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Thursday, March 28, 2024

At 83, nun’s ‘great spirituality’ keeps her going

Nancy Wiechec
Pueblo Indian Sister Mary Rosita Shiosee prays with a homebound man in Mesita, N.M. CNS/Nancy Wiechec
Pueblo Indian Sister Mary Rosita Shiosee prays with a homebound man in Mesita, N.M. CNS/Nancy Wiechec

Sister Mary Rosita Shiosee beats a small drum as she leads an elderly congregation in song.

“Sing a new song unto the Lord. Alleluia.”

Her voice is strong and warm and encourages her frail Massgoers to join in.

There’s always drumming in Pueblo life, Sister Shiosee said later. “The drum is the heartbeat of our Mother Earth.”

Laguna Rainbow Nursing Center is one of the many weekly stops she makes on her rounds visiting and praying with people in Laguna Pueblo, N.M.

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The pueblo’s pastor, Franciscan Father Wayne Gibbeaut, said people call her “the flying nun” because she’s always on the go.

“Some people just never stop,” he said.

Sister Shiosee is a striking example of Catholic faith prospering in the indigenous communities of this land, where Church history has been marked by ups and downs.

She was born, baptized and confirmed in Jemez Pueblo, 60 miles away as the crow files, and spent time as a girl in the village of Mesita in Laguna Pueblo. She still speaks her native Keres language, which has fewer than 8,000 fluent speakers.

While visiting homebound people in Mesita, Sister Shiosee looks out over the village’s surrounding landscape. It is wild and barren now, but she remembers it as fertile ground, where the pueblo once tended fields of wheat, alfalfa, corn, chilies and other vegetables.

“As children, early in the morning after the dew had settled on the dirt, we would go out and turn the dirt over. That’s how we would water the plants,” she said.Her mother died early, and the young Shiosee was sent to attend St. Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe.

“That’s where I was taught English,” she recalled. “I learned English through singing from a sister at the school.”

She said that in the fifth grade she discerned a call from God and entered her novitiate in 1954 on the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.

“That day is special to me because it’s the day my dad offered me back to the Creator to serve him,” she said.

She joined the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the order of St. Katharine Drexel. As a young postulant, she was at the motherhouse in Pennsylvania when the foundress died there in 1955.)

Sister Shiosee studied in Louisiana and went on to teach in several mission schools in the West.

Now, at age 83, she is back on the land of her ancestors, living near her only sibling and ministering to those most in need. Each week she takes Communion to 28 homebound members of the pueblo and also visits its senior center and inmates at the penitentiary.

“My great spirituality keeps me going,” she said. “The Lord gives me all the energy to go on. . . . Taking Jesus to the people gives me a lot of energy.”

She has put thousands of miles on her car, driving paved and dusty unpaved roads of the pueblo. Although there are street signs — Coyote Drummer Road, Salt Cedar Loop — she ignores them. She knows where she is.

In Mesita, she peered down a street and said, “See the one house where the pickup is? That’s where Joe lives. He is a healer, a very spiritual man. He believes in the Indian ways and the Christian ways intertwined, supporting one another.”

That’s what she believes, too.

“We believe in one God,” she said. “And we thank the Creator for all that he’s given us.”

 


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