Sister Story

Sister Sandra Lyons, OSF

Her mission of Social Justice is carried out through

The Bernardine Center in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Here is a piece from "The Delaware County Daily Times"

Written by Patti Mengers

Night is fast falling on this chilly December day when a vigorous knock is heard at the entrance to the Bernardine Center on West Ninth Street in Chester.

Sister Sandra Lyons, executive director of the center, opens the door to find 40-year-old John Powell standing there.

"Can I leave donations?" he asks.

The nun, who also chairs the Delaware County Interfaith Food Assistance Network, swiftly scales the steps back into the center then emerges from another door where she invites the man to deposit his food parcels in a room full of stuffed brown paper bags. She thanks him for the donations and he promises to bring more.

"I've been there. I was a recipient. I'm giving back," said the Chester resident.

It is the perfect end of a work day for the 65-year-old nun, who has devoted her life to social justice, human rights and empowering people to stand on their own two feet. She has spent half of her 46 years as a Bernardine Franciscan Sister serving the impoverished people of Chester in various capacities at different times. The rest of her religious career has been spent serving ministries everywhere from Aston to Transylvania.

In all of her efforts, said the nun, she is striving to emulate the historical Jesus of Nazareth who was an advocate for the oppressed.

"There are people who say Jesus was a wimp. There are people who say Jesus was a high priest. I see Jesus as a revolutionary who came to change the structures that oppress and marginalize people," said Lyons.

In keeping with Christ's philosophy, she works to revolutionize the world peacefully through advocacy, education and providing direct services to those in need.

In her 19 years as a nurse and midwife at Chester's old Sacred Heart Medical Center, now Community Hospital, she both delivered babies and conducted childbirth classes for girls, women and health care professionals.

"They needed someone passionate about empowering women. Part of why I became a midwife was to help women learn about themselves and empower them to take responsibility for their health so they wouldn't have to depend on someone else to do it," said Lyons.

At the Bernardine Center, which was founded 25 years ago by Sister Rose MacDermott, clients not only can receive food, they can obtain referrals for such essentials as rent and home heating assistance. They can also attend classes for such subjects as parenting, anger management or to improve computer skills to make them more marketable to employers.

"I don't want to just give food to people, I want to teach them how to grow their own food. We're trying to help them learn to find resources to meet their needs," said Lyons, who has been at the center's helm since December 2007.

The Bernardine Center's food pantry is one of 12 that are part of the Delaware County Interfaith Food Assistance Network, which she has chaired for the last year. Family and Community Service of Delaware County provides oversight for the state food purchase program that provides some of the funds for the network.

"We get most of our food and funds from donors," noted the nun.

Since the advent of the recession in 2008, she said demand for donated food has increased almost 30 percent. With the closures of the Sunoco refinery in Marcus Hook and ConocoPhillips in Trainer putting hundreds of Delaware County residents out of work, Ly-ons expects the demand to continue to climb.

She has addressed the impact of corporate ethics on individuals through her work with the Bernardine sisters' Justice, Peace and Earth Care project, which she has directed since 2002. In that capacity, Lyons also is part of the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investments and the Interfaith Coalition for Corporate Responsibility.

"We work to change corporate behavior, for example, to have no child or slave labor and to be more Earth-responsible," said Ly-ons, who earned a master's certificate in Earth literacy from St. Mary of the Woods College in Indiana in 2006.

She understands the philosophy behind the Occupy America movement.

"The people of 'Main Street' need to be provided the resources to feed their families and to pay their rent. If Wall Street is speculating and losing money, then they need to provide for Main Street," Lyons maintained.

She also conducts fair trade sales, marketing coffee and crafts that are produced without child or slave labor and pay workers "a living wage, not minimum wage."

Sister moved the headquarters of Justice, Peace and Earth Care from the Bernardine sisters' mother house in Reading, Berks County, to Chester's Bernardine Center in 2008 after she took over operations there. She sees part of her mission as "a justice and peace person," to utilize local resources, whether it be for trash collection or groceries.

