Newspaper stories, television reports, social media posts, and conversations relating the details of church, school, and parish closures and mergers continue to be all too familiar. Over the years, we in Holy Name Province have experienced many closings and departures from familiar homes and ministries. The following 1956 letter to the sisters from Mother Gonzaga Miller, provincial superior, relates one such experience—the closing of “old Sacred Heart.”
Dear Mother and Sisters:
For the past two years our Sisters at Lady of the Rosary Convent and School have been witness to one “last” event after another. Finally, on August 25th, the feast of St. Louis, the last High Mass, a Mass of Thanksgiving, was offered by Rev. Ralph Sturtzer, S.J. in the beautiful and dearly loved chapel of our first Motherhouse.
Nearly everything had already been removed from the Convent and School, but the Chapel had been kept intact for this last Holy Mass. The superiors and Sisters from all the Houses in Buffalo and its vicinity joined Mother Patricia and her small community to give thanks to the Sacred Heart for the innumerable blessings which He had bestowed on and through this, our first Motherhouse in America throughout seventy-eight years of its existence, functioning as Motherhouse from 1878 to 1908, continuing as the Academy of the Sacred Heart, until 1931, and as the Stella Niagara Normal School from 1932 to 1948, then as Lady of the Rosary Elementary School from 1948 to 1956.
A number of the sisters present at this last Holy Mass had been received and professed in this Chapel; some few had celebrated a Jubilee here; many of them had received their education in Sacred Heart Academy and/or at the Normal School; a few had taught in one or both schools; nearly all of us, we found had had some intimate connection with this old foundation, and were deeply indebted to its founders for the spirit that they had built into its very fabric, and the spirit in which they and their successors had lived here, so that no one could long stay at 749 within its cloister or even school walls without sensing that spirit, imbibing it and becoming the better for it. We often spoke of it as the spirit of the old Sisters, and analyzed it as a spirit of simplicity, contentment, generosity, warm, alive and joyous—a Franciscan spirit steeped in the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. At that last Holy Sacrifice they seemed to be with us: Mother Cecilia, Mother Leonarda, Sister Clothilde, Sister Paula, and a host of sisters renewing the oblation of their lives in this last offering on the Altar. Earlier in the week a Requiem Mass had been offered for the repose of the souls of all who had labored here and had passed to their reward.
. . . I cannot close this account without including a word of grateful acknowledgment to Mother Patricia and the sisters of her community, who, for the last two years, have been sorting, packing, shipping and disposing of the accumulation of seventy-eight years. That is in itself a gigantic task and none too agreeable, but when it is done in the spirit of love, willingness and thoughtful concern for the further use of each article, the task was sacramentalized, as it were, and brought blessings of peace and strength and unity. A special word of thanks is due sister Charlene Saunders, who directed the last of the moving, in Mother Patricia’s absence this summer. May God reward them!