Eighty-six years.
That's how long - since Calvin Coolidge was president - that Sister Angelina Wald served the Catholic church in religious life as a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She joined the sisters in 1924, finishing her high school years at Mount Notre Dame Academy in Reading. She earned a bachelor's degree in education from the Athenaeum of Ohio. She initially wanted to be a missionary, but ended up becoming a teacher, principal, religious education teacher and community outreach worker at assignments in Ohio, Illinois and Arizona, including at Sts. Peter and Paul in Reading, where she taught in the 1940s and was principal. Sister Wald died June 30 at Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Reading. She was 102. In the 1950s, she led the first group of local sisters out to Phoenix, where they started schools for migrant workers' children and worked with ranchers to help them better treat the workers. She often said she found her greatest joy in her Arizona work.
She retired in 1985. She returned then to Mount Notre Dame and worked there in community service until 2008. She was particularly good in reaching middle-school boys, said Sister Mary Ann Barnhorn, now development director at the convent. Sister Barnhorn had Sister Wald as a teacher in elementary school and was inspired to follow her into religious life. "Her boys are now in their 70s and they still come to see her," Sister Barnhorn said. "She was ahead of her time."
Her funeral is expected to draw many of her former students. Sister Wald was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1908 and was given the middle name of her mother, Mary Angelina Wald. She was baptized Helen Catherine. She outlived her siblings, three sisters and a brother.
Survivors include nieces and nephews.Though her service to God occupied much of her life, Sister Wald also loved to make fudge, crochet and study birds, ants and butterflies, which she called "little living beings." She also liked gardening and reading, mostly biographies, natural history books and inspirational messages. She never made it to an international missionary assignment, but she kept in touch with other missionaries, including her nephew, Father Eugene Watrin, SJ, who spent almost 50 years in India and Nepal, before his death in 2004.
