'How many of us will be left?' Catholic nuns face loss, pain through toll of pandemic

At the front desk, the kindly nun who greeted visitors at St. Anne’s Home is missing, and in the chapel, where stained glass paints the walls with pastels, 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 tan recliner, and on its porch, she isn’t relishing the hummingbirds.

The heart of this little Greensburg convent is gone, as are 20 other Felician Sisters around the country. 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 these devastating covid-19 losses mean.

“There’s got to be a reason,” Sister Mary Jeanine Morozowich says of her survival. “What is God asking me to do?”

Like Labik, Morozowich is a part of the convent community at St. Anne’s that has a long history of service in Western Pennsylvania and the Felician order. She was principal of St. John the Evangelist School in Latrobe in the early 1980s. And she’s warmly remembered in the Sacred Heart of Jesus parish at St. Margaret Mary Church in Moon, where she was director of religious education for nearly three decades before serving as director of novices for the Felician Sisters of North America from 2012-19.

Among hundreds of communities of Catholic sisters, the Felicians have neither the ubiquity of bigger ones like the Salesians, nor the singular focus of those like the School Sisters of Notre Dame, nor the repute of women following in Mother Teresa’s footsteps in the Missionaries of Charity. But they are scattered like mustard seeds across the continent and beyond, from a clinic in Jacmel, Haiti, to a preschool south of the Arctic Circle in Tulita, Canada, running affordable housing, ministering to inmates, teaching in schools and, time and again, focusing their work on the poor, disabled and sick.

In Greensburg, they have been a fixture for five decades at St. Anne’s, a 155-bed nursing home that also hosts more than three dozen assisted living units.

Before she served as a receptionist at St. Anne’s for 27 years, Labik served the students of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart High School in Coraopolis for 15 years. She also served as a kindergarten teacher, child care aide at McGuire Memorial in New Brighton and a nurse’s aide to the sisters at St. Joesph Hall Infirmary in Coraopolis.

Well before the 78 year-old nun died Oct. 30 at Excela Health’s Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg, the Felicians were feeling losses elsewhere during the pandemic year.

Crisis in Michigan

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 order’s first casualty there. Three days later on Easter Sunday, two more died. By the end of the first week, the toll was five. By the end of the second week, it was a staggering 10.

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

And, in an instant, they were gone.

“How many of us,” Morozowich wondered, “will be left?”

Even before covid-19 began its march through the Felician order, the number of nuns in the U.S. had been dwindling. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, the number of women in such orders declined from 160,931 in 1970 to 42,441 in 2019. At the same time, the average age of sisters in U.S. orders was approaching 75.

The combination of old age and a virus that struck hard at the elderly took a heavy toll among the aging sisters. It was most pronounced at their mother house in Michigan.

Confined to their rooms as they desperately tried to stop the spread, the Livonia sisters cracked their doors in the morning to collect breakfast trays. They peered down the hallway to see if a new sign appeared bearing the news, in dark marker on plain printer paper, 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 had died. But summer seemed to bring an end to the crisis. Lockdowns persisted at some of the convents. But in others, a blissful sense of normal continued, with nuns going about their work and joining together for communal meals and the daily bookends of religious life — morning and evening prayers.

The reprieve wouldn’t last for the Felicians, though. A second wave of infections haunted and taunted with erratic efficiency, and by the middle of November had robbed them of sisters in Buffalo, N.Y.; Enfield, Conn.; and in Greensburg.

‘My God, my all’

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

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

When word of Labik’s death reached the convent, her six sisters went to the chapel. There, 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. A wood crucifix on string hung around her neck. The simple silver band she received when she professed her final vows adorned the ring finger on her left hand.

“Deus meus et omnia,” was inscribed inside. “My God and my all.”

No women took final vows with the Felicians in 2020; they ended the year with 455 sisters across the continent. In addition to the 21 who died of covid-19, another 15 sisters died of various causes. Labik was the only sister to die in Greensburg, a shadow of the loss elsewhere and yet no less profound.

“Everywhere we go,” says Sister Amala Jose, who is a part of the Daughters of Mary community but lives with the Felicians, “we remember her and we miss her.”

Tribune-Review staff writer Deb Erdley contributed to this report.