At 95, Sister MarieClare Powell still teaching us

By PETER FINNEY JR.
Clarion Herald

In one of her nine lives in the early 2000s, School Sister of Notre Dame MarieClare Powell, now 95 and living at St. Anthony’s Gardens in Covington, found herself inside a bank in Communist-controlled Vietnam with a purse full of U.S. cash.

The nun who had served as principal of Redemptorist High School in the Irish Channel in the 1960s – the same religious woman who in yet another life had launched a Catholic TV show before anyone ever had heard of Mother Angelica – was in characteristically tunnel-vision mode in her so-called retirement.

Sister MarieClare had proven so adept at teaching two Vietnamese sisters in New Orleans how to speak English that their superior asked the retired nun to fly to Vietnam to teach English to 55 young postulants in her order. The Hilton Foundation paid for Sister MarieClare to make the pilgrimage to Vietnam and to buy computers there, which she intended to leave behind so that the sisters could continue their lessons after her three-month visa was up.

“Three months is a short time to teach English, so my idea was – in teaching by all means – to buy computers and use some excellent programs that were on DVDs,” Sister MarieClare recalled. “My thought was I could teach them so far and then turn it over to the computers.”

Cash and carry

But, in Vietnam, she couldn’t whip out a personal check or a credit card to buy the computers. Since each U.S. dollar was worth 14,000 dong, the few hundred bucks she exchanged at the bank became less a math problem than a heavy-lifting exercise. She was fortunate to have collegial muscle provided by another sister and a priest.

“The fact is we had to get those dong out of the bank, and we wrapped them in newspapers like bricks and carried them out,” she said.

When Sister MarieClare first “retired” at age 65 in 1991 – not long after the fall of the Iron Curtain – the congenitally curious and media-savvy nun had heard on National Public Radio of the dire need in Eastern Europe for children to learn English. She had been a physics and chemistry teacher at Immaculata High School in Marrero before becoming principal at Redemptorist, but she had minored in English.

Her passion to help children led to a 10-year mission in Hungary. She prepared for the trip by spending a summer in a Hungarian parish in Chicago.

“In Hungary, they would tell me my pronunciation was very good,” she said. “When I would call a student on the phone, her mother would answer, and my student would tell me later, ‘My mother says you speak very good Hungarian.’ But that was because I had rehearsed what I was going to say.”

Irish Channel faithful

A native of southern Illinois, Sister MarieClare cherished her tenure as principal of Redemptorist from 1965 to 1971. Redemptorist parents were far from the wealthiest, but they made sacrifices for their children to get a Catholic education.

She started at Redemptorist in September 1965, just as Betsy had badly damaged most of the school’s 11 buildings. There was no FEMA to provide recovery grants.

“There may not have been much money, but there was a great richness in the things that really matter, and I loved working with those good families that were poor,” Sister MarieClare said. “I can remember wanting to speak to a mother who had two children in school – one was a great student and the younger one really needed attention. I called the mother up, and she said, ‘Sister, if I came to see you today and had to pay Public Service for transportation, I wouldn’t have enough money to buy the next meal.’ There was great joy in our faculty in working with these students who really valued an education.”

In yet another life – “I really think I did have nine lives” – Sister MarieClare worked for the Archdiocese of New Orleans for 20 years in charge of “special projects” for Archbishop Philip Hannan. That was a loose term for doing whatever she could to promote the archbishop’s passion for cable TV and radio ministry that was both educational and promoted Christian values. She also helped found WRBH, the local FM radio station (88.7) for the blind and print-handicapped, the first of its kind in the country.

One of the long-lost footnotes of her career was directing satellite television coverage of the National Catholic Educational Association convention in New Orleans after having negotiated with televangelist Pat Robertson for the use of his satellite. That program aired before Mother Angelica broadcast her first program. She also worked with the public school system to cooperate on shared-access, educational cable programs.

Abp. Hannan was a visionary

Archbishop Hannan, she said, was a rare leader who could inspire people, set a vision and then get out of the way. He authorized the installation of a 4-meter satellite dish to transmit some of the archdiocesan programming.

“He was absolutely a remarkable person,” Sister MarieClare said. “I think he spotted people and then allowed them to do what they could do creatively that would contribute to the archdiocese. He was not a demanding person at all, so that allowed you to create. ‘Inter Mirifica,’ the Vatican II document on communications, was the council’s shortest document, but it said the church should use all means of communication for evangelization.”

In the last few years, Sister MarieClare has been able to use her free time to do extensive research on the life of a nearly unknown member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame – Irish-born Sister Johanna Hussey – a teacher who lived in the 1800s and had mystical battles with the devil that were recorded in a convent journal kept by her superior in New York.

Sister Johanna died in New York in 1860 at the age of 27. She was beset by what Sister MarieClare calls a “bewildering experience of mystical visions (of the Blessed Mother) and hell’s horrors.”

Teachers doing God’s work

Contemporary documents Sister MarieClare has unearthed indicate that the devil was tempting Sister Johanna precisely because she was “teaching children” and thus doing Satan “great harm.”

“My first motivation for writing the book is to let the rest of our sisters know the story, since most of our sisters came from teaching in the classroom,” Sister MarieClare said. “I hope it will generate some interest in those who are teaching young people. My subversive hope is that some young person would know that it is truly education that could solve most of the problems that we’re trying to solve right now – if only those young people had been educated. That is the answer to society’s problems – a good, values education; a Christian education, not just an academic education; an
academic education that fits to God’s plan.”

At 95, as Sister MarieClare continues to change the world from her tiny outpost in Covington, she has the wisdom of identifying not only effects but causes. Kids at Redemptorist never had iPhones and actually had to communicate with each other to get along in life. Now, she says, the adage of an idle mind being the devil’s workshop is clear to see for anyone with eyes to see.

“I don’t see many people saying this, but it frightens me that people have so much free time and don’t know how to use it,” she said. “They don’t ...  use it to continue to enrich themselves and their neighbors. There was an article in The Times-Picayune in which someone said you could put a cop on every corner, and you’re not going to solve the crime problem in New Orleans.”

Reaching those who have been educationally underserved has given purpose to her life. Before she moved to Covington, Sister MarieClare lived at her congregation’s retirement convent in Chatawa, Mississippi. In 2019, she was in her early 90s and still teaching.

“Four miles away from Chatawa, we had a little public school, and four of us went three times a week during the school day,” she said. “We were allowed to teach reading in the public school. Each of us took a small group, and we were able to raise those reading scores. Then, in the summertime, I was able to get some sisters from our whole province, which goes from Minnesota on down, and they let us use public school buses to bring children to an old Baptist church right across from us. This can happen now. Retired teachers could be catching these students up. The public school teachers supported us. The principal and the other faculty members said we had a great effect on their school just by coming.”

For the woman with nine lives, showing up has been 99% of the battle.

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