“In all of our ministries, in all of our encounters with people and situations, we strive to be signs of hope in a struggling world,” says Sister Jeanne Rollins, one of the longest serving members of the Sisters of Penance and Christian Charity. At various times in her life as a religious sister, she has been assigned to serve in the Diocese of Sacramento.
This year, the Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity celebrate 125 continuous years of ministry on the West Coast, and it all began at St. Francis of Assisi School in Sacramento in 1901.
Like many other communities of women religious, they originally worked in the areas of education and healthcare, founding schools and hospitals. The past six decades have seen their expansion into a diversity of presence using the gifts God entrusted to each sister.
The sisters living and ministering in the Diocese of Sacramento gathered at two recent events to mark this milestone. On Feb. 8, alumnae, family and friends gathered for Mass in St. Francis of Assisi Church celebrated by former pastor, Franciscan Father Anthony Garibaldi, an alum of Grace Day Home and Holy Angels School. On May 3, Bishop Jaime Soto presided at Mass in St. Francis of Assisi Church to celebrate the Franciscan life in Sacramento and to honor the sisters’ ministries over the past 125 years.
Sister Jeanne and Sister Dorothy McCormack are two of the longest-serving members of the community. Both currently reside at Mercy McMahon Terrace, returning to live in Sacramento after years of ministry in various places in the western United States and abroad.
Sister Jeanne was born and raised in rural Pe Ell, Washington, a close-knit Polish community at the time, and faced many challenges in her family during World War II. After being struck with a debilitating childhood illness as a one-year-old, she gradually recovered and was able to go to school as a normal healthy child at age six. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried when she was seven.
“I remember a friend of my stepfather asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told him I wanted to be a sister, either teaching in school or working in a hospital,” she recalls.
She attended St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Toledo, Washington, established by the Franciscan Sisters in 1911 and closed in 1973. “I felt very much at home,” she recalls. “To this day I’m still in close contact with my three best friends from there – Maureen, Therese and Loretta, who is a Poor Clare Sister.”
After high school graduation, Sister Jeanne worked for United Airlines in Seattle for a brief period. From there she entered the religious congregation and spent the novitiate period of her formation at the motherhouse in Sierra Madre, California. After first vows, she was assigned to teach at St. Jude Catholic School in Havre, Montana, for five years. She survived the vicious cold there, she says, even a temperature of 39 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
She was moving back and forth teaching between Montana and the Los Angeles area, and returned to Seattle in 1970. There she became interested in ministry with Native Americans and helped in urban areas, serving for four years on the Swinomish Reservation in La Connor, Washington.
In 1979, she had the opportunity to return to teaching and did so at the Sisters International School in Rome, Italy. “For me, it was not only a ministry, but also a learning opportunity and a highlight of my life,” Sister Jeanne says. “Rural and urban settings have both been a part of my life – each in its own way acquainting me with God’s blessings.”
After returning to the United States, she served at Grace Day Home in Sacramento, where she was the last sister to be its director from 1984 to 1992. She then traveled to teach English to novices, before returning to the Northwest, where she taught at Centralia Community College and helped in the local parish.
When all members of the province were asked to return to California, Sister Jeanne accepted a position at Marian Community Hospital in Santa Maria. Over the years, she served on Dignity Health boards in San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria. Before the Mercy Sisters in Arroyo Grande left for Ireland, she was asked to help at St. Patrick Parish. She worked with senior members of the parish, helped with funerals, provided grief support and served as eucharistic minister to the homebound. She also assisted with seminarian development through evaluations, reviews and when necessary, English as a Second Language (ESL) classes.
At Mercy McMahon Terrace, Sister Jeanne has completed the first draft of her memoir. She assists the chaplain when needed and shares her spirituality with anyone who wishes to speak with her.
Reflecting on her decades of ministry, Sister Jeanne turns to the word “good,” as mentioned in the Genesis account of creation to describe God’s work in her life. “I follow in the footprints of Jesus and St. Francis, who also went about doing good. Good is a simple four-letter word with hundreds of synonyms and (it) is core to everything I try to do."
Sister Dorothy celebrated her 70th jubilee as a Sister of St. Francis in 2025.
A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she moved with her family – parents, grandmother and seven siblings – to Sacramento in 1946, just before her 12th birthday. She attended seventh and eighth grades at Sacred Heart School and then graduated from St. Francis High School in 1952. Following graduation, she entered the Sisters of St. Francis, who had taught her in high school, with four classmates, two of whom remained during their life span: Sister Marianne Rasmussen and Carol Kelly, known as Sister Annemarie.
Like Sister Jeanne, her formation as a novice took place at the motherhouse in Sierra Madre. After her first vows, she taught fifth and sixth grades at Holy Angels School in Arcadia for four years, followed by five years at Bishop Armstrong High School in Sacramento, where she taught physics, Spanish and religion.
In 1964, she was sent to Havre Central High School in Montana and taught math and religion. While serving there, she contracted encephalitis, which required rest and recovery. Her next assignment was as novice and postulant director in 1967 in Redwood City, California. She returned to teaching in 1970 at the new St. Francis High School on Elvas Avenue in Sacramento, teaching math, religion and psychology.
Due to changes in the Church brought on by Vatican II, the need arose for parents’ education in the faith, Sister Dorothy notes. As a result, she applied to the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, becoming the first woman admitted to this then-member school of the Graduate Theological Union. She went on to receive a master’s degree in theological studies.
Upon returning to Sacramento in 1974, she began a new ministry as a pastoral associate at St. Francis of Assisi Parish. She taught Scripture to adults, led the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and worked in liturgy. She served in a similar role as pastoral associate at Ascension Parish in Portland, Oregon from 1981 to 1984. Once again, she was asked to work as novice director for the province, based in Oakland, after which a sabbatical took her to Chicago in 1990 for training in spiritual direction. From 1991 to 2001, she resumed the ministry of pastoral associate at Mission San Luis Rey Parish in Oceanside.
In 2007, Sister Dorothy received permission from her provincial to assume the role of executive secretary of the Commission for the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition (CFIT), where she served for the next 13 years. This was a group of international Franciscan scholars who met annually in Denver, Colorado. “It was by far one of the most powerful and educational Franciscan theology and spirituality experiences of a lifetime,” she says.
At three provincial chapters, Sister Dorothy was elected to serve as a member of the provincial council. She was also present at a general council in Rome, once as secretary and once as a delegate.
After moving back to Sacramento in 2017, she has been involved at St. Francis of Assisi Parish. She teaches Bible class on Thursday mornings and evenings to adults, meets with parents with children in faith formation on Sundays, is a member of the pastoral council and serves as spiritual assistant to the Secular Franciscans.
“My passions are Scripture and all things Franciscan,” Sister Dorothy says. “As I reflect on these many years, I find that one of the enduring treasures that has guided my life is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire.’”
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying what I do is me: for that I came.”
“Along my way when I was young, I was set on fire with Scripture. That fire became my passion,” Sister Dorothy concludes. “Then in my mid-years, I met Francis. This encounter has shaped the ‘being indoors’ in which I now dwell.”