yearning and fostered by great generosity.
About S. Camilla Gertrude:
According to our archival file, her name was Anastasia MacGillivray. She was born in Glace bay, in 1904. She taught music her entire religious life; in fact, she taught until the day before her death in 1971. In addition to her great love of music, she was well prepared for her music ministry. She held a teacher’s license in music from the Catholic University of America and a certificate in music from the Toronto Conservatory. A Sister who lived with her in Quebec told me that S. Camilla had great compassion for the poor. This story is a wonderful tribute to her great generosity as a Sister of Charity.
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“Love God... with the strength of our arm and the sweat of our brow.”
S. Margie Gillis currently works with several community development organizations in Cape Breton. She’s Executive Director of Carmel Centre in New Waterford, staff member of New Dawn Enterprises, co-chair of the Cape Breton Wellness Centre, Secretary of NewERA (the New Waterford Economic Renewal Association) and a member of the advisory committee for the Cape Breton Women’s Employment Initiative, among others. She has earned an Education degree from Mount Saint Vincent University, and a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on community economic development from York University, Toronto.
“Love God... with the strength of our arm and the sweat of our brow.” These words of Saint Vincent de Paul have great meaning for me.
God is the foundational force for goodness, love and justice in our world. This is the image of God that I most hold to in these times. The challenges are greater today than ever, and there’s a need for an equal and greater response of goodness, justice and love. I believe that it’s up to us to “make the love of God visible in today’s world”. This is the motto of the Sisters of Charity, but I believe that all humans have this responsibility.
My image and notion of God has certainly changed over the years. I’m beginning to understand more clearly my role in God’s life rather than God’s role in my life. It’s a subtle distinction. God is bigger than any of the images and understandings I’ve held over the years. My life and work are now much more influenced by the notion and understanding of a universal God.
As I grew up, my experience was that church and community were one. In Cape Breton there was a particularly strong connection between church and other community organizations – there was a sense that one naturally involved the other. So the relationship between religious faith, organizations for justice, and the building of community were intertwined and became part of my consciousness at a very young age.
I also felt the influence of the Sisters of Charity from a young age – as my teachers from kindergarten right through high school in New Waterford. When I was seriously considering religious life, in my mid-twenties, the Sisters of Charity were actively exploring issues of poverty in the world and considering actions on behalf of justice. To see a group of women committed to taking such a stance was compelling. It very much connected with my inner longings to be actively involved with others to make changes in our world. After close to 20 years of study and work elsewhere, my home community of New Waterford drew me back.
At the time the coal mines were closing, we were setting up the Carmel Centre Society in New Waterford. By 1999, the community was plunged into a whole new reality with the complete closure of the coal industry and later the closure of the Sydney Steel Company. The communities of industrial Cape Breton were thrown into turmoil. Hundreds of direct jobs were lost and hundreds more indirect jobs were to follow.
A whole chain of events catapulted the Carmel Centre Society into a leadership role within the New Waterford community. Since then the Centre has become the place of learning, leadership and leverage for the people of this community in efforts to adapt to economic collapse and to decide what happens next.
In addition to Carmel Centre, I work with New Dawn Enterprises, considered the ‘granddaddy’ of community economic development organizations in the country. Based in Sydney, New Dawn is the leading voice and instrument for citizen engagement and community renewal and has inspired many organizations in Cape Breton including Carmel Centre.
When I stop to look back I realize that organizational involvement has long been a part of my life. My senior years in high school were filled with extracurricular activities: student newspaper, theatre, athletics, church organizations. University was much the same – student politics, chaplaincy, newspaper, etc.
I believe that my work here is in alignment with the charism of the Sisters of Charity. Saints Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac and Elizabeth Seton were all builders of organizations. Their spirits were such that they recognized the needs of their day and set about to build organizational structures that would help people respond to those needs. And that’s what we try to do today. Our work here in Cape Breton is quite modest in comparison and scope. Nonetheless it’s all aimed at building a world of goodness, love and justice.
