Thirteen-year-old Olivia Connealy is sometimes asleep when a religious sister from the Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, arrives at her home in Lexena, Kansas, two nights a week to offer respite care and prayer, according to her mother, Amanda Connealy.

But sisters who’ve cared for Olivia often tell Amanda and her husband Casey that as soon as they enter, the girl’s playful personality appears, Amanda said.

Though unable to speak, “Olivia opens her eyes like, ‘Okay, let’s talk,’” her mother said.

For the past four years, members of the international religious institute have provided overnight care for Olivia, who became disabled during an epileptic seizure and continues to experience seizures, Amanda explained. Olivia is one of many thousands of sick and mostly dying patients worldwide who the sisters have served in their own homes since their institute’s founding in 1851. 

“It’s just been a joy having them in my home — and ‘joy’ really is the word that comes to mind when I think about them,” Amanda said, adding that the family’s three other children have also been blessed. “Especially in light of their ministry of being called to sit with the sick and the dying, [the sisters] enter into homes where there is exhaustion and grief and they bring this light.” 

Olivia experienced an undetected seizure when she was 6 years old that deprived her brain of oxygen, leaving her visually impaired, with limited control of the left side of her body and requiring a feeding tube.

Olivia has about 10 small seizures each day and because they’re uncontrolled, her illness is considered terminal. As some of the 17 sisters in the institute’s Kansas City convent in Kansas City, Kansas, who are trained nurses take turns caring for the girl overnight, they can recognize when she is having a seizure and are ready to assist.

 Legacy of Christian Care

The Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, live out their charism of caring for the physical and spiritual needs of the sick and dying for no charge in dioceses and missions in 22 countries. About 1,200 sisters serve or are preparing to serve in the institute’s apostolate around the world, including 74 sisters in five convents in its U.S. province, according to Sister Lucero Garcia, 47, who has been a sister in the institute for 25 years. Members of the institute’s lay fraternity in several U.S. cities share in the sisters’ charism to care for the sick and dying.  

The sisters accept patients of any religion and social status and seek common ground in praying with them, Sister Lucero said. They also provide for patients’ physical needs if they are poor, she said. The institute runs missions in Oaxaca, Mexico; Cameroon; the Philippines; Bolivia; Haiti; Indonesia; and West Africa. They have helped build shelters in the Philippines, sometimes bringing patients food, blankets, clothes, walkers or canes, Sister Lucero said.

The idea for the institute came from Father Miguel Martinez y Sanz, a parish priest in Madrid, who saw a need for bedside care of the sick, according to an institute website. Father Martinez chose a young woman named Manuela Torres y Acosta as one of the first institute members in 1851. Professing the name Maria Soledad, she became the new institute’s first superior, founding 41 convents in Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Pope St. Paul VI canonized St. Maria Soledad Torres y Acosta in 1970.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City in Kansas dedicated a shrine to St. Maria Soledad’s patronage within the archdiocese’s St. Peter the Apostle Cathedral in 2023, recognizing the institute’s more than 100 years of service in the archdiocese. 

In his decree designating the shrine as a place of devotion to the saint, pilgrimage and healing for the sick and their loved ones, the archbishop wrote that the Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick “have provided physical and spiritual care for countless souls, many of whom cannot afford health care, especially at the end of life. Along with their hospice care and ministry, they also provide spiritual guidance and care for the family members of the sick in their care.”

 

Signs of Hope

Sisters who’ve completed training as registered nurses, licensed practical nurses or certified nursing assistants spend six nights a week caring for one patient per night in their home, explained Sister Teresa Seaton, who made final vows as a Servant of Mary, Minister to the Sick, in December 2021. Patients may receive two to three nights a week of care, she said.

The sisters are qualified to administer medication, though few patients need a lot of medical care, Sister Lucero said. They relieve patients’ pain as much as possible but when it can’t be completely eliminated they help them find redemptive value in their suffering by uniting it to Christ’s, she said. 

Inspired by Our Lady under her title of “Help of the Sick,” the sisters minister in all-white habits as a sign of hope. Viewing their patients as Jesus, the sisters try to emulate for them his Blessed Mother’s presence, Sister Lucero said. “We know that they are Christ because they’re suffering,” she said. 

“We’re meeting him, and he is on the cross, as he was back then. But it is a continuation which actually is a reality … Jesus continues suffering through his suffering members.”

When notified that a patient is actively dying, a sister will leave a less critically ill patient to be present with that person, to help them die peacefully, Sister Lucero said.

As they care for patients, the sisters also help families, Sister Lucero said. “If somehow we can be a comfort to the family or to the patients as we pray, we try to soothe the pain or just be there, present.”

One of the sisters’ goals is helping patients get a good night’s sleep; and while they sleep the sisters pray, Sister Teresa said. 

“Our prayer life, whatever prayer that we wouldn’t be doing at home because we’re either resting or we’re out with the sick, we try to do that during the night with them,” she said. “We’re there to pray, and we’re there for whatever they need.”

 

‘The Lord Wants You There’

A native of Bonner Springs, Kansas, Sister Teresa, 33, first learned about the institute when she got to know some of the sisters who were in her nursing classes at a Kansas City community college. 

When she later accompanied sisters during an overnight visit, she got a glimpse of herself in a patient’s mirror and realized how happy she felt. “That was really the moment where it was very clear to me that this is what I wanted to do,” she said. Sister Teresa’s found further confirmation of this in the apostolate: “You realize the Lord wants you there.”

When she decided to enter the institute’s formation in 2012, Sister Teresa withdrew from her two-year registered-nurse program. In the next six years, she served as a nursing assistant in locations including California, Spain and the Bronx, New York. Now a professed sister, she is completing the same nursing program at the Kansas City community college she left 12 years ago when she entered the institute. 

Patients are mostly referred to the sisters by word of mouth, or at times, from a hospice or hospital, Sister Lucero said. The community’s superior meets the patients before a sister is assigned to care for them in their home. The sisters don’t charge the patients or families for their nursing service, she said, explaining that the ministry is sustained by donations.

But the sisters do require families to provide transportation to and from patients’ homes, Sister Teresa said.

“It’s not just the patient and their family but it’s also anybody else involved,” she said. “If it is that family member that’s picking us up that trip, whether it’s 10 minutes or half an hour, it gives us a time to talk and gives them time to share their struggles or to realize some of the blessings of the situation that they’re going through or just to ask, ‘What parish are you going to?’”

Whatever assistance sisters provide, patients aren’t always able to thank them or even realize a sister spent the night caring for them, Sister Teresa said.  

“We spend this whole night at the side of somebody who’s reaching the end of their life and whether or not they can thank us for that, we’re doing it free of charge,” she said. “You have to be doing it from your heart for the Lord. There’s just such a reward in knowing that he’s using you as an instrument in his plan.”

LEARN MORE

Families and loved ones of sick and dying patients who are interested in  receiving care from the Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, in the Kansas City area, New Orleans or several California locations, can reach them by sending a message through SisterServantsofMary.org/contact-us or by calling their Kansas City province at (913) 371-3423.