Sister Jane Ellen Kelly, CSJ
September 6, 1934 - September 7, 2023
(S. Maureen Patrick)
A woman of compassion, gentleness and dedication.
James and Mary (Fisher) Kelly of King City, Missouri, welcomed their daughter, Jane, on September 6, 1934. Jane attended Maple Grove, a one-room school on their property. No Catholic high school was near, so Jane attended Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas. In 1952, she began a three-year nursing program at St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing in Kansas City, Missouri. Although desiring to be a nurse, she also came from a family of religious including CSJ Sisters Mary Hugh McLarney and Margaret Eileen McLarney and members of other orders. After her second year of nursing school, she felt she could not “ignore the call to enter religious life any longer.” In 1954, she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Louis, receiving the habit and the name Sister Maureen Patrick.
Sister Jane earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota (1959) and began her nursing ministry at St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City. She was then a nurse supervisor at St. Joseph Hospital in Kirkwood, Missouri (1962-64). She returned to St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City as a nurse supervisor until her position changed to pastoral care visitor and staff nurse in 1967.
In 1971, S. Jane moved to Seattle to serve as a staff nurse at the Veterans Hospital. A year later, she became nursing service director and supervisor at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma, Alabama, sponsored by the Edmundite Fathers who set up clinics to provide health care to poor African Americans in rural Alabama. Her next ministry was as nurse supervisor at Lowndes County Health Service Association in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1976 until she returned to Good Samaritan Hospital in 1978. Sister Fran Voivedich ministered with Jane in Selma and remembers her as “wonderful to live with” and “always thinking of everyone else before herself.”
S. Jane studied to be a nurse practitioner at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1979. The following year, she ministered as a nurse practitioner at the Grace Busse Rural Clinic in Pine Apple, Alabama. Realizing that many of her patients could not read, she appealed to the Edmundite Fathers, who then set up a learning center where many people then learned to read. From 1985 to 1988, S. Jane served her community in province leadership as regional superior and provincial councilor. She then returned to the clinic in Pine Apple as nurse practitioner. In 2010, she received the Medal of Honor from the Edmundite Fathers for her dedication to her ministry and to the people of Pine Apple.
S. Jane retired in 2016 and volunteered at the Health Link-Doc on the Bus Clinic in Selma from 2017 to 2022. She then moved to St. Anthony’s Senior Living in Kansas City.
S. Jane's real-life and CSJ sister, Sister Anne Kelly, shares:
Jane embraced her own health challenge with deep faith and openness to God’s will. In the loving care of her family, the medical team and the Sisters of St. Joseph, Jane knew the risen Christ accompanying her in the final days of her pilgrim journey. The call to go forth to 'proclaim God’s love,' which Jane heard many years ago, would be Jane’s message to each of us along with her Thank You!
By Sister Helen Oates