Sister Kay Koppes, OSF
May she rest in peace
October 4, 1946 - August 7, 2009

Franciscan Sisters Nancy Meyerhofer, Pat Farrell, Kay Koppes, Carol Besch

I met Sister Kay Koppes in El Salvador on one of my trips there. She and Sister Pat Farrell were working at the Calle Real camp for persons displaced by the war. She showed me around and we spoke. I met her a couple of other times when I visited El Salvador. In 1991 I got my first chance to visit with her in Suchitoto, the parish where she and four other US sisters were working with the Salvadoran pastor, assisting the people who lived in a zone ravaged by war. A year later, from January to July 1992, I ended up spending a sabbatical volunteering in the parish of Santa Lucía, Suchitoto.

Kay was a nurse practitioner and she worked in all areas of health, including work with midwives. During the Salvadoran war she worked to get medical supplies to the countryside even though the military tried to prevent them from getting in since the army feared that the medicine would go to the guerrillas.

Kay and the other sisters ministered in a very dangerous situation, going out to the countryside in the midst of bombings and military maneuvers. They stayed with the people when they could and ministered to them - with medicine, educational efforts, training of catechists, agricultural projects, and much more. They were truly a sign of God's love for the poor by their commitment to face the harsh realities of the Salvadoran war.

A few years after the war, Sister Kay left El Salvador. For a time she worked in a clinic for Latino migrants and refugees in Washington, DC. However, she began forgetting things and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She moved back to Dubuque, Iowa, and stayed at the facilities of her congregation, the Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Family.

She died yesterday - surrounded by her sisters.

Kay was short in stature, but I remember her spry smile, her strength, and her love for the poor. I will pray for her - but even more I think I'll pray to her. She lived the love of the God of the Poor.

Though their lives were very different, as I wrote this blog entry I thought of the journalist Penny Lernoux who died of cancer. Before she died Penny Lernoux wrote:

I feel that I’m walking down a new path. It’s not physical fear or fear of death, because the courageous poor in Latin America have taught me a theology of life that, through solidarity and our common struggle, transcends death. Rather, it is a sense of helplessness — that I who always wanted to be the champion of the poor am just as helpless — that I, too, must hold out my begging bowl; that I must learn — am learning — the ultimate powerlessness of Christ. It is a cleansing experience. So many things seem less important, or not at all, especially the ambitions.

Kay, strong in life, became helpless in the last years of her life. I pray that we all may learn the powerless of Christ as we remember Kay and many like her.

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Today, in the rural village of El Zapote de Santa Rosa, I gave a presentation to catechists on the temptations of Christ. As I was preparing this, I was reminded that the temptations were about Jesus' identity and the way he would live out his mission. The temptations were to avoid the suffering of the cross and the identification with the powerless as the means to bring us salvation. Would that we - and the institutional Church - would remember how we need to live - not with guns, not by political conniving, not consorting with the wealthy and powerful - but identification with the suffering poor, taking up their cross with them.

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A last note: you can read or download a draft of a chapter on the sisters' work in Suchitoto at http://home.igc.org/~jdonaghy/THE SISTERS.doc. I hope one day to be able to publish it together with the story of the parish of Suchitoto in the 1970s and 1980s.