Threshold - Winter 2005

Spotlight on Jubilarians
by Joan Offenburger, OSB

Sister Mary Frederick Lueb
Sister Mary Frederick Lueb looks back gratefully to the roots of her vocation in Seneca, Kansas, where she was raised by her Aunt Anna. Taught by Benedictines from age five, Sister Mary Frederick knew from the time she was thirteen what she wanted to do with her life. She recalls the sisters at Sts. Peter and Paul allowing her to start school “early” because her mother was ill, and she remembers the sisters from towns around Seneca coming for grocery shopping and stopping at the school or the convent. “I knew many before I entered.”

Following her calling, she studied history and education at Mount St. Scholastica. When the time came to staff schools in Mexico City, she was ready. By then, she had taught in Purcell, Wetmore, Shawnee and Kansas City, Kansas.

“I went from small towns to seven million,” she said, but wherever she was, her love of children was obvious. She taught at Colegio Guadalupe, then was administrator at a school in Tulpetlac which served poor children. “Sister Freddie” was so christened there by the children who found it difficult to say her name, and she has responded to that name ever since. “The highlight of my life was the 15 years I spent as a missionary."

Back in Atchison, she worked at Benedictine College, taught at Happy Hearts, was transportation director for the sisters, and assisted at Le Blond High School and at Heartland Hospital in St. Joseph. More recently, Sister Freddie makes sure the sisters have hot sauce for the jalapeno lovers and popcorn for Friday night movies. Her carved wooden crucifixes (shown in the picture) are popular in the monastery’s gift shops and on its own walls.

Sister Mariella Pucka
Sister Mariella Pucka (standing in the photograph) has been many places on her journey and come full circle to her birthplace of Atchison. Her twin sister, Millie Morley (seated in the photograph), still lives here as well. Taught by the Benedictine sisters at St. Benedict’s School and the academy, she is reluctant to point to a single sister or event that led to her joining the community.

“It’s hard to explain,” she observes. “It’s like choosing the person you will marry. The pull was there and, sooner or later, I had to give in.” Before entering, she worked at various clerical jobs in Atchison and, after her novitiate, she became a teacher.

She began teaching in the area, but later went to the daughterhouse monastery in Mineiros, Brazil. There she taught English, did catechetical work and learned to appreciate and love a culture very different from her own. “Change is good,” she has concluded from her variety of experiences over fifty years of monastic life. “If there’s no change, there’s no growth.”

Sister Mariella has had plenty of chances to grow. Besides teaching, she has worked in parish ministry, assisted with internal ministries as sacristan, driver and hospitality director, and is just beginning a new service as supervisor in the housekeeping department at the monastery (things she refers to as “real Benedictine things”).

Her advice on a fifty year commitment is practical. “Something inside just drives you on. Commitment is forever. That’s why community is so important. It takes help. You need grace, prayer, friends, and a lot of give and take, usually more give than take.”


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