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Mission accomplished
Originally appeared in the Bermuda Sun, March 17, 2004
By Nigel Regan
Veteran school principal, S. Judith Marie Rollo, has decided to ‘retire’ next year but she hasn’t come to terms with the decision, not really.
During an interview with the Bermuda Sun this week we asked S. Judith whether she’ll still have connections to the school post August 2005, her official retirement date.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I could cry right now thinking about it.”
S. Judith, 64, has been the principal at Mount St. Agnes, a private catholic school, since 1980. She was first “missioned” to MSA in 1968 for six years, leaving in 1975. But when she was asked if she’d like to come back here two years later in 1977, she didn’t hesitate — she’d already fallen in love with the place.
S. Judith comes from staunch catholic Irish/American stock. Her father drove trucks while her mother took care of the house and children: She has an older brother and two younger sisters. The news of S. Judith’s retirement is likely to strike a chord with the thousands of Bermudians who attended MSA over the past 30 years. But the Bostonian nun has made her decision. “I want to go out while I’m still on top,” she says.
S. Judith received her calling early in life, during her junior year in high school. “It was like an inner awareness,” she said. “When I was in junior high I had really long hair past my shoulders and I remember brushing it and looking in the mirror and saying in my mind’s eye ‘I won’t get my hair cut until I enter the convent.’”
“I had an inner longing for something more than the humdrum of every day life — people getting up, going to work, coming home… I never believed that was for me. I felt that establishing an even deeper relationship with the Lord would be the most comfortable way to live my life.”
During her senior year in school, S. Judith talked to her teachers, the Sisters of Charity, about joining the convent, which expanded her interest.
The teenager’s request was not unusual. About 10 per cent of the girls at the catholic school decided to join the convent in those days. “It wasn’t a case of ‘wow, what are you doing?’” she said.
S. Judith took her first vows in April 1960 and led a “very regimented” life in the convent for eight years until she received her mission to Bermuda.
“We always got our assignments in June in a formal envelope. Mine said: ‘Teacher. Mount Saint Agnes. Bermuda,’” she said. And now, all of a sudden, here she is, 36 years later, trying to come to terms with the fact that her run at MSA is almost over. She puts on a brave face telling us: “The story here is I love teaching. I love what I do. But at the same time there comes a point in your life where you don’t want to be in such a position of responsibility — teaching the young people and starting to lose it. I would hate to have someone say to me ‘You are forgetting things.’ I want to go out while I’m top of my game.” MSA was already integrated by the time S. Judith arrived on the island and would have been sooner if the Sisters of Charity had got their way.
“We had a Superior here who in the mid-1950s went to the Department of Education to ask if we could take black children into the school,” she said.
“I fell in love with the place. I saw a great need on this island, that appears to be rich, but is very poor in its understanding of God’s love and the commitment people need to make.”
This unwavering drive has steered S. Judith through more than 30 years of teaching at MSA; that’s 30 years of brand new faces looking for direction, something that’s become increasingly difficult to find in the home.
S. Judith stressed the importance of religious education saying: “The religious setting brings about a caring environment, which is extremely necessary today when you have so many children living fragmented lives, coming from broken homes or homes that are dysfunctional,” she said. “It lets them know they have a safe house in school.”
She continued: “The big thing is you can’t have a peaceful world until you have a just world. Catholic education, in particular, tries very hard to bring an awareness to our students of those impunities in the world and we try in some small way to teach them that they have an obligation to help those that do not have all the things they have.”
S. Judith gets up, goes to a side table and returns with two large coffee tins full of money. The message appears to be getting through. The children are donating money during Lent to Project Ahead, which send supplies to Tanzania.
Home doesn’t always provide the right creative setting for children to explore what’s on their minds, not like school, which is why parents are sometimes surprised to learn it’s actually their child the teacher’s talking about on parents’ evening.
