Sister Justine Ostini

Kindness, dedication, gratitude

Justine Ostini was born on October 20, 1925, the fifth child of John and Antoinette ( Jackson) Ostini of Mobile, Alabama. Her older siblings included two sisters and two brothers. Two younger sisters completed the family. Justine’s mother was a native of Mobile, but her father was born in Genoa, Italy.

Justine was baptized at St. Joan of Arc Church in Mobile. In an excerpt from Sister Justine’s oral history, she shared:

I grew up in the country with no electricity and no inside plumbing. Later on the city gradually did move out that far. We never had water. Grandma had a pump and we would go next door and get the water from her pump. So I grew up that way with chickens and whatever else we had. We had a goat one time. We had ducks. We had a cow. Those were the things you lived on in those days.

Justine began her education at Woodcock Public School. When Little Flower opened, which was staffed by Sisters of St. Joseph, Justine switched schools. High school was at Bishop Toolen, an all-girls school operated by the Sisters of Loretto.

From her elementary education, Justine recalled, “There was something about the Sisters of St. Joseph that attracted me. I can’t exactly tell you what that was.” Deciding that she preferred the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, she entered on September 15, 1945, and was received into the novitiate on March 19, 1946, as Sister Maria Giovanni. She earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Fontbonne College in 1981.

After pronouncing first vows on March 19, 1948, she was sent out immediately to what was then St. Joseph Home for the Friendless in Chicago, Illinois. She was a child care worker from March through August. Then, in time for the new school year she was missioned at Most Holy Rosary in St. Louis as a primary teacher. She had no teacher training, so she was partnered with Sister Veronita who, as S. Justine remembered, was really “the one who basically taught me how to teach school.” She then went on to teach at St. Teresa of Avila School, St. Louis (1949); St. Viator, Chicago (1951); St. Matthew, Mobile, Alabama (1955) and St. Leo, St. Louis (1957).

Sister Justine moved into teaching the intermediate grades at St. Thomas the Apostle in Florissant, Missouri (1962); Our Lady of the Americas, Kansas City, Missouri (1966): St. Mary Magdalene in St. Louis (1968); and St. Matthew (1971) and Little Flower (1974), both in Mobile.

Returning to child care—her first love—she was a dorm unit supervisor at the Village of St. Joseph in Atlanta, Georgia (1975). Next, S. Justine was, for a short time, a mailroom assistant at the Sisters of St. Joseph Provincial House in St. Louis (1980). In 1981, she returned to education, teaching primary students at St. Mary’s in Edwardsville, Illinois. In 1987, Sister Justine found herself in Valdosta, Georgia, at St. John the Evangelist, teaching intermediate grades until she retired there in 2007.

When asked about the changes in church and community, S. Justine said, “I liked them ... I thought that if this is the way it’s supposed to be, then this is the way it’s supposed to be." She also mentioned that she was content to be a Sister of St. Joseph, “I go with the flow.”

She continued living in Valdosta, helping out at St. John’s School, until she moved to Nazareth Living Center in 2019.