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Transcript
My name is Sister Sheila Carney, and I was born in 1945. My family lived on Ellers Street at that time. I lived there until I was eight years old, but then I came back to high school and college at Carlow, and I’ve been there ever since. I have a brother and three sisters. I’d say we had a pretty happy childhood. When I was growing up, the world was a lot less complicated and less violent than it is today. When we were little, we would walk from our house on Ellers St. all the way to Carnegie Museum. Just walk by ourselves, crossing big streets and things like that. The world wasn’t as scary as it is now. I actually live in a house that was built by my grandfather. My grandfather was a carpenter, and he and his family lived on Robinson Street, but he built a lot of the houses that are in that area. It was a lovely childhood. Well, I’m a Sister of Mercy. Well, do you know what nuns are? So the Sisters of Mercy are nuns. I’d say that one of my most important role models was Catherine McAuley. She was the woman who founded the Sisters of Mercy. She lived in Ireland in the 1800s. She lived in poverty for a while, but then she inherited a great big amount of money, and she used it to serve people who were living in poverty, and she used it for education and for healthcare particularly. So the Sisters of Mercy are a group of women, now in 43 countries. There have been 55,000 of us who followed her way, and education is an important part of what we do. And so in the 1920s, when there wasn’t any opportunity for Catholic women to go to college, we founded a college. It was called Mount Mercy then, and now it’s Carlow University. I’m going to say I’m an expert in the life of our founder and in her spirit, and so I have gone to places where there are Sisters of Mercy who have asked me to come and to help them to learn more about our spirit and the spirit of our founder. The Hill District has been through a lot of difficult times. I was alive when they tore down that part of the hill to build the Civic Arena and really radically changed the neighborhood in a negative direction. But the residents of the Hill have lived through that and are working very hard to continue to make the community here a vibrant community. I’m part of the McAuley Ministries Organization. So it’s a foundation that the Sisters of Mercy have that enable us to give money to organizations in the Hill. So I’ve gotten to know a lot of the agencies that operate here and the people who work in them, like I know Reverend Grayson, whose son this building is named after, and I’ve had the opportunity to come and visit a lot of the places in the Hill that we’ve been trying to help. In the last couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with people who live in the Hill in a program called Intergroup Dialogue. We recruited people from the Hill and from the Sisters of Mercy and from Carlow to come together to learn how to talk to people when you don’t agree with them, how to talk across differences, how to talk across cultural differences. And I think the idea behind it is it’s helpful if we just talk to one another and listen carefully to one another’s stories and respect one another’s stories. Everybody’s life is different, and everybody’s life is important. So our founder, Catherine McAuley, wrote lots of letters, which is helpful to us, and we have lifted out of those letters quotations that have become very important to us. There are two, one that I find very comforting, and it’s “this is your life, joys and sorrows mingled, one succeeding the other,” because that reminds me that you might be happy, or you might be sad. But whichever case, it’s not going to last long. It’s going to be replaced with the opposite. And that’s just… I think it creates a sense of peace to know you’re never in trouble long. Something will happen. And the other, a favorite of most of the sisters, would be “There are three things the poor prize more highly than gold, and they cost the donor nothing. And among these are the kind word, the gentle, compassionate look, and the patient hearing of their sorrows.” So I think what that tells us is that we can just be with them and witness their lives and to the courage of their lives just by sitting and listening to a person’s story and help them to understand that their story is important.