Sr. Anne E. Patrick holds up her 2013 book, "Conscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations." (Courtesy of The Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual or WATER)
by Leo J. O'Donovan
On April 5, 2018, on what would have been Sr. Anne E. Patrick's 77th birthday*, a group of friends and fellow scholars gathered to honor the distinguished feminist scholar and Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary who had died July 21, 2016. The panel was comprised of Heather Dubrow of Fordham University, Jesuit Fr. David Hollenbach of Georgetown University, Leo Lefebure, also of Georgetown, and Susan Ross of Loyola University Chicago. Moderated by Julia Lamm of Georgetown, the panel reflected pointedly and poignantly on Patrick’s posthumously published On Being Unfinished: Collected Writings (Orbis). I offered the following introduction:
Come, Spirit of God, gather us here together to remember and to invoke and to celebrate one of your wonders.
Born in the old Georgetown Hospital just down the hill from where we now sit, Anne Estelle Patrick was the eldest of six sisters, grew up happily in Takoma Park, Maryland, and entered the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in 1958 "to become a sister." It was not until 1969 that she completed her BA and 1982 her doctorate at the University of Chicago. Who can say it better than Fr. Charlie Curran: she was a gentle woman with a spine of steel.
Anne was, as a friend recently wrote me, "a woman of grace in every way." To know her was to love her. Her graceful writing, nurtured by her love of literature, matched a commitment to precision with passion for the truth. She took her love of literature and brought it into her work in ethics.
Read the full story at National Catholic Reporter.
* This date has been corrected.