Threshold - Fall 2003

Spotlight on Golden Jubilarians

In the summer of 2002, there were two golden jubilee celebrations which included a total of fourteen jubilarians. Each of the past three issues of Threshold have featured some of them and the profiles are completed with this installment.

Sister Rosemary Bertels

“ My mother told me that, no matter what my ability to do something, ‘You have the ability to like whatever you’re doing.’” Sister Rosemary (formerly Sister Mary Albert) has always taken that advice to heart.

She wasn’t sure about the religious life at first, but knew that it was a choice she had to make. “When the Lord is calling, it’s going to get you. I struggled with the choice but, once I made it, it wasn’t a struggle to stay.”

Sister Rosemary was taught by Benedictines in Nortonville, Kansas, and was particularly touched by the example of her eighth grade teacher, Sister Mary Julian O’Neil. She was already finding that helping with the classroom and sacristy tasks were a way of showing care for the place and building relationships. Although the teachers as role models for her generation were important, “The sisters are present in so many ways in the parish and in other fields. I suspect that if someone has a vocation, they’ll find the role models they need. We are visible in so many new places where we weren’t before.”

Sister Rosemary herself has been visible in diverse ways. After 24 years of teaching, she has worked in various administrative positions in the monastery, Benedictine College and Conference Center. The secret of successful administration for her is not merely her ability to organize, but the willingness to be part of a team. She believes that one should not just give orders, but get in and do the work.

Her own hard work is evident in many ways around the monastery. She adds little touches of beauty such as plants or things she has sewn or upholstered. She claims not to be an artist herself, just the one who gets the plants or chapel decorations or grounds ready for others to finish or arrange. Nevertheless, making such beauty available is a gift as well.

In her latest appointment as building manager for the ministries in Feeney Memorial, she will be able to put her abundant energy to good use. She loves staying active and sees it as one of her greatest gifts. “God gave me my good health, and many talents, and gifts are to be used. That’s the best way to show gratitude to God.”


Sister Mary Benedict Jacobs

Sister Mary Benedict literally grew up in the monastery. An Atchison native, she was often at the Mount visiting her aunt, Sister Geraldine Jacobs. In the summer, she and other local children were brought to the college classrooms to be the experimental group for those taking courses in methods of teaching.

“ Everyone thought I should be interested in music like my aunt, but it was the art classes I loved most.” The arts were always valued in her home. There was music and the children got drawing materials instead of coloring books. Her mother has learned china painting and other crafts in the Academy. She has continued to enjoy crafts and is especially known for the seasonal decorations she creates for the monastery dining room tables.

After attending the Mount Academy, it was another short trip (at least geographically) to the monastery. “I belonged to St. Benedict’s parish, had Benedictine teachers all through school and even got the name of Benedict.” Like Sister Rosemary, she admits that the customs and schedule in the Academy also made life in the novitiate feel familiar. She was grateful for the support that came from having such a large novitiate class and thinks it was a blessing.

After some years of teaching, she was called upon to go into health care as an LPN and as a physical therapy assistant. The care of the aged and infirm sisters has placed her in the heart of the community and given witness to her patient caring and easy manner of service.

She recently became head of the monastery’s housekeeping department. The relationship with the several lay employees has been a stimulating new dimension to her life. The most important thing for her is that there be an environment of respect. “Our values show through to them and, when they see how we respect each other and them, they act that way too.”

It has been a life full of unexpected turns for her. The world, her career, religious life, have become different in ways she may mot have imagined. Through many changes, Sister Mary Benedict prescribes “flexibility, a sense of humor, and sticking with it. God’s grace is in it all.”


Sister Joan Offenburger

It’s a long way from New Jersey to Atchison, but Sister Joan (formerly Paulette) found her way here for college and “fell in love with the place. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

She found more of the kindness, earthy realness, and humility which she had loved in the Benedictine sisters of Elizabeth, N.J., who were her early teachers. Her youthful interest in a research biology career was abandoned in favor of the fields of English and library science. “I realized that I wanted to teach. The person who learns most when teaching is the teacher.”

While still having a great appreciation for science, her passion is for words. “We use words in many ways, but the most exciting way is when we try to say what can’t be said.” She places poetry in this category and finds it especially wonderful that the Benedictine praying of psalms is prayer by poetry. Poetry gets closest in its attempt to get through the veil.

In addition to loving other’s words, she shares her own. Her great love of storytelling, formed in the table narratives at her grandmother’s home, shows in her affectionate descriptions of the sisters. It is she who writes the obituary notices and memorial cards for the community, as well as her own poetry.

The down-to-earth spirit which she especially appreciates in others is evident in her own life. “Next to my religious profession, one of the most important years was the one I spent at Shalom House, a homeless shelter.”

She speaks lovingly of the sisters on her early missions who fed the hungry at the door, of the importance of friendship and forgiveness in her life and of appreciation of the community for the gifts of each sister. “Our stories are the mortar that keeps us together. They are also the way we incorporate new members and graft them into the same roots.”