At 78, Sr. Finn has no plans to retire | The Michigan Catholic

DETROIT ? At 78, Sr. Mary Finn, HVM, still says she doesn?t see retirement anywhere on the horizon.

?No matter where I look, I can?t see retirement; I can?t see it anywhere,? she says with the smile and characteristic good humor known to successive waves of seminarians and lay students at Sacred Heart Major Seminary since the late 1960s.

For more than four decades of her 60 years in the Sisters, Home Visitors of Mary, she has been a part of the pastoral and spiritual formation of students at the seminary.

Sr. Finn

But while some of them have become bishops, diocesan officials, seminary administrators or professors themselves, what counts for Sr. Finn is ?that we?re in God?s family together and that we were in a learning community together.?

To know Sr. Finn is to know the warmth of her personality and the enthusiasm of her greetings, which typically include a hug.

And many carry with them the ?birthday gift? she likes to give. ?I always ask their age, and then tell them to look up the psalm with that same number, and pray it every day until their next birthday, when they should move on to the next psalm.?

Msgr. Todd Lajiness, rector of Sacred Heart Major Seminary, says Sr. Finn exemplifies the ?selfless love of Jesus.?

?She is an example of the pastoral charity that we desire in all of our students,? he said.

Sr. Finn was honored at the order?s annual gala dinner Oct. 14. Although she now loves teaching, she was first attracted to the HVM Sisters because she didn?t want to become a teacher.

Sr. Finn still recalls the presentation the HVMs? co-foundresses gave to her 10th-grade class at St. David High School in Detroit. She had been thinking about becoming a sister for a while, and now thought, ?Aha! That?s what I?ll be.?

She entered the HVMs in August 1952 after graduating high school.

For most of the 1950s and ?60s, Sr. Finn did door-to-door evangelization work. The Detroit-based HVMs focused on city neighborhoods that were in transition, and Sr. Finn worked in St. Catherine Parish, now St. Augustine and St. Monica Parish.

?Many of those who later were among the black Catholic leaders in the archdiocese came out of those visits,? says Sr. Finn, who still makes St. Augustine and St. Monica her parish home.

As an HVM, she also went on to study at Marygrove College of Detroit, Marquette University and Duquesne University, and began doing retreat work, eventually winding up on the seminary faculty.

But she is making home visits, Sr. Finn says, noting she is visiting the future priests in what is, at least for a time, their home.

She says a big influence on her own formation was the late Auxiliary Bishop Walter J. Schoenherr, who came to St. David of Wales Parish as a young priest when she was in fifth grade.

?I tell the seminarians, ?Be very careful of fifth-grade girls, because they will fall in love with you,? which is exactly what we did with Bishop Schoenherr.?

Source: http://www.themichigancatholic.com/2012/10/at-78-sr-finn-has-no-plans-to-retire/

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