Eight elderly nuns in a Wisconsin monastery died of COVID-19 complications in the past week – including four who died on the same day.
The women were all in their late 80s and 90s and lived in the Notre Dame of Elm Grove, a nursing home for sisters in the suburbs of Milwaukee, authorities said.
“Even though they are older… we didn’t expect them to go that fast,” Sister Debra Marie Sciano said. “It was just really hard for us.”
The congregation that runs the house discovered on Thanksgiving that one of the 88 sisters living there had contracted the fatal disease, said Sciano, the provincial leader of Notre Dame Central Pacific Province’s School Sisters.
More positive tests followed, and on December 9, sisters Rose M. Feess and Mary Elva Wiesner died.
Sister Dorothy MacIntyre died on December 11 and Sister Mary Alexius Portz died on Sunday, according to the congregation website.
Four of the eight – sisters Cynthia Borman, Joan Emily Kaul, Lillia Langreck and Michael Marie Laux – all died on Monday.
All women worked as educators, including Wiesner, who taught in Catholic primary schools for over 40 years and worked as a gift shop coordinator at home.
Some had been missionaries and musicians or worked on peace and justice issues. One of the sisters was a published poet, and another spent her summers working on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.
The tragic outbreak comes after six nuns at Our Lady of Angels Convent in Greenfield, Wisconsin, also a care home for Catholic sisters, died of the coronavirus in August.
In July, seven nuns died at a Maryknoll Sisters’ Center in Ossining, New York, and 13 nuns died in a convent near Detroit, Michigan.
Last month, 76 Catholic nuns in a monastery in Germany tested positive for COVID-19, forcing health authorities to quarantine the entire monastery.
Waukesha County Department of Health & Human Services said the district diseases investigators have been working with the School Sisters of Notre Dame facility since they were contacted about the outbreak.
Sciano declined to say how many other sisters tested positive, citing privacy reasons.
With pole wires