(1927-2025)

The Good Lord always comes to my rescue. He has showered me with many gifts and blessings and has always put wonderful people in my life. Now I have friends who have come into my life and accepted me into their family and for this I am eternally grateful and love them all.

Sister Anne Lindquist completed her autobiography, in which this paragraph appears, when she was nearing her eighty-fifth birthday and was in many ways taking stock of her life. As an only child and therefore without any siblings, nieces or nephews, friends had become her family and had given her life great richness.

Anne was born on August 16, 1927, in Chicago. Shortly after her birth, she was adopted by William and Anne (Danne) Lindquist – an adoption she did not know about until she was in her late fifties and which, not surprisingly, came as a great shock. Her birth name was Ruth Ann, but her adoptive parents had her baptized as Annie Laurie.

William worked for W. C. Danne Insurance Co., the firm owned by his brother-in- law. Anne attended first grade at St. Ambrose School; then the family bought a home near St. Philip Neri School and she completed her elementary education there.

Anne was in sixth grade when her parents divorced. The whole succeding year was a difficult and unhappy one, and because divorce carried such a stigma at the time, she did not want anyone to know what was happening. “Dad left on a Holy Thursday,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I was all dressed up to be in the Holy Thursday procession and wanted so for him to see me in the procession.”

She rarely saw her father until after she entered the Congregation. Then, “Dad never missed a visiting day and came laden with boxes of Fannie May (chocolates),” she wrote. “One summer he came to visit me in Adrian with the trunk of his car filled with Good Humor bars packed in dry ice.”

Read more about Sister Anne (PDF)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, MI, 49221. 

Sister's Memorial Card (PDF)

Recordings of Memorial Liturgies

Recording of Sister Anne's Memorial Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)

Recording of Sister Anne's Ritual of Remembering - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as."

 

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(1935-2025)

As the oldest daughter in a family of fourteen, Rita Brunett learned responsibility at a very early age. And, as a girl sandwiched in the middle of four boys and trying to keep up with them, she earned a reputation for being more adventurous than most of her school friends. Both of these factors, responsibility and adventurousness, came to bear often in her later life as a religious.

Rita was born August 10, 1935, on Detroit’s east side to Raymond and Cecilia (Gill) Brunett. Eventually, the family grew to encompass six boys and eight girls; besides Rita, who was the third child, there were Raymond, Alex, Michael, Anne, William, Grace, John, Rose, Jean, Mary, Paul, Ruth, and Margaret.

Anne, Rose, and Mary all followed Rita into the Congregation, although each of the three ended up leaving, while Alex entered the priesthood and eventually rose to become Archbishop of Seattle, Washington.

Raymond was a plumber who worked hard to provide for his family and both he and Cecilia worked hard on the domestic front. According to Rita’s autobiography:

We were a happy family although often very poor. … We did not want for anything that was important. From both my parents we learned a good work ethic. My father would always tell us to do “eight hours of work for eight hours of pay.” My mother believed that there was a place for everything and everything should be in its place (try to follow that with six kids under the age of seven!). One of the other important lessons we learned was that it was no shame to be poor as long as we were clean and our clothes were neatly patched. My mother spent many hours darning socks and making and repairing clothing for us. My father was unusual for his day in that he had a large hand in raising the children. In a time when the man was supposed to work and the wife take care of the children and home, my father changed diapers, cooked meals, and did whatever work needed to be done.

Read more about Sister Rita (PDF)

 

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, MI, 49221. 

 

Vigil and Funeral Recordings

Recording of Sister Rita's Vigil Service - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)

Recording of Sister Rita's Funeral Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)

 

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(1939-2025)

Over the course of time, the Adrian Dominican Sisters teaching at St. Kilian School on Chicago’s South Side had all seven of the Traut children – all of them girls – come through their classrooms. The three oldest of those girls went on to be educated by the Congregation at Aquinas Dominican High School, and one of those, Janet, went on to become an Adrian Dominican Sister after graduation.

Born on October 25, 1939, in Evergreen Park, Illinois, to James and Ethel (Heinrich) Traut, Janet was the third oldest child in the family. Her sisters were Marjorie, Kathryn, Linda, Judy, Susan, and Bernadette.

James was a Chicago police officer who rose to the rank of detective sergeant in the homicide bureau. “His views of the causes of poverty were far different than Janet’s after she taught in Detroit,” Judy wrote in a remembrance after Sister Janet’s death. “They had arguments many times and both got exasperated with each other. But it taught us there were many dimensions to social issues.”

Janet was in her senior year at Aquinas Dominican in 1957 when she wrote to Mother Gerald seeking entrance to the Congregation. She graduated from high school that June and arrived in Adrian late that same month.

Read more about Sister Janet (PDF)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, MI, 49221. 

Sister's Memorial Card (PDF)

Vigil and Funeral Recordings

Recording of Sister Janet's Memorial Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)

Recording of Sister Janet's Ritual of Remembrance - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as."

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(1928-2025)

For Sister Pauline Opliger, the path to becoming an Adrian Dominican Sister was a long and winding road.

Her father, Harry, was a Methodist minister originally from Millersburg, Ohio, while her mother, Della, an elementary schoolteacher at the time of their marriage, came from Lewiston, Nebraska. The two met and married in Glade, Kansas, where Harry was assigned.

Shortly after the wedding, Harry was transferred to a church in Rice, Kansas. The couple’s first three children were born in Rice: Pauline on March 2, 1928; Mark in 1930; and Lila in 1932.

Harry bought a small farm in north-central Kansas a few years later and left full-time ministry. It was a difficult time to be a Midwestern farmer; Sister Pauline wrote in her autobiography about her memories of massive dust storms and an invasion of grasshoppers that devoured the crops. Besides all that, “farming did not agree with my father,” she wrote, and he returned to full-time ministry and was assigned once again to Glade. Pauline’s youngest brother, Leland, entered the family there in 1939.

A couple of transfers later, the Opliger family was in Covert, Kansas, at the time of Pauline’s graduation from high school (in a class of four) in 1946. Wanting to save money to go to college and study art, she took summer classes in 1947 at Fort Hays State College in order to obtain a provisional teaching certificate, and that school year taught three elementary grades – containing a grand total of five students – in nearby Enterprise.

Read more about Sister Pauline (PDF)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, MI, 49221. Funeral arrangements are being handled by Anderson-Marry Funeral Home, Adrian.

Sister's Memorial Card (PDF)

 

 

Vigil and Funeral Recordings

Recording of Sister Pauline's Vigil Service - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)

Recording of Sister Pauline's Funeral Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)

Leave your comments and remembrances – if you don't see the comment box below, click on the "Read More" link.