Eight elderly nuns in a Wisconsin convent died of complications from COVID-19 last week, including four who died the same day.
The women were all in their 80s and 90s and had resided in Notre Dame of Elm Grove, a nursing home for sisters in the Milwaukee suburbs, authorities reported.
“Even though they’re older … we didn’t expect them to go that fast,” Sister Debra Marie Sciano said. “It was very difficult for us.”
The congregation that runs the house learned on Thanksgiving that one of the 88 sisters who lived there had suffered the deadly disease, said Sciano, the provincial leader of the school sisters in the Pacific province. central Notre Dame.
Several positive tests followed, and on December 9, sisters Rose M. Feess and Mary Elva Wiesner died.
Sister Dorothy MacIntyre died Dec. 11 and Sister Mary Alexius Portz died Sunday, according to the congregation’s website.
Four of the eight, sisters Cynthia Borman, Joan Emily Kaul, Lillia Langreck and Michael Marie Laux, died Monday.
All the women worked as educators, including Wiesner, who taught in Catholic elementary schools for more than 40 years and worked as a gift shop coordinator at home.
Some had been missionaries and musicians or had worked on issues of peace and justice. One of the sisters was a published poet and another spent the summers working on an American Indian reservation in South Dakota.
The tragic outbreak comes after the deaths of six nuns at the convent of Our Lady of the Angels in Greenfield, Wisconsin, also a nursing home for Catholic sisters, due to the coronavirus.
In July, seven nuns died at a Maryknoll sister center in Ossining, New York, and 13 died at a convent near Detroit, Michigan.
Last month, 76 Catholic nuns from a German convent tested positive for COVID-19, forcing health authorities to quarantine the entire monastery.
The Waukesha County Department of Health and Human Services said county disease researchers have been working with the Notre Dame School Sisters facilities since they were contacted about the outbreak.
Sciano declined to say how many other sisters have tested positive on grounds of privacy.
With publishing cables