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sister mary beth reissen, ssnd: Always the Teacher

Story by Rafe Middeke
Messenger staff

There has been a foundational constancy in the ministry of Golden Jubilarian Sister Mary Beth Reissen in environments as diverse as an elementary or high school classroom and the halls of the United Nations. She has always been a teacher — a ministry rooted in the charism of her religious community, the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

When Sister Mary Beth talks about her 50-year journey of religious life and ministry it is always with an attachment of a litany of names of sojourners who formed her, nourished her gifts and supported her dreams. They begin with the names of her parents, Art and Area, and sister Joanie, and of early and lifelong friends — Betty Rose, Suzanne, Peggy, Carol Ann, Mary Ann, Cathy — and end with international heroes, including the saintly Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara. They are the living companions of her ministry and continue to be lifegiving.

The teacher has travelled roads she could not have imagined when she was one of 63 professing her first vows as an SSND religious in 1961. The following five years of formation were also the years of Vatican II sessions, which laid the foundations for dramatic changes in her church and her community — changes which emphasized the “ministry of education in its broadest sense.”

As a junior sister (student) at Notre Dame College she was prepared for ministry as a high school science teacher, under the direction of Sister Joecile Kyscki and Sister Clodovia Lockett, with doctorates respectively in chemistry and biology. Their names are among the lifegiving litany of names and she credits them when, as a high school teacher, she received six National Science Foundation grants during the summers of 1967-1972.
As a girl growing up in Cathedral parish in Belleville, Mary Beth had been mesmerized by Covelle Newcomb’s biography, “Running Waters,” of Mother Caroline Friess, who in 1847, at the age of 25, was sent — by the founder of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Blessed Theresa of Jesus Gerhardinger, in Bavaria in 1833 — to the United States to establish educational missions for Catholic immigrants in the new country. Her pioneering spirit lingered in Mary Beth’s memory. And the names of the Notre Dame sisters who inspired her — especially, Hyacinth, Ilona and Pacifica — remain on her litany of enriching lifegivers.
The post-Vatican II years were years of renewal in word and action. Challenged by the council her community revised its constitution, which emphasized the “ministry of education in its broadest sense.” The U.S. bishops called action for justice a constitutive element of faith and response to the Gospel. For Sister Mary Beth there was a growing desire to engage in social action ministry. Participation in a summer Migrant Action Program in Iowa as a Head Start teacher for migrant children, some of whom were presumed undocumented, uniquely deepened that desire. “I was on fire to work for social justice,” she said. “A hunger and thirst for social justice really permeated my life.”

She often frames her experiences and recalls her influences in the phrase “one door closes and another opens” citing her father’s early mandatory retirement from the milk business as a providential entry into his ministry with his parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society. Doors were opening for Sister Mary Beth (though sometimes only after persistent knocking), and they opened wide when in 1975, with her superior’s blessing, she accepted a NETWORK — Religious Lobby for Social Justice — internship in Washington, D.C. The litany of names includes her 1970s superior, Sister Bernadelle Zurmuehlen, SSND, whose insight and support she credits for launching her social justice ministry. Given her science background, she was charged at NETWORK with research, study and advocacy concerning the international justice and peace issues related to negotiations underway at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, focusing on the shaping of an international policy that would support an earlier UN recognition of the deep seabed beyond national jurisdictions as “the common heritage of (hu)mankind.”

Give the litany of names an ecumenical dimension. Add the names of Miriam and Sam Levering and Barbara Weaver. Devoted Quakers and directors of the Washington-based Ocean Education Project (OEP), the Leverings invited Sister Mary Beth to become the associate director of the ecumenical education and advocacy project on the Law of the Sea, also collaborating with Weaver, a committed leader in the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church. The ecumenical environment recalled experiences from her earliest childhood, when she absorbed the gifts of her maternal grandparents, Evangelical Reformed Christians, years before Vatican II’s blessing of ecumenism.

The Leverings were freed to direct the study on the Law of the Sea issues when their southern Virginia orchard froze, which Miriam Levering included in her experiences of “the pretty ways of Providence.” Appointed Pax Christi International Catholic Peace Movement’s representative at the United Nations, Sister Mary Beth participated in the ongoing UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. In that framework she proposed and initiated a theological reflection on the moral and ethical issues underpinning the Law of the Sea.
Her Law of the Sea Ministry opened the door to her social justice ministry at the UN -- addressing human rights and ethical issues through the International Catholic Organization community at the UN headquarters in New York, serving as Pax Christi’s representative. (Pax Christi International was founded after World War II to foster reconciliation among French and German Catholics and later focused on Catholic teaching on war and peace.)

Together with Eileen Egan — the noted Catholic author and peace and human rights advocate, who spoke of war as the denial of the works of mercy — she made Pax Christi’s voice heard at the UN. Sister Mary Beth collaborated with representatives of other UN non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as an international justice and peace advocate, and was the first woman to chair the NGO Committee on Disarmament.

Eileen Egan is a treasured name in her litany, as is Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, the ardent champion for the poor in Brazil, whom Sister Mary Beth welcomed and assisted in 1982 when he was in New York to speak on behalf of Pax Christi International at the UN Second Special General Assembly Session Devoted to Disarmament. Sister Mary Beth welcomed and assisted Dom Helder again in 1983 when he received the Niwano Peace Prize from a lay Buddhist organization.

In the 1990s she decided it was time to go back to school “to gain a firm intellectual grasp of the complex issues in the field of international relations so I might better articulate them.” The door to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts needed some assistance to open. Fellowships, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship in Public International Law, a US Department of State Hubert Humphrey Doctoral Fellowship, scholarships and grants provided the needed tuition expenses at Tufts, where she completed her doctorate in International Relations in 2003.

Shortly afterwards, the foundational constancy of her teaching ministry was put on the back burner, when “the pretty ways of Providence” beckoned her to an even more fundamental ministry — to care for her ailing mother, with assistance from her sister Joan. Her healing ministry continued for four years and four months. Her mother died in 2007.

Currently Sister Mary Beth is a member of an SSND community in St. Louis. She is an assistant adjunct professor of International Relations at Webster University in St. Louis and serves on the board of directors of the St. Louis Chapter of the United Nations Association. She is also designing a graduate course in ocean law and policy.
The foundational constancy of her teaching ministry continues in a classroom, where it began 50 years ago.