How many parents, for example, truly realize how much of an impression world events are having on their children? They might not show it at home, but according to S. Judith, images of war and terror are having a deep impact on children’s sense of self.
She said: “Children have this sense of ‘I have to live my life now because I don’t know how long I have.’”
The relentless pursuit of material possessions and the toll that takes on the family is another fundamental problem. “The rat race to get more and more things is destroying relationships with family members turning to drink and drugs as a means of escape,” S. Judith said. Children soak it all up and they’re angry.
She said: “There’s an oppression among the young people today that wasn’t there 30 years ago and that’s what we’re trying to work with. That’s why we try so hard to make school such a place where they feel at home.”
S. Judith wishes people would take a step back from their lives and maybe re-assess what it is they want. She said: “If you are working to get a boat or the biggest house in Bermuda, you are so focused on doing it but by the time you get it there’s always going to be someone who has more than you —‘Our hearts are restless until they rest in God — St. Augustine.’”
S. Judith knows her comments may sound “trite” but adds: “I’m a firm believer that if you say something often enough, it may reach somebody.”
Advertisements for S. Judith’s job have been in the local papers and potential successors have until the end of the month to apply. The successful candidate will join the team in January 2005 as Principal Designate and take over from S. Judith in time for the start of the new school year in September.
S. Judith won’t be out of the picture entirely; she’ll devote more time to the numerous community programs she’s involved in. Although she’s got another year and a bit to go, her message will be the same then as it is now. When all is said and done she said: “I hope that I have really touched people’s hearts to believe that God loves them.”
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Sister Cecelia Sacca — 2003 Elizabeth Ann Seton Award Recipient
S. Cecelia Sacca very clearly exemplifies the qualities of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, cheerily going about her work as parish administrator in Saint Peter’s Parish, Sheet Harbour. She welcomes new babies, conducts prayer services and Bible studies, “walks with those who are dying”, gives aid to the poor... whatever is needed. Her dog Pepper accompanies her on regular visits to the local nursing home and seniors’ apartments. Pepper, she says, is “part of the therapy, people respond to the nuzzle of a dog.”
Her ministry stretches along the 70-km coastline from New Chester to Pleasant Harbour, on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia. One of Sister Cecelia’s lighter activities currently is helping Saint Michael’s Parish in nearby Quoddy plan its 125th anniversary celebrations for this summer. She also works with other individuals and organizations across the community to ensure that needs are met and resources are pooled whenever possible.
Prior to Sheet Harbour, Sister Cecelia spent several years in Mount Uniacke, where she oversaw the major expansion of Saint Francis of Assisi Church. She helped parishioners with everything from soliciting donations of furniture and funds to climbing the staging to fit insulation. But it was her eight years in Latin America, she says, that made her see things differently. During the 1980's, for instance, she worked with families of a small village in the Dominican Republic to build their first-ever school. “I came back a different person. We worked with the poorest of the poor, yet they have so much ...”.
S. Cecelia is originally from New Jersey, holds a BA and BEd from Mount Saint Vincent University and an MA in Scripture from LaSalle University in Philadelphia. She has been a Sister of Charity since 1962.
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Sisters of Charity Recognize One of Their Own for Life of Service
Originally appeared in The Atlantic Catholic, week ending June 26, 2004
By Carolyn Girard
Every year for the past five years, the Sisters of Charity in Halifax have given out an award sporting the name of their ministry’s foundress, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.
The 19th century saint was the daughter of a New York doctor. She left her wealthy family to embrace Catholic values as a Sister of Charity, in the style of St. Vincent de Paul, who ministered to the poor in France. It was in the spirit of Seton’s ministry and of the four religious Sisters who founded the Motherhouse in Halifax, that this year’s award was given to Sister Doris Schoner in May. Chosen because of her outstanding dedication to serving others in need, physically, emotionally and spiritually, Sister Schoner represents many of the values held by the Sisters of Charity. However, Sister Schoner said the spirit of charity does not end with her.
