Eight elderly nuns at a Wisconsin convent died last week from COVID-19 complications – including four who died on the same day.
Officials said the women were in their late 80s and 90s and lived at Notre Dame in Elm Grove, a retirement home for sisters in suburban Milwaukee.
“Even though they got older … we didn’t expect them to come that fast,” said Sister Debra Marie Sciano. “It was very difficult for us.”
Ciano, the provincial leader of the School Sisters in Notre Dame Central Pacific, said the congregation, which runs the house on Thanksgiving Day, had a fatal illness from one of the 88 sisters who lived there.
Many more positive tests took place and on December 9, Sisters Rose m. Fees and Mary Alva Wiesner died.
According to the congregation’s website, Sister Dorothy Mintier died on December 11 and Sister Mary Alexius Portz died on Sunday.
Sisteria Borman, John Emily Kaul, Lilia Langrake and Michael Marie Lux – four of eight died Monday.
All the women worked as teachers, including Vizner, who taught in Catholic primary schools for more than 40 years and worked as a gift shop coordinator at home.
Some had been missionaries and musicians, or worked on issues of peace and justice. One sister was a published poet and the other spent summers working on the American Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
The tragic outbreak comes after six nuns at Greenfield’s Our Groom Lady Angeles Convent, a care home for Catholic sisters in Wisconsin, died in August of coronavirus.
In July, seven nuns died at a Merricknol sisters’ center in Oceania, New York, and died at a convent near Dechit, Michigan on the 13th.
Last month, C76 Catholic nuns tested positive for COVID-1F in a convent in Germany, forcing health authorities to segregate the monastery.
The Wauxha County Department of Health and Human Services said county disease investigators were working with school sisters at the Notre Dame facility as they were approached about the outbreak.
Sciano denied that many other sisters had tested positive, citing privacy reasons.
With post wire
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