Tony Messenger | Post-Dispatch
Metro columnist
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There is a pair of socks in my bottom drawer with a woman’s face on them.
Her name is Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt. She died Thursday. She was 106.
The socks with Sister Jean’s picture were sent to me after her beloved Loyola University men’s basketball team made a dream run to the Final Four in the 2018 NCAA Tournament. Having attended Loyola for two years in the mid-1980s, I was a fan of the team and thoroughly enjoyed the attention that Sister Jean, the team’s chaplain, received.
Her joy, and her ever-present maroon and gold scarf, became the story of the tournament. It was repeated in 2021, during the pandemic, when she returned with the team for another run, though they fell short of the Final Four.
Joy, spread with words of encouragement or a smile like the one Sister Jean had, can be infectious.
“I got letters from Germany and France, different kinds of people, saying, ‘You brought great joy to our country,’” she once told ESPN in an interview.
It’s possible that our paths crossed at one time. In 1985, when I was a freshman at Loyola, I’d often walk past the campus of the nearby Mundelein College, where Sister Jean was an administrator at the time. Then, as later, she was doing the job she committed her life to when she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary: educating and guiding young people. When Mundelein was absorbed by Loyola in 1991, Sister Jean became an administrator at the university and eventually the academic adviser and chaplain for the men’s basketball team.
There was a time when I wanted to walk in her footsteps and join the Catholic ministry. Before I discovered journalism, I was a theology major, with plans of possibly becoming a priest. A series of discussions with a priest at Gonzaga Hall disabused me of that notion. You either know or you don’t, the priest told me.
I didn’t know. Sister Jean did.
So it is for most nuns I’ve come across over the years. They open homeless shelters and do the hard work of serving the poor. They go to prisons to bring prayer and friendship, and sometimes hope, to people who have lost their freedom. A nun in Illinois who reads my column regularly calls me about once a week to offer words of encouragement.
I don’t call her back often enough to say thank you. Sister Jean, I suspect, would tell me to pick up the phone.
I’m still amazed at how a tiny elderly woman known mostly for her basketball fandom became such an iconic and international figure. She rose above the noise of the 24-hour news cycle to inspire people and have her face on socks, bobbleheads and billboards. And now, after her death, she has been featured in obituaries in every major newspaper in America.
Her rise to fame and ability to capture world-wide attention tells me something about the most divisive era in my lifetime: We yearn for genuine heroes. Despite all of our social media-fed anger, we are uplifted by good news.
As a journalist, writing about divisiveness — politics, gun violence, racial discord, homelessness — is a big part of my job. But increasingly, I find myself attracted to stories of the heroes among us — the folks who run food pantries and help connect unhoused people with critical services; the senior citizens fighting for democracy; the people who dedicate their lives to making the world a better place.
Amid the madness of daily life, we need those stories to feel better about ourselves, to feel better about the state of humanity.
Sister Jean, I think, would want me to look for more of those tales. And so I will.
Amen, and go Ramblers.
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Tony Messenger | Post-Dispatch
Metro columnist
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