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Marking Milestones: religious cherish ministry in east st. louis

Story and photos by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

The common thread running through the lives of three religious sisters, and one Marianist brother, who spent many years in ministry in East St. Louis was a desire to be of service to others. Coming from within and outside the diocese, they devoted themselves to serving God’s people.

All three sisters — Sister Carmen Marie Chandler, SSND, Sister Jean Kumke, ASC and Sister Helen Miller, DC — are celebrating their 50th anniversaries in their respective religious orders.

Brother Laudenbach is also celebrating his 50th anniversary as a Brother of Mary.

Sister Carmen Marie Chandler, a School Sister of Notre Dame, was born in 1938 in a St. Louis hospital because at that time, African American mothers delivered their babies in the basement of St. Mary’s Hospital in East St. Louis, and her mother didn’t want to take any chances with the health of her baby.
Growing up in East St. Louis, Sister Chandler spent her school years at the old St. Augustine’s and then in the public school system. She returned to Catholic school for high school and graduated in 1956 from the Academy of Notre Dame in Belleville.

Deciding early that she wanted to live a life of service, she looked for opportunities. A bus trip to the Notre Dame motherhouse on Ripa Avenue in St. Louis gave her an idea of how she could do this.
“I was very impressed,” Sister Chandler said, remembering that day at the motherhouse. “The young women there were very happy and prepared to give their lives in service.”

When she told her parents, her mother was prepared to accept her decision to join the School Sisters but her father wasn’t quite ready to let her go. “He told me I could always come home,” she said.
However, “I never wanted to come home. My experience with the church was positive.”
And her preparation to serve was positive as well. “I was happy, praying, getting ready to do service for the church,” she said.

She studied, earned her degree and became an elementary school teacher and later a principal in two schools.
A turning point for her came in 1968, a time when this country was caught up in turmoil with some facing, for the first time, the racial inequality that African Americans had known as a way of life.

All along, Sister Chandler “wanted to be able to touch people’s lives and provide an avenue for change,” she said.
When she attended the Black Sisters Conference in 1968 that event touched her own life in a very personal way. “It opened my eyes to the situation (of African Americans) in the church.”

Realizing she wanted to “go to a black community,” to be a supportive presence to African American Catholics in the Church, she began her more than 25 years of ministry in her own community, East St. Louis.

In 1976 she was appointed principal of St. Joseph Catholic School, at that time a racially mixed parish.
It was a kind of homecoming she said because it was a community where parishioners from her home parish of St. Augustine’s had come when that parish was closed.

Sister Chandler remained principal of St. Joseph’s until 1987 when she began to look for new ways to serve the church and its people.

“Your gifts can only serve for a certain number of years, and the (School Sisters) community asked me to share my gifts someplace else,” she said.

Seeing the many needs in East St. Louis, and having met Sister Jean Kumke, ASC during her years as a teacher at St. Joseph’s, the two religious women teamed up to open St. Joseph’s Children’s Center in the old convent at the parish.

The center would become a foster home for children, and the two women would live and care for foster children there.
“We were committed,” Sister Chandler said, to the “beautiful children” who were placed in the sisters’ care.
The sisters were licensed through the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to house up to eight children with no more than two of those eight under the age of 2. The oldest could be 12 years of age.
Sometimes the sisters cared for brothers and sisters in one family.

One of the first families the sisters cared for included four brothers and sisters who stayed with them for two years and returned home. Later, the children returned to the sisters for a period of time. Now grown, Sister Chandler said the siblings continue to stay in contact with the sisters.

Sister Jean Kumke, an Adorer of the Blood of Christ, also comes from the Diocese of Belleville. Born in 1938 in Columbia, Sister Kumke attended Catholic schools, first at Immaculate Conception grade school in Columbia and then rode a bus to St. Teresa Academy in East St. Louis.

Always being taught by ASCs, Sister Kumke also had three cousins, all ASCs, who ministered at a Children’s Home in Alton, Ill.

She knew what a life of service meant, and this was what she wanted to do. “I wanted to work with those nobody else wanted,” she said.

The only way, Sister Kumke said, she thought she could dedicate her life to serving others was to become a sister. Her longing began to take shape when she was in high school.

“I knew in my heart that’s what I wanted,” she said. “There was always that desire to be of service.”
Again, 1968 became a turning point, this time for Sister Kumke.

Sister Kumke cared for children at a day care in East St. Louis from 1968-75 and living at St. Teresa’s Academy when the day care was sold. Then pastor of St. Joseph’s, Father Ed Barbier, asked Sister Kumke to open a kindergarten at the parish school.

“We had one room, five children, two or-ange crates and one table,” she said of the first year. The kindergarten eventually expanded to 75 youngsters.

She continued to teach kindergarten at St. Joseph’s for 11 years where she met and worked with Sister Chandler.
During the time she taught at St. Joseph’s, the two sisters began sharing a home at the parish convent.
Sister Kumke remembers a family living next door that lacked enough food and had no running water.

