Waiting on sainthood with a heart full of hope

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Since God normally doesn’t work on tight deadlines, saint-making can be a tedious exercise not to be attempted by the impatient or the faint of heart.

Convincing the Catholic Church – and, ultimately, the pope – to canonize someone is not easy, and for good reason.

Since 1988 – when the U.S. bishops allowed the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans to begin a formal process for the possible canonization of their pre-Civil War foundress, Mother Henriette Delille, who taught and cared for the enslaved – Sister Doris Goudeaux spent most of her waking hours dedicated to that task.

Even in the days before Sister Doris died Nov. 9 at the age of 91 – nearly 30 years after she formally had assumed the role of chief promoter of Mother Henriette’s sainthood cause – she was telling her fellow sisters, who have been waiting patiently on God, that the finish line was in sight.

“Just about every week, she would say to me, ‘I have a feeling it’s going to happen,’” said Sister Sylvia Thibodeaux, the former congregational leader who now is the promoter of the cause. “Doris always had this virtue of hope. She always knew it was going to happen soon.”

On God’s watch, “soon” is such a relative term, but toiling in the vineyard became Sister Doris’ daily calling card.

Maybe she absorbed that perseverance from Sister Audrey Marie Detiege, a congregational historian who in 1976 wrote “Henriette Delille: Free Woman of Color,” an important historical account that got the ball rolling. Sister Audrey Marie, so it is told, was so immersed in poring over the Cabildo’s archives one day that she spent the entire night in an empty, locked building looking up information.

“It was so hard to get in there, so she stayed,” Sister Sylvia said, laughing at the memory of the overnight vigil. “She was so determined.”

So was Sister Doris, who assumed responsibility for the Delille Commission Office in 1993 and began collecting and organizing hundreds of personal accounts from individuals devoted to Mother Henriette’s cause. They described amazing healings and other favors, small and large, they felt had been granted through Mother Henriette’s intercession.

One unexplained cure hit especially close to home: Sister Doris’ grand niece Marilyn Groves, who lived in Texas, was just 4 years old in the 1990s when she contracted life-threatening double pneumonia and a bacterial infection. Her mother and others in the family prayed to Mother Henriette for Marilyn’s healing, and she recovered quickly.

Marilyn’s recovery became the basis of a 2005 medical tribunal convened by the Diocese of Galveston-Houston, which certified after speaking with her doctors that there was no medical explanation for her regaining her health. The alleged miracle wound its way to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, but a panel of doctors could not come to a definitive conclusion.

That meant another delay, but it didn’t faze Sister Doris.

Currently, the Diocese of Little Rock has forwarded to the sainthood dicastery another possible miraculous healing of a woman from a serious aneurysm. So, the wait continues.

Even as her health waned, Sister Doris continued to go to her office daily, dashing off notes and overseeing the “Servant of the Poor” newsletter honoring the Delille legacy.

“I’d tell her, ‘You don’t have to go to that office every day; turn it over to someone else,’” said Pearl Cantrelle, her former student at St. Mary’s Academy in the French Quarter. “She would just tell me, ‘Maybe next year.’”

Cantrelle admits that when she was a sophomore in Sister Doris’ Spanish class in the 1960s, she was the dictionary entry for a whirling dervish – predating the years when there was a common diagnosis for attention deficit disorder.

“I was a piece of work,” Cantrelle said. “At the end of every test that she ever gave, she always ended with a sentence, ‘Smile, God loves you!’ One time she told me, ‘Pearl, you didn’t answer one question on the test,’ and I said, ‘I didn’t study, so there’s no point in taking it.’ And she said, ‘Well, you can sit there and guess!’”

But there was always the smile.

“She had a smile for everyone,” Cantrelle recalled. “She always felt like no matter how bad it was, it was going to be OK. You could go in there and fuss about anything, and when you walked out of there, you felt better.”

“Joyful is the primary word,” said former Tulane University historian Dr. Virginia Gould, who worked with archdiocesan archivist Dr. Charles Nolan as part of Sister Doris’ fact-gathering team. “She was the most joyful person I ever met.”

Sister Sylvia said Sister Doris approached life with such equanimity it was hard to discern if she ever got mad.

“She never complained about anything,” Sister Sylvia said. “Even if the house was burning, she would say, ‘At least the kitchen is OK.’ If we had a disagreement about something, it was difficult to distinguish when she was not happy. Oh, she would tell me, ‘Right now, I am fussing.’”

Marcia St. Martin, the former executive director of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, was another of Sister Doris’ students in the 1960s. She said Sister Doris was so close to Mother Henriette and her mission of educating the enslaved that she invented creative ways to spread her fame.

Since the Sisters of the Holy Family always fed every hungry person who came to their motherhouse doors looking for food, they decided also to feed the homeless once a year at Ozanam Inn before Thanksgiving. Supplemental care kits Sister Doris and her volunteers put together contained toiletry supplies and other items – and also a Venerable Henriette Delille T-shirt for the homeless to wear.

“I worked downtown until I retired, and I would always see people walking down the street with Mother Henriette Delille T-shirts on,” St. Martin said. “She was so devoted to spreading the devotion to her and ensuring that people knew about the great works of the Sisters of the Holy Family. People were always praying for the community, no matter where they were in parts of their lives.”

As her death approached, Sister Sylvia made a point of visiting Sister Doris at the Lafon Nursing Home – across Chef Menteur Highway from her office – and placing a prayer card with the image of Venerable Henriette on her chest.

Then Sister Sylvia prayed: “O, good and gracious God, you called Henriette Delille to give herself in service and in love to the slaves and the sick, to the orphan and the aged, to the forgotten and the despised. Grant that, inspired by her life, we might be renewed in heart and in mind, and, if it be your will, may she one day be raised to the honor of sainthood. By her prayers may we live in harmony and peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

In a few months, Sister Sylvia and Gould will travel to Rome to meet with the sainthood dicastery and also to find a new postulator to succeed Dr. Andrea Ambrosi, who retired after shepherding the cause since the early 2000s. God doesn’t work on deadlines.

The sisters recently met in New Orleans with Cardinal Peter Turkson, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academies of Sciences, who has given the cause his enthusiastic encouragement.

“We are very, very hopeful,” Sister Sylvia said.

Sister Doris was buried Nov. 14 in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. Her final resting place is the tomb where Mother Henriette was buried in 1862.

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