In Loving Memory...

Sister M. Louis, CSC
(Mary Angela Stifter)
Birth: July 23, 1922
Profession: February 2, 1949
Death: June 30, 2005

Our dear friend Louis would never want accolades. She’d wonder whom we were talking about. And that was the core of her beauty, her spirituality. Hers was clearly the “Little Way” of Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, the mystic, later proclaimed doctor of the Church, whose spirituality was about doing things with extraordinary love. Louis went about her life in just that way. She was present to whatever life in the everyday moment might offer with an amazing mindfulness and with great love. Hers was a spirituality of the “Little Way” of which great saints are made.

Born Mary Angela Stifter on July 23, 1922, on a farm in Windsted, Minnesota, she was the seventh of 10 children. Her father was Louis, a grain farmer, whose name she later received in religious life. Her mother was Amanda Sherman. She had two sisters who also became religious: Sister Lydia was a Poor Clare who died at age 23, and Alethia, a Rochester Franciscan who served for years as a nurse at Saint Mary’s in Rochester. Two sisters, Posie and Louise, survive her.

Mary Angela’s graduation from Holy Trinity High School in 1941 coincided with the United States’ movement into the second World War, and she chose to serve her country by going to Washington, D.C., where she lived with cousins and worked in a secretarial position in the Department of Treasury until the war ended. There she met the famous Monsignor Miltenberger, who directed many women to Holy Cross. Louis was one of them. She entered the Congregation in 1946 with hopes of becoming a missionary to foreign lands. Following her novitiate, Louis went to Saint Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing in Cairo, Illinois, where she became a registered nurse. Her next 24 years in nursing were spent alternating five or six years in Cairo with one-year nursing assignments at Saint Mary’s Convent.

In 1973, Louis’s ministry changed from bedside nursing to pastoral care, and she served for the next 23 years in Holy Cross hospitals in the west: Saint Agnes in Fresno, Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City, and Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills. During her time in Salt Lake in the mid-1980s she was diagnosed with lymphoma and began treatment. In 1995 she went to Marrero, Louisiana, as part of our Holy Cross presence in a nursing care center for the elderly, a good preparation for her subsequent return to Saint Mary’s in 1997, where she has been busy about many things for the past eight years.

Louis’s life was rich in giving herself away to other people and their needs as she lived her Little Way. Nothing was too much trouble or too costly of her time and energy, or of her love. She was tenacious and determined. She was great at the practical things like making countless rosaries, sewing, calligraphy or gardening. Her talent for gardening went back to her early childhood, when she raised fruits and vegetables to pay for her Catholic school tuition. She was also skilled at the computer and used its technology as a way of keeping in touch with those she loved. In addition to this practical bent, Louis was also great of heart and compassion as she gently journeyed with so many during times of illness and death, both in her hospital ministry and here at Saint Mary’s. For the last several years she daily fed the sisters on the fourth floor of Saint Mary’s Convent. It was her prime commitment and nothing interfered. As one sister remarked, her feeding was never simply about getting food into someone’s mouth, it was her gesture of love and presence. It was her Little Way.

Those who knew Louis well also noted her wry sense of humor, her gentleness, and her frugality. Have you every known anyone to make all their own greeting cards from magazine pictures or, better yet, to cut off tops from worn-out hose to keep her well-ordered boxes tightly shut? Louis’s waffle parties for friends were memorable both for her hospitality and for her good cuisine.

Louis has been a member of Marian community in Augusta Hall for the past several years. In their presence and with their support – and the support of other dear friends – she died as she lived, quietly and gently, early in the morning of June 30.

Louis also had missionary ambitions as she entered religious life, but her actual assignments limited her to service here in the United States. Perhaps she went about transforming the world in other ways.

Written by Sister Mary Ellen Vaughan, CSC

Memorial contributions may be made to the Sisters of the Holy Cross Ministry With the Poor Fund, Saint Mary’s, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556.