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She Helps Others Inspired by Help She Got

By Kevin Kelly
Catholic Key Associate Editor
Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Key

She once dreamed of raising a dozen kids on a ranch.

But in ways both mysterious and as subtle as a brick, God led a Catholic school girl from Green Bay, Wis., through several career shifts and debilitating illnesses to a life as a full-time chaplain at St. Joseph Health Center in Kansas City.

"Each day has new opportunities," said Sister Gabrielle Smits, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet. "There is never one day when you are going to do the same thing. I learn something new every day."

Sister Smits has been a teacher, a formation director, and a pastoral associate in a career that will reach 40 years this fall.

And she has suffered through illnesses that might have tested the faith of Job - including a muscular disease that left her without the use of her legs for two years when she was a young teacher in St. Louis, and, more recently, a viral infection of her larynx that took away her voice for another two years.

But even those illnesses have turned into gifts which she uses in her ministry to the ill, she said.

"We use our brokenness to help someone else," she said. "It's not about me. It's about the person who is lying there on the hospital bed, or the family in deep distress. If you see someone who has been through this, then they become your hope."

She has also discovered that the person who gives is actually the person who receives. Whenever Sister Smits returns to St. Matthew Parish, located in one of St. Louis's most impoverished neighborhoods, her students remember not just the three R's she taught, but also that for two of the 12 years she served there, the children were her legs.

"Every morning, the kids took me in a wagon from the convent to St. Matthew's and carried me up the stairs," Sister Smits said. "I wanted to give up. They wouldn't let me, and they had to struggle with a lot more painful experiences in their lives than I."

Five years ago, when she temporarily lost her voice, she learned that people without voices still need to laugh and to communicate. So she made it a special point to spend extra time with a patient who was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and couldn't talk.

"I accepted her and wasn't afraid of her," Sister Smits said. She also knows she couldn't have lived the full, rich life she has enjoyed without her religious community.

"I wouldn't be as free or available to do the things I have done if I had a partner or a family," Sister Smits said. "Our lives aren't boring. Those vows offer us freedom. Religious life is a treasure. I value it because we empower one another to do the work we do."

Sister Smits said the Sisters of Notre Dame "drilled religious vocation into my head" during her elementary school years in Green Bay. But it was not until she began high school at St. Joseph's Academy, taught by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, that she began to hear the call, Sister Smits said.

One day, she recalled, she asked one of the Sisters of St. Joseph how to know whether she was called to religious life.

"She told me, 'You pray and ask God,'" Sister Smits said. Then the sister invited her to attend a retreat at the Carondelet motherhouse in St. Louis.

For her classmates that went along, the retreat meant time away from school.

"But there were no frills for me. I came home with the thought that there is something more to life, that these sisters have something I like," she said. Sister Smits remembers sobbing when she told her parents, during her senior year in high school, that she wanted to leave home to become a Sister of St. Joseph.

"My father was elated," she said. "My mother said, 'Why are you crying if that is what you really want?' She found it very difficult, since I was the youngest child. But in time, she came to accept and support me."

In the fall of 1961, she joined a class of 65 postulants at the St. Louis motherhouse.

"We were typical of religious orders. When I made first vows, there were 32 of us. By the time I celebrated my 25th anniversary in 1986, there were 16," she said.

Her first assignment after receiving a bachelor's degree from the order's Fontbonne College was as a third and fourth grade teacher at St. Roch Parish in Indianapolis. But the first of her series of illnesses struck her, and she was sent to St. Louis to recover.

She spent a year teaching at Cathedral School in St. Louis, then another year at Immaculate Conception School in Montgomery City, Mo. It was a rural community, something Sister Smits had never experienced, and she blames her own youthful immaturity for not having a good experience there.

"They were more ready for me than I was for them," she said. "We had no telephone, no car. There was no hospital, no theater. For fun, we used to walk out into the countryside and look at the horses. I was just too young and immature for that."

Following her religious community's mission to serve urban African-Americans, Sister Smits soon became a teacher, and later pastoral associate, at St. Matthew.

"That was very fulfilling to me," she said. "I learned everything about life while I was there."

She then worked in formation for her community, but felt a strong pull back to parish ministry. When a former pastor then told her of a pastoral associate position at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Kansas City in 1986, she took the opportunity and moved across the state.

"I had been in St. Louis for 22 years," she said. "I felt I needed a change."

At St. Francis, Sister Smits directed the RCIA program and worked with parishioners to accept their role in the ministry of the church.

Leading by example, Sister Smits visited homebound parishioners. "I know every street in that parish," she said. It was there that she felt called to ministry with the ill, she said.

"I went on sabbatical, and I really asked myself, 'OK, what do you want to be when you grow up?'" Sister Smits said. She decided that she needed to be church to those who weren't able to come to church.

"When people are homebound, they need someone from the church to come to them," Sister Smits said. "They have come to the church and supported it all those years. Now they need the church to come to them."

Sister Smits was in the first class of four people who went through St. Joseph Health Center's Clinical Pastoral Education program. The health center, part of the Carondelet Health Systems network, later hired her as a full-time chaplain to attend to the spiritual needs of both patients and their families.

Every morning, she makes the rounds of the surgical unit, both in-patient and out-patient, speaking with patients who are about to undergo surgery, and attending to their families as they wait. "I tell them I am here for everyone, in-patient, out-patient, in-laws and outlaws," she quipped.

She also checks in on patients throughout the hospital, Catholic and non-Catholic, praying with them, and making certain that someone from their faith communities knows where they are.

It is all a part of the charisma of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who have devoted themselves to both education and health care, Sister Smits said.

"You have to take care of the whole person," she said. "The Sisters of St. Joseph are a very loving community who only want the best for every person."