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Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
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MISSIONARY

At 94, Sister Elenita goes about living the life of the missionary she wanted to be since she was a teenager -- visiting the sick, shut-ins and women in prison, or talking to teenagers while stopped at a red light, or in the store. She has followed her missionary calling as a Maryknoll sister through imprisonment by the Japanese in World War II, and service in Harlem, Hawaii and a Navajo reservation in New Mexico -- and finally, Stockton, where she lives today.

She was born on July 14, 1907 in New Jersey, one of seven children. "When I was 15 or 16, she says, "it just came to me out of the clear sky, that I was to be a missionary and go to China. My family was not particularly religious and I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know what a missionary was." Not having anyone to help her pursue that vocation, she took a job in New York with a lawyer. "I worked there for little over a year. One day when I was taking the train home, right on the seat next to me was a magazine called The Sign. It was a Passionists' magazine. I opened it up naturally and started reading about missionaries going to China." She wrote the Passionists, who referred her to Mother Alexandrian of the Sisters of Charity, an order of teaching sisters. Although still hoping to be a missionary in China, she decided to join the Sisters of Charity.

Then a few months before she was to enter the convent, she went to a dance with a friend. "I was there having a good time and here is this young Lithuanian priest. I told him. 'You know I am going to become a Sister of Charity, but I am not happy." He wrote a letter of reference to a priest in Paraseeck New Jersey, and Sister Elenita went to see him. "The priest said, 'I can't help you. Why don't you stay out and have a good time for yourself and maybe in about two years if you still want go to Maryknoll, go to Maryknoll.' I didn't know what I was going to do. My mother said, 'Do what you really want.' I said I wanted to go to Maryknoll."

Five years later, Sister Elenita went on her first mission. She taught school Los Angeles, took care of orphans, helped out in a sanitarium, and went to Immaculate Heart College. In the 1930s, Sister Elenita went to Korea, which was then occupied by the Japanese. On the Feast of Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1941, Sister Elenita recalls, "No one came to Mass, and we were wondering what was happening. Someone came and said. 'Oh, there's war with the United States.'" The day before, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Sister Elenita was arrested. When she was released, she returned to the motherhouse in New York and spent some time working there before Cardinal Spellman asked the sisters to go to Harlem. Then came 18 years in Hawaii. After Hawaii she served at her community's nursing home in Maryknoll, then went to New Mexico to work with the Navajo for 11 years, which included driving a pickup truck, sometimes eight hours a day.

Sister Elenita has been in Stockton 18 years, the only Maryknoll in the diocese. "Now I do home visiting -- I'm a free-lancer. I am my own boss," she says. "I have a list of people I visit, and it always grows. I meet people and they say, 'Oh, couldn't you visit my mother. She is ill.' So I put them on my list. I make no appointments -- when you see the whites of my eyes, there I am. That's how I work." "I will be 94 on July 14. Seventy-six years a sister. You know that's a long time. I wonder why I'm here so long."

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