Forty Years of South American Service Sister Judith Hilbing, OP
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2005 edition of Just WORDS.
La Oroya, Peru, was filled with celebration last February, honoring the Springfield Dominicans’ forty years of spirit and service in South America. The remembrance overflowed with music, dance, food, sharing, and prayers. People came from each of the eight missions where the sisters had served over the years to participate in this joyful event.
How was it that Dominicans from Springfield, Ill., were transplanted to the Andes? During the 1960s, when civic and church events were changing the world, the Springfield Dominicans responded to the challenge of Pope John XXIII to send ten percent of their personnel to Latin America over a period of ten years. Over the next 40 years, 35 Dominican women walked with the Peruvian people, learning their culture and trying to creatively address their humanitarian needs. The context, content, and motivation of mission have changed over the years, but the preaching has adapted and continued.
In 1965, four Dominican sisters were chosen from numerous volunteers to serve as pioneers in the Peruvian missions. Sisters Mary Andrea Smith, Mary de Montfort (Janet) Guretz, Mary Leona (Doris) Taylor, and Mary Rene Lawless were as young and vibrant as the foundresses who left Kentucky 92 years earlier, journeying to Illinois to establish a Dominican presence on the prairie. Those women had traveled by carriage and train. These four women boarded an airplane on a cold winter day in February.
Their destination was La Oroya, a metallurgical city, situated 13,000 feet above sea level. It was in this isolated city of excessive rain, mudslides, cold climate, and meager utilities that the sisters began their 40 years of collective service. They ministered in schools, prisons, and hospitals. They worked with youth, catechists, and women, and led parenting classes and prayer groups.
In 1968, Sisters Janet Guretz and Charmaine Kribs opened a school in the new suburb of San Borja. Over the years, even as the sisters’ passion for education flourished and the school grew, their numbers, gifts, and spirits stretched beyond the school to embrace other pastoral works with more marginated neighbors.
From the beginning of Dominican life in Peru, the sisters committed themselves to a collaborative mission with the Precious Blood Fathers in the numerous villages surrounding La Oroya. In 1980, Sisters Doris Taylor and Dominga Moore moved to Llanopampa in the Yauli valley in order to better attend to the needs of these isolated villages. Thirty-five farming towns, haciendas, and mining camps saw the faithful dedication of numerous sisters over the years. Everyone who lived in Peru between 1980 and 1992 has stories and experiences of violence inflicted by terrorist groups or the military. The sisters lived as the people did, one day at a time, with alternating uncertainties, fears, and hope. During those twelve years the radical Marxist group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, was at its height, in the midst of extreme poverty and economic chaos. (In 2003, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that from 1980-2000 more than 69,000 people lost their lives to this conflict.)
In 1986, the Dominican sisters recommitted themselves to work for justice by educating the poor in a Fe y Alegría (Faith and Joy) School, one of a network of schools for the poor initiated by the Jesuits, in a dusty “invasion” of Canto Grande on the margins of Lima. (An invasion is barren terrain occupied by people desperate for land ownership.) The commitment to minister in the school implied a willingness to accompany the people in all facets of their lives, as they struggled to claim their basic human rights and needs. Sister Judith Hilbing took on the leadership of the school, while Sister Doris Taylor provided pastoral care and works of social justice.
For years the North American sisters envisioned establishing a Peruvian religious community that would enhance their mission, serving the poor and oppressed in faithfulness to the Gospel. Many young Peruvian women were attracted to the charism, or spiritual gifts, and pastoral ministries of the Springfield Dominicans. Then, in 1986, Luz Arge, Nérida Guardamino, Margarita Valentín, and Beatriz Vila became the first Peruvians to bring their own dreams to the community. Through the years many other young women of Incan roots became preachers of truth, hospitality, and non-violence.
The loan of a house in San Isidro from 1991 to 1996 provided a site for Casa Domingo, a center house for sisters studying in the universities, as well as lodging for sisters on altitude leave from the mountains. The building allowed Sister Alverna Hollis to realize her dream of establishing a secondary school for deaf youth. In the evenings, Sister M. Rose Schleeper used the space to teach small-business crafts to women.
Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, dedicated lay men and women met to pray and reflect on the Scriptures through a Dominican lens. Gradually they joined the sisters for special ministries, celebrations, and other community events. They became Dominican associates alive with the charism of St. Dominic. In both Lima and La Oroya, they support spiritual and communal Dominican activities.
In the year of Jubilee, 2000, the Dominicans established yet another house in an isolated strip of the Andes. Sisters Patricia de la O’, Mila Díaz, and Kathlyn Mulcahy went to live and serve in Jarpa, a village of about 500 inhabitants, whose preservation of rural culture and indigenous simplicity speaks of the tenacity of a people who live in rhythm with nature.
In 2003, the Formation House found a new location in the suburb of Manco Capac. The young women entering religious life, as well as the student sisters, live among the people and are actively involved in the neighborhood community and church life. They participate in the common novitiate, learning with sisters of other congregations, and in the activities of the Dominican family. They are enriched by classes of human development, sexuality, and spirituality.
When the sisters who served in Peru, now or in the past, talk and share about the last forty years of living as Dominicans in South America, they seldom mention the hardships or the years of terrorism and fear. Rather they remember the people and the experiences of solidarity in a myriad of places. They speak of faith and courage, joy and growth, dreams and celebrations, simplicity and life. All of this was celebrated at the end of February, and will continue to be honored and cherished.
