Margaret Held and Paula Merrill, both nurse practitioners, failed to show up for work Thursday at a clinic in Lexington, where they served one of the state’s poorest counties.
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“It’s so senseless”, Rev. Greg Plata, who oversees the small church the nuns attended, said.
A minister in MS says a memorial Mass will be held for two Catholic nuns were found slain inside their home.
Investigators aren’t saying much about how the sisters died Thursday, but their friends say they’ve been told the two were stabbed during what might have been a break in which has a tiny town living in fear.
A worldwide congregation that’s headquartered in Kentuckiana is grappling with the loss of two beloved sisters. The care they provided leaves a huge void.
Maureen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, said there were signs of a break-in at the home in Durant and the nuns’ auto was taken.
Bishop Joseph R. Kopacz of Jackson commended the sisters for their years of dedicated service.
Sister Gatz said the deaths do have one silver lining – they help the SCNs to be in solidarity with others who have lost a loved one to violence. The Sisters of Charity released a statement on their website.
Two years later, she moved south and found her calling in the Mississippi Delta community, according to a 2010 article in The Journey, a publication by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.
“They served the poor so well”, the post read. “Because we are gospel women, please also pray for the perpetrators”.
“They were earthly angels with hearts of pure gold”, said Rosalind McChriston-Williams, a nurse who worked with the nuns at UMMC Holmes County, according to The Clarion-Ledger.
“We just see patients and do what needs to be done”, Merrill said in the video. It’s hard to put those things together. “They were valiant women”. They describe themselves as an global congregation who are “committed to work for justice in solidarity with oppressed peoples, especially the economically poor and women, and to care for the earth. It puts us in touch with the pain, the hurt and the bewilderment that so many have experienced in deaths that come violently”, she said. “I remember being with her for two days when we visited the sisters at Mississippi”. She was from MA and joined the order in 1979.
Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said the sisters had made the community a better place to live and lamented their deaths.
“I came here because of a dream and a cause”, she once said, “but I stayed because of the people”. “They challenge me, they inspire me”.
“She and Sister Margaret did such wonderful, wonderful work”. She relocated to Omaha, Nebraska, from 1981 to 1983 as a community health nurse with the Visiting Nurse Association before returning to MS that year. Also slain was Sister Margaret Held.
At that time, School Sisters of St. Francis will hold a service for Sister Margaret here in Milwaukee.
Held had family and religious ties to southeastern Wisconsin.
“Any act of violence is always a tragedy for the entire community”, he said August 25.
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Smith, with the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, tells PEOPLE she worked with Merrill on a few projects.
