Sister Oakes eyes Mercy sisters, people of color NOTRE DAME, Ind. – Sister Paulinus Oakes, RSM, historian for the Sisters of Mercy and chaplain for the north campus of St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, Miss., organized a panel focusing on the “Sisters of Mercy and People of Color” for the seventh triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious at the University of Notre Dame.
Theme of the conference was “Local Cultures/Global Church: Challenge and Mission in the History of Women Religious.” This conference, in its 20th year, was attended by 250 historians, authors, and archivists.
Sister Oakes is presently working on a history of the Sisters of Mercy in the seven state region of the St. Louis province.
At the conference, she presented her paper on the sister’s outreach to Native Americans. The Mercy sisters went to Neshoba County, Miss., in 1885 and remained until the 1903 relocation of the Native Americans by the federal government to Oklahoma.
Sister Oakes also presented the history of service of the Sisters of Mercy to the Indians in Oklahoma from 1885 to the present day.
According to Sister Oakes, Mother Katherine Drexel worked very closely with the Sisters of Mercy to help financially with the plight of the Indians.
Other members of the panel were Sister Maria Luisa Vera, RSM, the first Hispanic Mercy Sister in the St. Louis region to hold the president’s position and later serve in leadership on the national level. She presented the sisters’outreach to the Hispanics.
Sister Jolitta Konecny, a Sister of Mercy from Little Rock, Ark., presented the section on outreach to the African American.
The chair of the panel was Diane Batts Morrow from the University of Georgia. She recently authored a history of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an African American community of sisters in Baltimore, Md.