"I'd rather use the Chester Food Co-op and not a national chain. It's on 'Main Street' and the money goes to people in the local area who need that economic benefit," said Lyons.

Her work with Justice, Peace and Earth Care also extends to Reading, one of the most impoverished cities in the nation, in large part because of the high Dominican and Mexican immigrant population. She and her fellow sisters, with the help of graduate students from the Bernardine-founded Alvernia University in Reading, tutor immigrant students in various subjects, prepare 4-year-old immigrants for kindergarten and teach classes to immigrants studying for citizenship tests.

Since 1998, Lyons has also joined rallies for the closure of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., which trains military officers mostly from Latin American countries. She sees it as a training ground for dictators and international terrorists.

However, the nun sees poverty as one of the greatest sources of terrorism in the form of violence as witnessed in Chester, which has consistently had the highest annual murder rate in Delaware County in recent years. She has seen the small city's landscape change vastly just in the last 20 years.

"Even when I was here as a nurse-midwife, I could walk down the street and feel safe. If a guy was walking down the street and would see me, he'd probably stop and say, 'Hi, sister.' He was probably the father of a child I birthed," Lyons said.

While she was at Sacred Heart Medical Center from 1974 until the hospital was sold to Crozer-Keystone Health System in 1993, the nun was at the cutting edge of maternity care in the region. She instituted a birth center enabling mothers to undergo labor, delivery and recovery in the same home-like environment in the hospital. She championed drug-free, natural childbirth and "rooming-in" of babies with mothers. She implemented visitation of newborns' siblings and grandparents at the hospital.

In 1985, sister became the first midwife in the southwestern end of Delaware County after she earned a master's degree in nursing with a specialty in nurse-midwifery from the University of Pennsylvania.

"As a midwife, I birthed 500 babies. June of '93 was my last baby. He's also my godchild," Lyons said proudly.

But she attended labor for hundreds more as a nurse and the supervisor of obstetrics at Sacred Heart. Her youngest new mother was age 13. In the nun's work at the Bernardine Center, she regularly encounters clients whose babies she delivered.

"One of the volunteers who worked here said, 'You delivered my baby' and called me to congratulate me on the 30th birthday of her son," said Lyons with a smile.

After Sacred Heart was sold to Crozer-Keystone Health System and her services as a midwife were declined by the new owner, sister oversaw the practicum for senior nursing students from Neumann College in Aston at St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, Del., for a semester.

She then traveled to Romania as a companion for Sister Roberta Ann Leskey for three weeks in October 1993. While there, a repre-sentative of the National Catholic Health Association introduced them to Sister Anita Greene, a member of the Sisters of Divine Providence of St. Louis, Mo. Leskey was invited to return to Romania, which, just four years earlier, had been liberated from Com-munism, to teach religion while Lyons was asked to consider teaching at the first Catholic nursing school in Cluj.

"We discerned together over a bottle of Romanian beer, that we would be willing to return for those ministry opportunities," said Lyons, who noted that Romanian beer and wine were preservative-free and cheaper than mineral water and soda.

They returned to impoverished Romania in January 1995 and stayed for three and half years. Lyons taught English and childbirth education to fourth-year nursing students, who, in turn, taught clients who sought care from the free prenatal clinic Lyons set up with Greene.

"It was the Transylvania area by the way. That always gets people," said Lyons with a smile.

The oldest of five children, she started her international travels at a young age because her now-late father, Robert, was a career Navy man. Her mother, MaryAnne, now lives in Arizona.

Lyons remembers as a high school senior in Hawaii, revealing to them during a dinner discussion about college that the following September she was entering the Bernardine Franciscan Sisters, then based in Radnor. Her family didn't even know she had applied. She was drawn to the order after being taught by Bernardine sisters at one of the high schools she had attended during her family's Navy travels.

"I was sweeping the floor and one sister said, 'Sandra, did you ever consider being a sister?' I said, 'Oh no, I want to be a mother with a lot of children,'" she recalled.

Little did Sister Sandra Lyons know her vocation would lead her to deliver hundreds of children, and propel her to try and make life better for hundreds more.

Bernardine Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis
An International Congregation of Women Religious