On Monday evening, June 10, ICNY supporters gather to celebrate “The Courage of Conviction – Then & Now” and to honor five distinguished individuals, including Sister Pat Farrell, OSF, Vice President, Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque & Immediate Past President, Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Born on a farm and then raised in Waterloo, Iowa, Sister Pat Farrell joined the Sisters of St. Francis (OSF) in Dubuque, Iowa at age 18. She took final vows at 29 after receiving a bachelors’ degree in English from Briar Cliff University. Early in her religious life she was part of a religious education team in rural Iowa and taught English and theology at the high school level, after which she spent five years doing pastoral work and community organizing in San Antonio, Texas.
Farrell’s work with Latino immigrants eventually led her to Latin America. She was in Chile for more than five years during the Pinochet dictatorship, working in the northern city of Arica in a variety of social service, pastoral and human rights activities. During her last year in Chile Sister Pat worked in Santiago in service to The Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians. In 1986 she began work in El Salvador during that country’s civil war, beginning in a camp for internally displaced persons. Farrell spent another 14 years in Suchitoto, in El Salvador’s war-torn area of Guazapa, accompanying returning refugees, providing pastoral services, working with the women’s and human rights movements, and finally serving as a trauma mental health worker. She earned a master’s degree in social work from Loyola University Chicago, acquiring skills to work with those traumatized from war and torture in El Salvador. Before returning to the US she co-founded the Center of Art for Peace in Suchitoto. Sister Pat has also worked in the behavioral health field with Spanish-speaking people in Chicago and Omaha.
In August 2011 Farrell became president of Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) steering the conference through a challenging period while it underwent a doctrinal assessment by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. LCWR is an association of leaders of congregations of Catholic women religious in the United States with more than 1,500 members representing greater than 80 percent of the nation’s 57,000 women religious. Now as its immediate past president, Farrell continues to be an integral member of the LCWR’s national leadership team as it works to resolve differences with the Vatican, as well as serving as Vice President of the Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque, Iowa.
The following is a “60 Minutes” segment featuring Sister Pat Farrell and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. From CBSNewsOnline, published Mar 17, 2013.
ICNY cordially invites you to join us in honoring Sister Pat Farrell on June 10. Other JMP awardees on June 10 will be:
- Rev. Dr. C. T. Vivian, Veteran Civil Rights Activist & Colleague of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Bill Moyers, Host, PBS Bill Moyers Journal
- Judith Moyers, CEO, Public Affairs Television
- Russell Simmons, Chairman, Foundation for Ethnic Understanding
