Sister Paula Dukehart returns to key leadership role, 50 years after taking her final vows
Sister Paula Dukehart, SSNDShe began her spiritual journey in the Catholic Church at Saint Andrew the Apostle in Waynesboro, Franklin County.
Now, Sister Paula Dukehart’s path with God takes her to reassume an important leadership role in the Atlantic-Midwest Province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, beginning a second four-year tenure as provincial council.
The move comes almost 50 years since she took her final vows with the order and even more decades since she walked the sanctuaries and halls of the small town Catholic church and elementary school that her ancestors literally helped build.
“My grandfather, who was a contractor by profession, and (some of) his sons in later years became part of that…they had a hand in actually building St. Andrew’s Church,” Sister Paula says.
She and her four siblings received their sacraments at the church and attended the elementary school staffed by the Sisters of Mercy, based in Dallas, Pa., located in Luzerne County.
“We had my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who were also members of the church, and everything we did, we pretty much did on foot. We lived within walking distance of school and church,” Sister Paula says.
“I loved school. I loved learning and I was fond of the Sisters that I had as teachers in those early grades.”
Sister Paula says that the first sprout of discernment into religious life happened in seventh and eighth grade, as she reflected on the example of the Sisters teaching in the classrooms.
“I was really feeling an experience of attraction and interest, a desire to make choices in my life that would align me with what I saw in these Sisters. They were educators. They were generally kind and supportive of us as children growing,” she says.
“Those were the values that surrounded me: Grow, learn, do what you can do the best you can do it, and serve God in some way by the way you live your life. So that was kind of the earliest conceptualization.”
Her journey took her across state lines to St. Maria Goretti High School in Hagerstown, Md., which recently closed. The School Sisters of Notre Dame, which had a presence in the Diocese of Harrisburg at the time, also served at her high school.
Today, they minister in 28 countries across the world, including 24 U.S. states. Their focus includes education, health care and positive systemic change, particularly walking beside women, children and the under-resourced of society in their journeys.
“I saw and experienced in those Sisters a spirit of joy and real interest, even delight in us as young people, and a strong promotion of us growing and learning and doing something good with our lives,” Sister Paula says.
Just out of high school in 1965, she began her postulancy with the SSND – one that exposed her to the deeper understanding of community that would drive her vows to come.
“I become a member of a community, and my mission is to proclaim the Good News that we are all part of God’s community. God’s vision and Jesus’ message,” she says.
“We are here to reveal the oneness, to make one, not by our power, but to make Christ visible by our living, by the way we live and serve, and making it clear that it is God’s vision for us to be one community, one in union with others, people different from myself, people who have a lot of things in common with me.”
Final vows in 1976, time studying at Notre Dame of Maryland University, teaching in Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Florida, mission and ministry work in North Carolina, overseas journeys representing the order, and so much more all took the route that the order calls its Sisters to embody.
“Enabling people to reach the fullness of their potential, understanding themselves as created in God’s image and directing their gifts to help build the earth,” she says.
“All of these things that are out of our documents today are so urgently needed.”
Her Baltimore-based role in this mission will be to support the current members of the SSND Atlantic-Midwest Province and the 11 ministries the province sponsors. She began this role in 2021 with her first term, and has been elected to her second.
“The role today is seeing that our Sisters have what they need to be able to continue to live their religious life in community, no matter their physical or psychological, emotional or mental status,” she says.
“Our sponsored ministries (include) Notre Dame of Maryland University, Academy of Holy Angels in Demarest, New Jersey, and Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson, Maryland. We have a number of educational outreach ministries that SSND sponsors in this province, which are teaching, educating people for whom English is a second language and teaching life skills and job training opportunities, especially for women who have not achieved a level of education or training that really equips them well to provide for their families,” she says.
A life of ministry that has taken Sister Paula across oceans and throughout the eastern U.S. has pulled her far beyond her hometown of 11,000 people, all on a journey where God has always been present.
“When I look back and think about being a child growing up in this little town, whose world was very small, to have had these opportunities to serve in so many places in a variety of roles, to have received the education that enabled that service, that ministry…those things were nothing I would have ever dreamed,” Sister Paula says.
“The blessings, the opportunities, (are) the expansion of my understanding of God at work on a grand scale.”
(Jay Sorgi is a freelance reporter for The Catholic Witness. Photo courtesy of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.)
By Jay Sorgi, The Catholic Witness
