Founders

" Prison chaplain devotes herself to work that 'can't be measured'

By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- At first glance, it wouldn't seem like a 64-year-old woman religious would possibly be able to relate to inmates at a women's prison. But that's not the case for Mercy Sister Natalie Rossi, a petite, gray-haired woman who works at the women's prison facility outside Erie, Pa.

Sister Natalie has a natural camaraderie with the inmates because she has no shortage of empathy.

For the past 12 years she has been a full-time chaplain at the State Correctional Institution for Women in Cambridge Springs, Pa., a minimum-security facility primarily for women nearing their prison release.

Sister Mary Joachim Boland (1919-2005) was born on August 10, 1919 in Boston, Massachusetts, the fourth of five children. As a child she contracted polio and her mother died when she was fifteen years old. Three years later, on September 8, 1937, she entered the Catholic religious community of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston. Her first assignment was teaching elementary school at St. Columbkille in Brighton, Massachusetts.

In 1943 she was reassigned to teach at St. Catherine School. Shortly after this her youngest brother, Thomas, returned from the military and drowned.

In 1954 she joined her community’s newest mission in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, to teach junior high school at St. Rose School. There she fell in love with the people and places of New Mexico. This “love affair” with New Mexico continued for 52 years.