We invite readers to send short stories about the ways in which their lives have been personally blessed by the life and work of priests and religious in our diocese.

By Karina Fabian

Sister Patricia Canty believes Catholic schools are the best places to give children a love of learning and a deep spirituality. It’s certainly the case for her, and she’s devoted her life to continuing that mission as a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth.

Sister Canty attended Catholic schools in Butte under the SCLs through high school. She felt a great love for the sisters and a calling to the religious life, but her parents encouraged her to explore a secular life first. She attended Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., and taught public school for a year.

She said the experience solidified her commitment. “I have grown to appreciate my mother’s encouragement to do that because I feel like that it saved my vocation – the fact that I had time to do a lot of other things, yet I was always attracted to the sisters. I felt it was God’s call.”

She joined the SCL community in 1959.

After professing vows, she taught at Billings Central in Montana, St. Louis in Kansas City, Mo., Fall City, Neb., and Denver, Colo., where she served for 16 years. Most of the schools were inner city, where up to a third of her class might not speak English and many students were only around for part of the school year.

“I had to learn Spanish very fast. We had a lot of children that would be there for a few months and then they’d be gone. Or we’d have families that would come in the middle of the year and we’d have to start from scratch. You had every level of learning in one classroom. There were so many needs, yet education was so important to them, to the whole family in fact, and we had a lot of support and some really good people on our faculty. They were hard years, but they were good years.”

With her experience in Spanish, she went to Wyoming, where she taught Spanish and English as a second language, then spent three years in Kansas City, Kan., before returning to Butte in July 2005.

Sister Canty is glad to be back home, where she is again close to her three brothers. (Her parents are deceased.) She’s spending her “active retirement” as a foster grandparent, working as a teacher’s aide. She enjoys helping the teacher and working one-on-one with the students but not having to “engineer” the classroom.

Last year, she was in a public school and is working with the Rockies program for remedial and enrichment learning. Next year, she’ll be a foster grandparent at Central Catholic Elementary, completing a circle in her life and perhaps influencing the calling of the next generation of Butte children to the religious life.

“You develop a real love for learning in the Catholic school,” she said. “I do appreciate the hard work the public schoolteachers do – they have marvelous spirit here in Butte – but I think in the Catholic school ... I don’t know if it’s a security or a balance between getting the work done and the art and music, but I think there’s more of an appreciation of the spiritual or the artistic side of life, a flow between the academic and the artistic and spiritual. I know it strengthened me and I think it strengthens the present generation.”


Published in The Montana Catholic, Vol. 22, No. 8, August 18, 2006.