The children began eating dinner with the sisters. It just seemed right, Sister Kumke said. The two women religious discussed the situation and decided “we couldn’t leave people to fend for themselves.”
The sharing continued for about a year, Sister Kumke said, until the mother moved to an apartment and the family regained its balance.

“Our hearts told us it was right,” Sister Kumke said.
In 1987, both women left St. Joseph’s but didn’t want to leave East St. Louis. Their communities supported them as they began their journey in foster care.

“I had come to be so much a part of that community, that faith life, to know them in such a deep way, with their love and acceptance of me,” Sister Kumke said, “I felt that was where I belonged.”

Each, in separate interviews, extolled the virtues of the other. No, they never disagreed because each woman used her strengths for the good of the other and the children they served.

So they became foster parents, and took on the responsibilities every foster parent must shoulder: late night calls for shelter, laundry, medical care, cooking, cleaning, teaching, correcting gently and loving each child that came into the home for whatever length of time was needed to sort out family problems and return the children to the home.
It worked almost every time, but one time it didn’t. A baby boy, 6 months old, came to the sisters in foster care and his parents couldn’t seem to meet all of the requirements the state established so that the child could return home.

He would have been shuffled from one foster care home to another as he grew up, and Sister Chandler decided to petition her community to allow her to become the child’s legal guardian. She credits the SSND community with tremendous support, and she became the child’s legal guardian.
“It’s been a wonderful journey with him,” she said.

Like Sister Kumke, Sister Chandler has retired from active ministry, but as many people know, sisters don’t retire, they adapt their ministry to their age and physical abilities.

Sister Chandler, who now lives in Belleville, works with the St. Vincent de Paul Society at St. Augustine of Hippo (the former St. Joseph’s Parish, renamed when all of the East St. Louis Catholic parishes — except Immaculate Conception — were merged into one).

While Sister Kumke said, “We probably didn’t do everything right,” their care for the children and their care for each other made the busy days and nights with youngsters needing help meaningful. The foster care center eventually closed and the two women religious continued to minister in different places and in different ways, but their experiences in East St. Louis remain near and dear to their hearts.

After ministering at Hospitality House in Vienna and as Temporary Professed Director among other ministries, Sister Kumke has returned to minister in East St. Louis as a volunteer librarian at Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School.
Sister Kumke said: “I’m back at St. Augustine’s. I feel like I found my soul again; that faith community of those folks is really important to me.”

Throughout their ministry in East St. Louis, the two sisters always put the needs of those in their care first. They offered their lives in service, just as each had wanted to do.
Sister Kumke said they found happiness in their ministry because “without a doubt, the people brought us the most joy.”

Four years before the foster care center closed, a Daughter of Charity began ministering in East St. Louis.

Sister Helen Miller, DC, from Steven’s Point, Wis., at 68 feels like a “spring chicken,” she said, and is “grateful to God and the community.”

When she graduated from high school in Wisconsin, she decided she would never pick up another book, and would probably be married and have 10 children.

Within a few months, she decided her love for children and her call to religious life changed her mind and her plans about school and marriage.

“I thought I would join the convent and take care of children in homes. She entered the Daughters of Charity in St. Louis “sight unseen. Isn’t that a leap of faith?” she asked, then smiled.

Leaving her family in Steven’s Point was difficult, she said, especially for her mother. “She couldn’t let me go and followed me (when a brother) took me to Green Bay, Wis., and then we had to say the good-byes again.”
Her ministry took her to a number of places and eventually to Chicago where she worked with teenage mothers in public housing.

Then her ministry brought her to East St. Louis where she began supervising an after-school program at Roosevelt Homes.

The program is an affiliate site of one at Griffin Homes directed by another Daughter of Charity, Sister Julia Huiskamp. The program includes recreation, tutoring, access to computers, and Sister Miller does social outreach through the center.

“This is where we should be,” she said, “seeing some of our kids who graduate” and move out of public housing and “move on.”

The most difficult part of her ministry, she said, is when shootings occur and children are harmed.
“A boy, a champion at chess, was outside a building and was shot,” she said. “To this day, these killings just mystify me; they are so senseless.”

Being able to make a difference in the lives of the children makes her ministry worthwhile.
After heart surgery last year, Sister Miller said: “I hope the Lord lets me go a little while longer.”
Other people have ministered and continue to make a difference in the lives of the people of East St. Louis.

Brother John Laudenbach SM, is working on his 38th year of ministry in East St. Louis, now with the Catholic Day Care Center.

With a master’s degree in physics, he began his teaching career at the former Assumption High School in East St. Louis. Later, he was an administrator and teacher at Vincent Gray Alternative High School in the city. Since 1994, he has been administrative assistant at Catholic Day Care, also in the city.

“I enjoy the small town atmosphere of the city,” he said.
Brother Laudenbach can also be found at Cosgrove’s Kitchen at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter with his famous corn bread. Using 24 boxes of mix, he bakes and serves it to those who go to the Kitchen for their dinners.
Brother Laudenbach said he is happiest where he can do the most good.

Working at the Day Care has been fulfilling because, like his other ministries in the city, he said: “These kids need all the help they can get.”