Prayer Request from Brian Kelly: Please pray for my aunt, Sister Mary Susan Boyle, Sister of Charity, age 90, my mother’s sister. She just died some minutes ago. She recently had Extreme Unction. The sister of Father Flanagan of Boys Town, who was also a Sister in the same convent with my aunt, told me on a visit there some years ago that my aunt was a saint. She truly was. And is!
When I was a young man my mother and I would visit Sister Mary Susan where she worked at the Sister Miriam Teresa League House in Convent Station NJ. with six or so other saintly religious. Sister Miriam Teresa was eventually beatified in Newark NJ at the cathedral of the Sacred Heart on Oct. 4, 2014. Pope Francis gave his approval after a miracle of the healing of a boy with macular degeneration was discovered, which had occurred through her intercession over forty years before. That amazing story can be read here. When I spoke with the postulator for her cause, while I was in Rome in 1973, he knew nothing about the 1970 miracle. How could he? The letter reporting it was lost in a filing cabinet in a back room at the League House! Only to be discovered in 1998!
My aunt was the last and youngest of my parents’ generation of Kellys and Boyles. She suffered very much these past few years from various illnesses. I am sure mom was with her in the last moments. Mom more or less raised her since their mother died when “Joan” (my aunt’s baptismal name) was only a child. Sister Mary Susan Boyle died on May 7 the eve of Sister Miriam Teresa’s feastday, May she rest in peace.
