There are three very important lessons I learned in my first Catholic job: 

  1. Nuns can wear makeup.
  2. The key to evangelizing is collecting digits…
  3. and remembering people’s names.

I learned each of these lessons thanks to the incomparable example set by Edith Prendergast, R.S.C., a towering figure in Catholic religious education, who died on April 1. 

In 2006, the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Santa Clara University, I was a passionate religious studies major who had no idea where to direct my professional ambitions. My academic advisor set me up with an internship at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the Office of Religious Education. It was a behemoth of an office, serving over four million Catholics across 287 parishes. This was perhaps best illustrated by a wall of binders and stacks of book boxes, filled with curricula, that I spent most of the summer assembling.  

I would wake up early, drive 30 minutes from my mom’s house in south Orange County to the closest Amtrak station, and enjoy the hour ride up to Los Angeles while reading a chapter or two from this new book called My Life with the Saints, by a priest named James Martin, S.J. (not knowing that 20 years later I would have the pleasure of producing Father Martin’s podcast “The Spiritual Life”). After exiting the train at Union Station, I would follow the stream of commuters into the underground metro and ride another 30 minutes before popping up a few blocks from the archdiocese’s office in a very tall building on Wilsher Boulevard. I would copy, print and fill binders for most of the day before starting my two-hour commute home. It was hard to see the formative value in this internship. That is, until I met Sister Edith.

Nearly 20 years earlier, in 1987, Cardinal Roger Mahony had appointed Sister Edith as the director of the Office of Religious Education, making her the first nonordained person to hold this position. (After Sister Edith’s passing, Father Martin posted on X that she was, “in her own quiet way, one of the most powerful and influential women in the Catholic Church in the United States in the last 50 years.”) My advisor had tried to impress upon me just how influential and important Sister Edith was in this role, but it wouldn’t be until many years later that I would see the stakes so clearly—the world of religious education was an intense battlefield, with various parties contending for authority and often attacking the orthodoxy of its leaders. And at the religious education office, Sister Edith was at the helm of this storm-tossed vessel for decades. Yet when I entered her office for the first time, I detected no such battle, only a woman, dressed in a long skirt and blazer, walking contemplatively back and forth beside her desk, listening to someone speaking on a cassette player. She was warm and welcoming, and in addition to the natural sparkle in her eye, I noted a light dusting of lavender eye shadow swept across her lids. 

Edith Prendergast, R.S.C. Credit: Courtesy of the Religious Sisters of Charity

It was only July, but Sister Edith explained that she had hundreds of speaker submissions to listen to in advance of the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress the following February. Often simply called “Congress,” it is the premier gathering of thousands of Catholic religious educators, youth ministers and catechists, spanning four days at the Anaheim Convention Center. It also offers an exhibit hall featuring dozens of Catholic vendors, publishers, artists, ministries and products. It is, in effect, Catholic Disneyland. 

Sister Edith understood the magnitude of this ministry, how many lives would be touched by Congress and its radiating influence on young people, especially, and she was committed to this exhaustive listening process. Of course, she was listening for good Catholic theology in these tapes, but she was also attentive to the speaker’s delivery—their ability to tell good stories, to arouse faith in people’s hearts and to feed those hungry for a word of hope. 

One day, perhaps seeing my eyes glaze over while hole-punching and collating, Sister Edith invited me to shadow her at a few parish events. I did not hesitate to accept. It didn’t matter that the events were mostly at night or a good drive away; I was captivated by Sister Edith—her lilting Irish brogue and razor-sharp intellect—and I wanted to watch how one of the most powerful women in Catholic religious education engaged with people at a parish level. 

And what a gift it was to witness Sister Edith in action! She could work a room better than any salesperson, quickly gathering information about people, their families, what ministries they volunteered with and, most important, what support they needed. “I have someone for you to meet,” she would say, passing along her business card or collecting others’ cards or phone numbers. When we left the events, she would map out this invisible web of relationships for me, explaining how the five or six people she spoke with that evening might benefit from being connected to five or six people at neighboring parishes or community organizations. And what initially seemed like an uncanny ability to remember people’s names, I gradually recognized wasn’t simply a gift but a commitment Sister Edith made to connecting with others. I thought about how Jesus called his disciples by name, how personal one’s name is, and how Sister Edith understood the privilege and the power she wielded simply by remembering people’s names. 

After one parish event, Sister Edith suggested we sit down for a cuppa’ tea. As she poured the tea from the kettle into my cup, I felt instantly at home. Growing up in a family still heavily steeped in our own Irish traditions, I knew that sharing “a cuppa’ tea” was about so much more than hydrating or caffeinating; it is a ritual space, set apart from the busyness of ordinary life, where we are invited to ponder the day together and perhaps muse over the mysterious configurations of tea leaves. Sister Edith did not interpret my tea leaves, exactly, but she did something similar: She asked me why I loved studying theology, what authors I was reading and what I was enjoying about college. For that brief tea break, I was no longer an anxious student, unsure of my place in the world. I was someone whose life was brimming with excitement, passion and curiosity. That is at least what the great Sister Edith Prendergast saw in me. 

I realized that if Sister Edith’s spiritual gifts first attracted me to a life in ministry, it was her human warmth that said it’s O.K. for you to be here, in fact, you’re welcome to stay a while. And though I know her legacy extends further than anything I could convey here, Sister Edith showed me how the Holy Spirit dwells both in the small gestures, like remembering a catechist’s name, and in the grand vision that we, as ministers of the Gospel, are entrusted with. 

On one of our pastoral rides together, Sister Edith shared a Scripture passage that was central to her ministry: “Without a vision, the people shall perish” (Prv 29:18). That is how she characterized her work in religious education—to keep the vision and with it hope alive for the people of God. During that summer, I got to see firsthand how Sister Edith Prendergast’s quarter-century of leadership in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles held great theological and spiritual vision together with daily pastoral attention and care. She kept the vision, and she kept your phone number. 

Maggi Van Dorn is the Senior Audio Producer for America Media.