Sister Kathleen Stack,
December 29, 1925 - April 9, 2022
Generous, joyful, devoted to serving others
John and Martha (Steinmetz) Stack of Kansas City, Missouri, welcomed their daughter, Frances, on October
7, 1925. Growing up in Kansas City, she shared her life with siblings John, Charlie and Martha. Frances met the Sisters of St. Joseph while attending Redemptorist High School. After graduation, she worked for about two years at the Kansas City Gas Company as a cashier. One rainy, dreary day as she was sitting, waiting for customers, she had the thought that she was wasting her life.
On September 15, 1945, she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, receiving the habit and name Sister Kathleen Joseph on March 19, 1946. She began teaching in March 1948 at St. Mary Magdalen Grade School in St. Louis, followed by Our Lady of Presentation Grade School in Overland in September. In 1951, she moved to Wisconsin and taught the primary and intermediate grade levels at St. Peter in Oconto and Sacred Heart in Shawano (1954).
S. Kathleen returned to Missouri in 1955 and taught at St. Patrick Grade School in Rolla. A year later, she left to teach at St. Theresa Grade School in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Longing to be involved in the missions, when the CSJ community opened a mission in Japan, S. Kathleen volunteered. To her delight, she was chosen to go to the Carondelet House of Studies in Kyoto, Japan, to study the language (1957). She was then assigned as a music teacher and office manager at St. Joseph Joshi Gakuen in Tsu-Shi Mie-Ken (1958).
In 1966, she continued her studies at Washington University in St. Louis, returning to Japan as a pastoral assistant at Takano Parish in Kyoto (1967). The following year, she worked with the poor in the slums of Tokyo as a social worker, which was very dear to her heart. She directed a group of about 200 Japanese volunteers dedicated to helping the poor. They held a number of fundraising events to help a protestant minister build a new center for serving the poor. In 1976, S. Kathleen received her master’s in social welfare from Sophia University in Tokyo and returned to the United States. She found herself back in the slums of Japan in 197
as a special project coordinator. She came back to the states again in 1979 and worked as a special project coordinator with Tulsa Catholic Social Services in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
S. Kathleen went to Japan a final time in 1981 and served as an administrator at Sophia University. She returned to the United States in 1983 and attended the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. In 1984, she went
on to join the Pine Apple Community Center in Pine Apple, Alabama, where she served the next 15 years as a community care enabler (1984) and director (1997).
In 1999, S. Kathleen moved to Greenville, Alabama, and volunteered at the Butler Adult Training Center. A year later, she retired and remained in Greenville where she studied art (painting) with a local, well-known artist. She continued her enjoyment of painting until her passing. In 2007, she moved to Nazareth Living Center in St. Louis.
While Sister Sally Harper was a junior sister, she met
S. Kathleen who was studying Japanese at Washington University. She shares:
I loved to hear her stories about life in Japan and how she was helping the Korean people who lived in Japan and were, at that time, marginated and often poor. Her love of the Japanese people and her joy of living with our CSJ sisters there was always so evident in her sharing.
Sister Pat Gloriod also enjoyed hearing about S. Kathleen’s adventures in Japan:
She told us about a time she and some other sisters took a cable car up a mountain ... It was very windy ... they later learned that the cars were closed down after theirs. It was the last one running because of the wind. Needless to say, they thanked God and St. Joseph ... for their safe return to lower elevations.”
S. Pat also remembers visiting S. Kathleen with Sister Kathleen Eggleston, “The two Kathleens enjoyed talking about art, painting, sketching and the like. I will miss those conversations.”
By Sister Helen Oates