Hardscrabble nuns resettle in Anchorage

CatholicAnchor.org
The Little Sisters of Jesus, with a unique charism and a long history of service to Western Alaska, have left their longtime home in the Nome area.

The religious order has been a quiet presence in remote places like Diomede, Nome and King Island’s fish camp at Woolley Lagoon since the 1950s. Today, Alaska’s nine remaining Little Sisters live in an Anchorage convent, most in the St. Anthony Church area.

“The winters were just getting to be too much,” said Sister Alice Sullivan, who at age 75, was one of three sisters remaining in Nome. She was still shoveling snow there last winter and walking long distances over icy berms when the car wouldn’t start. “It’s amazing, the amount of work you have to do just to live in a place like Nome.”

She has been in rural Alaska since she arrived here in 1960 as a lay apostle. By 1962, she was working at St. Marys, the village along the Andreafsky River where the Jesuits and Ursuline Sisters ran a boarding school.

“The Eskimo girls were traveling to Fairbanks for Upward Bound, and the Little Sisters had a house there then,” said Sister Sullivan. “The girls came back and told me, ‘You should take a look at these sisters.’”

She took their advice, and within a couple of years, the young volunteer had joined the order dedicated to walking side by side with people in their ordinary lives, as Jesus had.

As an example of how that is carried out in daily life, you won’t find the Little Sisters founding hospitals or schools. Instead, in Anchorage one of them works at Costco, while another cleans at the neonatal unit at Providence Hospital, and another works in sales at a local store.

The Little Sisters are no strangers to hard work. Founded in 1939 in Algeria by a Frenchwoman named Magdeleine Hutin who had an intense desire to serve Christ by living among the poor and the marginalized, the Little Sisters intentionally find work and housing among commonplace people.

“We had to haul our own water on Diomede,” Sister Alice said.

The sisters even built their own house there, with wood shipped on the old North Star, the Bureau of Indian Affairs freighter that resupplied the schools of Diomede once a year.

“And we built our own cabin at Woolley Lagoon, too,” she said, with a car hauling a rack filled with plywood, which they then had to float across a lake to reach the lagoon.

Life in Nome was only marginally easier for these hardscrabble nuns. When the plumbing breaks down in Anchorage, Sister Sullivan reported, you call a plumber and he comes to the house. In Nome, you call and they tell you what you need to get at the hardware store to fix it yourself.

The Little Sisters of Jesus recently celebrated the order’s 75th anniversary with a Mass celebrated by Father Fred Bugarin, pastor at St. Anthony Church, followed by a luncheon in their Anchorage convent.

Sister Nirmala Soysa, one of the sisters moving into Anchorage from Nome, is originally from Sri Lanka. Despite coming from a native land with tropical weather, Sister Soysa said the weather in Nome didn’t bother her at all.

“I really loved Nome. The people were really friendly, and the sisters had been there for more than 50 years. Everyone knows everyone in Nome.”

While in Nome, Sister Soysa worked as an administrative assistant at the Nome Youth facility.

Sister Damiene Hoehn, 85, who lived on remote Diomede for 14 years, is also moving from her home in Nome to the Anchorage convent.

Although the group of sisters is aging — two are at the Pioneer Home, and one in assisted living — you can hardly call them “retired.” Sister Sullivan said the two Little Sisters at the Pioneer Home minister to their companions there, and both Sister Sullivan and Sister Hoehn look forward to visiting homes of St. Anthony parishioners as they become acquainted.

Hutin, the order’s founder, grew up along the border between Germany and France, in a village often disputed between the two countries. War and illness claimed her five older siblings, and Hutin found herself yearning to serve those affected by war and poverty.

Because of poor health, religious orders did not accept Hutin, who was attracted to the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld, another Frenchman who had settled in North Africa and lived a life of contemplative action among the poor. When a doctor suggested she travel to Algeria for her health, Hutin saw it as a sign that her vision of leading people into such active contemplation could be realized.

Today, her order spans the globe. And it’s no accident that the Anchorage community is a multicultural group with members from Sri Lanka, Japan, France and the U.S. The order’s website says that it is important that different nationalities, races and cultures live together “as a sign of unity.”

There are presently 1,300 Little Sisters around the world, a number Sister Sullivan said has held fairly steady for much of the group’s 75 years. The order boasts 67 nationalities living in 70 countries.

Although the U.S. has only one sister presently in formation in the order, and a small number from Europe, Sister Sullivan said many postulants are coming from the continents of Asia and Africa.

“We have many from Vietnam, even Lebanon. And we have one in formation from Iraq,” she said.

The Little Sisters collectively have a wealth of knowledge about Western Alaska’s cultural changes since 1952 when the order first settled in Nome. They’ve seen the economy change from a complete subsistence lifestyle to people working in hospitals and schools.

From the days when there was a priest in nearly every village, today, “there are hardly any priests,” said Sister Sullivan. “The priests have to travel so far, and often we are a church without sacraments. People miss out on confessions, and often on the Last Rites.”

Still, Sister Soysa sees hope in the situation.

“People still come to church. When we have a lay presider, who distributes Holy Communion which has been consecrated earlier by a priest, the church is still full. I see this as a positive sign, a living faith.”