“I am grateful to those who thought I was worthy of it,” she said. “I am thankful to the parishes for the opportunities that I have been offered. But I know that there are Sisters of Charity who are equally deserving because we all have unique gifts and no one’s work is more important.”
Sister Schoner grew up in New York during the post-depression era, a time when the luxuries of today were scarce. She had a family who valued religion, and teachers who were Sisters of Charity from Halifax and were inspiring role models. She said her faith became an integral part of her life at an early age.
“It is the faith that carries you through,” she said. “I feel that anything I have done has been in response to a call.”
Sister Schoner has had the opportunity of serving in locations both close to and far from her birthplace.
After teaching in Massachusetts, Sister Schoner was asked if she would be willing to take on the administrative role as principal of a school in Bermuda. She accepted, and after several years there, which she said she enjoyed, she was then called back to Brooklyn where she visited the homebound and the hospitalized while also doing work with an inner-city parish.
“I loved the one-on-one even more,” she said. “I was dealing with adults who have great stories, and it was wonderful getting to know them, their struggles. I feel like I received more from them than I gave.”
Having served the middle class for such a long period of time, Sister Schoner said she soon began to feel a calling to serve the poor. This calling led her to spend six years in the Dominican Republic – an experience she said was one of the most spiritually enriching times of her life.
“It was a very special blessing for me,” she said. “Their culture was very different, their language was very different, yet they shared the same human nature and the same warmth and joy. I often wondered how they could be so happy with so little.”
While she was there, she helped make literacy programs available to women, while also working with the youth, among other things.
Since then, Sister Schoner has returned to Halifax, where she studied before becoming a Sister so many years ago, and has since served as an administrator for health services at the Mother Berchman’s Retirement Center at the Motherhouse, volunteered at Adsum House and the Seton Spirituality Center. She currently cares for senior Sisters as coordinator of DePaul Hall at Parkstone Enhanced Care, contributes as a member of parish council at St. Stephen’s and is president of the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
Sister Schoner said she is glad she put her trust in God and allowed him to work in her life.
“I haven’t regretted anything,” she said. “I believe I am a better person for the people I’ve met. I’ve loved every place that I’ve been to because even though we’re different, we all belong to the human family.”
When asked if she had achieved all the goals she had set in life, Sister Schoner said there were no concrete goals for her.
“It’s about making the love of God visible to whomever we meet. It’s not something you achieve. It’s something you strive for daily.”
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Sister uses music to teach children the English language
Originally appeared in the Vancouver Sun, November 28, 2003
by Shelley Fralic
Music an intrinsic conduit for kids, educator says
Her first vocation is complexly simple. Her second, simply complex.
In the beginning there was her inner call to work for God, as a Sister of Charity. She entered the postulate in 1947, when she was 18, trained in education and has spent much of her life teaching piano to school children.
Her second calling crystalized in 2002, at the age of 73, when she received her PhD from the University of B.C. faculty of education for a thesis with the intriguing title From Sound to Symbol: The Whole Song as Curriculum, The Whole Child as Pedagogue, Observation as Methodology.
Fleurette Sweeney was, in so many ways, born to the music, and to the idea that music is an intrinsic conduit for children.
Her father was an Irish fiddler, her mother an Acadian folksinger. Theirs was an ardent Catholic family living harmoniously in the predominantly Protestant village of Kentville, N.S. in the 1930s.
“We were a family of 10 children and that’s what we did,” says Sweeney. “We’d play and sing and dance.”
In 1967, after a decade of teaching piano at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school in Vancouver, Sweeney heard of an interesting teaching method in Hungary, where children learned language through the use of folk songs.
She went to Budapest, and then California, where she became assistant director at the Richards Institute of Music Education and Research.
