Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
June 6, 2001
Dominican Sisters give 110 years of service
Irish immigrant, New Jersey native, dedicate lives to sick poor
By Alwen Bledsoe
Sister Marie Therese McGath, O.P., celebrating her 60th jubilee, and Sister Mary Regis Nuva, O.P., celebrating her 50th jubilee, still live together at the Dominican Sister Home Health Agency. Ever since Sister McGath fractured her hip, Sister Nuva has been her caretaker, "the best nurse in America," according to McGath. Together they reflected over their years of religious service with the Dominican Sisters of the Sick Poor, now a part of the Dominican Sisters of Hope. The order devoted itself to nursing and takes as its motto, "A healing presence in a fractured world."
Born in County of Gallway, Ireland, Sister McGath still speaks in the soft lilt of the Irish. She came to New York just after high school at the urging of her brother, who had left Ireland to flee disgrace after aborting studies for the priesthood. McGath arrived in Ellis Island, N.Y., with another 15-year-old brother and worked as a governess for a 3-year-old boy.
It was in New York that she met her best friend, Mary Campbell. They danced together, they went to movies together and, at Mary's urging, they entered the convent together. Obstacles nearly swayed both from the religious life — a marriage proposal for Campbell and the death of a mother and the opposition of a father for McGath. Nonetheless, the girls decided to try it out.
"`Let's go in for a few weeks and see how we like it and then come out again,'" McGath remembered Campbell saying. She continued, "We went in and to make a long story short, we persevered and we were professed."
Campbell later became Mother Rose Xavier, Mother General of the order.
First sent to the Ohio towns of Springfield and Cincinnati, McGath came to Denver 44 years ago. When she served in Springfield, she said, there was only one visiting nurse and four sisters to care for the town's nursing needs. This is where she met her favorite, and most unusual, patient, said McGath.
"This doctor called us up to see if we could send a sister up to take care of two patients living in the same house. He told us that the mother slept upstairs and was suffering from a terminal disease and that the son was downstairs and he weighed 600 pounds. He was the largest clown in the world."
He had traveled all over the world with the circus and now was too sick to care for himself, said the sister.
McGath was sent to care for the pair. When she and another sister arrived, they found that the two were badly in need of baths. It took nearly three hours to bathe and cut the hair and nails of the mother and son, she said. First they bathed the son, a two-person job as one held him up and the other washed him. Eventually, as he got sicker and could no longer stand at all, two of his nephews were recruited to support his 600 pounds as the sisters bathed him.
The sisters cared for the pair until both mother and son died on the same day. A special casket had to be shipped in for the massive clown. It took up the entire plane it came in, remembered McGath.
"They were very good people. They were so grateful, and we'd say, `That's what we're here for — to help you.'"
"She was so great among the poor," said Sister Nuva. "Sister Marie Therese has an uncanny memory and she would remember all the poor on the holidays. I didn't know how she ever did it, but she did. She was tremendous at remembering the poor and helping them in many ways."
"She was a Superior everywhere she went," Nuva added.
"Oh no," McGath protested.
"Yes you were," came Nuva's retort. "Even when you were in training you were the assistant."
"But no one would ever do what I'd tell them," said McGath with a soft smile, then turned the attention to Nuva's life story.
"There's not much to tell about me at all," claimed Nuva, "My life is very simple."
She was born in Trenton, N.J., and spent all of her growing up years there, involving herself in sports, even lettering in swimming, she said.
She was also very musically talented, added McGath, comparing her voice to a famous singer's.
"Oh not at all," demurred Nuva.
"At first I thought I would want to be a physical ed teacher," she continued. "But then suddenly my senior year I became quite disinterested in it because I always felt this pull to go to the religious life and I thought, `Oh, who do I think I am? Going to religious life? That's for holy, holy people.'
"I didn't quite think I fit that category. I was just an ordinary teenager," she explained. But, she said, "Nothing else became interesting to me."
After flirting with the idea of missions work, Nuva heard about the Dominican Sisters of the Sick Poor and their work of caring for the poor and the sick in their own homes.
"I thought, `What a wonderful work.' It just attracted me very much," she remembered.
She came to Denver in 1951 with the order.
"That makes it 50 years," she said in a tone of disbelief, "but to me it's like an overnight. I don't know where the time went because it was just so beautiful. ... Even today I just love this particular work. This is what I feel I'm called for.
"My greatest love is for the sick poor and the poor in general," she said. "This is where I felt called and this is what I love best of all."
When she's asked about how she's liked religious life, Sister Nuva responds, "I've loved every minute of it. You just can't find words to express yourself. You know, the best things you can never express.
"Something flashed into my mind suddenly: `It is I who have chosen you. You have not chosen me.' That's God speaking," she said, "and that's how I feel — that God chose me. And that was one of the greatest graces of all things."
Contact Us
