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September 11, 2002
'Sister Maggie' reflects on life of Franciscan service
Reared at north Denver orphanage, nun resides in senior home that replaced it
By Jack Bacon
For Franciscan Sister Mary Magdalene Ryan, there's one place like home.
"Sister Maggie," who celebrated her 82nd birthday in June, arrived at West 26th Avenue and Osceola Street in Denver when she was 12. It was St. Clara's Orphanage then.
She's there now, a resident of Francis Heights sharing an office with Franciscan Sister Theresa Langfield and coordinator of its food co-op for the elderly who also live there. The orphanage was closed Jan. 1, 1968, and Francis Heights was built on the site.
"My mother had died and taking care of us, especially the girls, was difficult for a single man," she said.
Her father had moved the family from Kansas, where he worked at the Army's Fort Riley cavalry post, because of an asthma condition and became a coal miner. His daughters' two older brothers "were pretty much on their own by then," she said.
The family lived in Longmont and belonged to St. John the Baptist Parish. A widowed woman in the parish who had a son and a daughter at St. Clara's because of similar circumstances suggested to Mary Magdalene's father that his daughters, she and 8-year-old Betty, could go to school there, too.
Arrangements were made through Benedictine Father Justin McKernan, St. John's pastor, and the girls enrolled in St. Clara's school in the fall of 1933.
"It was more a boarding school for us," she recalled. "We lived there but went home in the summer and for holidays."
She decided to become a Franciscan when she graduated from the eighth grade at St. Clara's, entered the Franciscan novitiate at the order's mother house, then in St. Louis, and took her first vows in 1937, working at St. Anthony Hospital and the order's orphanage in St. Louis until she was assigned to the orphanage in Pueblo, Sacred Heart Home, in 1942. She first returned to St. Clara's, from Pueblo, in 1957, working with the orphanage's younger children, some "graduates" of the Infant of Prague nursery opened on the site in the 1940s to care for babies until they were about 2.
In those days, she was Sister Daniel — among changes being made by religious orders was the nuns' option of returning to the use of their given names, which Sister Maggie did.
She returned to Pueblo as Sacred Heart Home's population swelled in the wake of Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba. Cuban parents feared the Communist dictator planned to send children from the island to the Soviet Union for training, and responded by sending their children secretly by the thousands to the United States.
"Two parishes there (Cuba) sent nearly 100" to the Pueblo home, she said. "They stayed until their parents could get to the United States." She's still in touch with some of them, especially an Arizona businessman who arrived at Sacred Heart when he was 12 with two younger siblings, ages 4 and 7.
She was housemother for the orphanage — "doing everything a mother does." Not all the children were orphans. A number were sent to St. Rose Home by their parents in smaller Southern Colorado towns "who wanted their children to get a Catholic education."
Sister Maggie returned to St. Louis and then spent five years at the order's retreat center in Wheaton, Ill., before being reassigned to Francis Heights in Denver in 1972. She's been here ever since.
She's proud of the Franciscan order's record of service to Denver's children and, more recently, its aging population, and was active in steps to preserve some of the signs of its service, including the original bell tower that now stands on the grounds at Francis Heights — its restoration financed in part by money from Sister Maggie's late sister's estate. Betty died at the home this year.
"The sisters have been here 101 years ... a long time," she said. At its peak, St. Clara's was home to more than 360 children, boys and girls. "I enjoyed the years I worked in the orphanage as a house mother, and I really enjoy working with the elderly."
She and her family remained close throughout the years. She suffered the loss of three siblings in the span of 18 months recently. Two stepbrothers also entered religious orders. Both are deceased.
Sister Maggie, a Franciscan for 65 years, noted none of her contemporaries in the order is still in active service.
"I'm the only one still in harness," she said. Will she retire soon?
"Retire," she said with a chuckle. "What's that?"
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