She and the institute’s founder, Mary Helen Richards, worked out a North American version of the Hungarian method and devoted the next two decades teaching it to educators all over the U.S. and, eventually, Canada.
In California, she completed her master’s degree, and moved north to Vancouver and UBC, where she lectured on music education until her retirement in 1995.
It was then she went after her PhD, and then that her love of music, teaching and children, took another direction.
When her brother Ernest, who was a country parish priest, died, Sweeney and her four surviving siblings used his small estate to start the Sweeney Family Charitable Foundation. It began last year with $20,000, but Sweeney worried that the name intimated theirs was a monied family, which it isn’t, so they changed it to the Living Language Institute Foundation.
It’s goals are not hugely ambitious, but she is proud that the foundation has been able to co- sponsor local education conferences, and bring in world-renowned educators and academics, all in the name of teaching children the English language through song.
Today, her focus is the foundation’s Singing English Pilot Project, a music education program designed to help students whose mother tongue is not English learn the language. The Vancouver Foundation donated $20,000 and the project is now under way in six Vancouver elementary schools.
It works something like this:
Take a song like the Mexican Hat Dance. Hum it to yourself and then apply these phrases to the rhythm:
“Put your coat and your hat in the closet.”
“Take a walk in the park in the morning.”
“Would you like to have strawberry ice cream.”
“Let’s get ready to go to the classroom.”
Okay, it doesn’t translate that well in print, but it demonstrates what Sweeney calls clustering, or breath phrases. And when she says the phrases, or more often, sings them out loud to the beat of the Mexican Hat Dance, all her complicated explanations suddenly make perfect sense.
The phrases, which are everyday words that children hear and say, fit exactly into the rhythm of that song. By using that playful familiar ditty, and applying it with the aid of teaching kits to English language comprehension and composition, kids learn.
In fact, Sweeney says, English is not a hard language; it’s a lyrical language. We’re just not listening and taking advantage of song as a language teaching tool.
She is, of course, much more scientific about it. The Singing English project includes recording students as they work through these exercises, and then analyzing the recordings on high-tech acoustical equipment to discover the parallels between language and sound.
She cites The Farmer in the Dell as a typical folk song with perfect clusters. “These old songs have lasted, not because of the historical context, but because they hold the language.”
Sweeney doesn’t think much of today’s music and says none of it would be useful in her teachings. She’s equally distressed about the music played in church these days, calling it a “mismatch of beautiful liturgy accompanied by comic book music.”
She still plays the piano, for herself, but doesn’t listen to music except CDs by John Wolf Brennan, a Swiss composer Sweeney calls “an artist of sound.”
In her small West End studio apartment, with its peekaboo view of English Bay, Sweeney looks back on 74 years and talks of an embarrassment of riches, of her friends and her work, of the comforts she has. There is a Kawai piano, with Beethoven sheet music at the ready. A fuchsia Christmas cactus, in full bloom, and a giant aloe vera plant dominate the picture window. There is a computer in the living area, and one in the bedroom.
“I’m embarrassed to say that I have taken a vow of poverty, because look around. There’s no poverty in here. Out there,” she says, pointing toward Davie Street, “on the street — that’s where the poverty is.”
She shares the space, for now, with Teresita Tubianosa, who is one of four scholars working on the Singing English project.
Sweeney is one of 650 Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, Halifax, spread across Canada, the U.S., Peru and the Dominican Republic. It is a communal order dedicated to education and health. All income is pooled and then split among the order’s members. Each year, Sweeney submits a budget for rent, food, clothes, education and incidentals. And each year, she seeks permission to continue her work with music and children.
“It’s a marvelous system, for a bunch of women who just want to do something.”
“I lucked out. I was able to express what I wanted to do within our charism — that is, commit to the well-being of others as an educator. I was always blessed by the superiors, to be free.”
It is, she says why she gave up having her own family.
“I didn’t want to be limited to just one family. I just wanted to be out and about.”
As I was saying, a simple, complex woman.
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