Bishop Buddy Scrapbook 1946-1948

More than and above all things else Sister Francis Jerome is the friend. Prob- ably no sister at Saint Mary's is known and remembered and loved devotedly by so many old students as she. Today a girl from Venezuela writes of a position she has secured through Sister's recom- mendation. Last week the mail brought letters from the Philippines, from China, from India with solicitous greetings and love from old girls. There is a message from a friend in Siena, a word of a new grandchild who has been happily bap- tized "Susan." And so the story of her friendships grows to a saga, a lovely epic of loyalty and trust. In the summer of 1946 Sister Francis Jerome spent a brief two weeks in Cana- da. She returned home ill. The months since have proved the illness one from which she cannot recover. Only that has kept her or could keep her from us for this the opening of the 104th year of school. In her absence she is still our great teacher. No lesson in Greek or Lat- in matches her present lessons in patience and suffering. No uttered prayer, and hers has been a life of fidelity to her daily Mass and every religious exercise, can match the wordless prayer of waiting on the inscrutable will of God. No love that she has spent so lavishly in her grand passion for Saint Mary's touches her love in leaving it. Her entire religious life has been spent here. The allegiance of a heart and a soul peculiarly rich in its capaci- ties for loyalty are wholly here. She can think of no place on earth so worthy of love. By the delicate kindness of God and of our Lady she will make no ex- change short of heaven for Saint Mary's. We who are her school, the college of her heart, dedicate this Honors Convoca- tion to Sister Francis Jerome, our laure- ate of teachers.

were always the implicit patterns for the new. Only those of us who have been suc- cessively student, sister and administra- tor with Sister Francis Jerome can know the completeness, the simplicity, the no- bility with which she adjusted and adapt- ed to changing conditions, conditions which made the impertinent girl who once sat at her table the academic supe- rior to whom she went without question for her assignments and permissions. Per- sonally, I have never met or matched these rare qualities of character that were so unmistakably and unfailingly hers. During the past two years as local re- ligious superior she has endeared herself to her sisters at the college by her solici- tude for their needs, her exemplary fi- delity to the spiritual pattern of the Sis- ters of the Holy Cross. After the death of Mother Pauline in 1935 the demand for a good biography of her became insistent. The centenary of the school projected it into a reality. Sister Francis Jerome was beyond ques- tion the logical person to write this life; and the perfect one. Her book, This Is Mother Pauline, published in 1945, is as adequate as biography can be. Without distorting either subject or author it pre- sents both, qualified by their own inher- ent nobility and shining with a shared holiness. During the past fourteen years the of- fice of vice-president has carried with it the amenities of hostess. To the many ·distinguished friends and guests of the college, the parents of students, the hun- dreds of old girls and returning alumnae Sister Francis Jerome has been the per- fect hostess. The charm of the college, and it has unique charm, is the charm of her grace, her cordiality, her deep human interest and response.