Newsletter: August 2026
Dear Friends of Joseph House:
The poet Robert Frost said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
There is a hole in our hearts and memories of Sr. Connie follow us throughout our days, but she believed in the mission of the Joseph House — she gave her life to it — and remembering that helps us to carry on with our work. The needs of the poor cannot wait. Their cries rise up like a summer thunderstorm, sometimes hitting us with the same tumultuous energy. Here is how one woman gave voice to her plight:
I have gotten so far behind in my rent because of my mental state. I am completely overwhelmed with life. I have a court date to EVICT me and my sickly husband. I don’t know what to do. I have no transportation, paying to get everywhere, doctor appointment, work, store. I need help! I don’t want to go back out there. I was homeless for 6 years, and I am petrified of going into the streets. We will literally be on the streets with nothing. I’m so scared, I have already thrown most of my stuff away just so we don’t be publicly humiliated by dragging clothes and things with us. Please help me cause I don’t see a way. I pray every day, several times a day, but to be honest I’m losing faith, not just in God but in my mental health.
It is not a burden to help the poor because we do it together as a community — which includes you and our volunteers — and because God is always present to give us strength. We all have trials to face, and in reaching out to others we discover that we are one. That impels us to do everything we can to help each other.
Our caseload at the Joseph House Crisis Center remains high throughout the summer months. Your support allows us to assist people like the following:
Mandy, 30, and her husband Logan were living in their car. They became homeless after Logan lost his job. Mandy works at an assisted living facility. You can imagine how difficult it is to get ready to go to work when you’re living in a car. And then when your shift is over, how can you get the rest you need? How can you live with any decency? Logan needed to find work, and thanks be to God he did. He got a job at the landfill, a place we pay no attention to but which is essential to our consumerist society. Did his new job mean he and his wife could stop living in their car? Well, the cost to move into an apartment was more than their combined monthly income!
There was something else this couple wanted, and that was to be reunited with their son. He was living with a relative because they wanted to spare him the hardship of being homeless. This is where the Joseph House stepped in: we helped to pay the security deposit on an apartment so this family could be together in proper housing. From this story we see once again that, far too often, people who work hard doing jobs that benefit others do not earn enough for even the basic necessities. We also see how poverty attacks family life.
Dolores, 72, is on a fixed income and has cut her expenses to the bone: no car, cable TV, or internet. She barely has enough for rent, utilities, and food. Her out-of-pocket cost for necessary dental work was several hundred dollars. Dolores turned to the Joseph House for help. Thankfully, we were able to contribute the full amount she needed.
Tom, 51, is a disabled veteran. After his wife lost her job, they couldn’t pay their electricity bill. More than $1,000 was needed to prevent a cut-off. Tom only had $400. The Joseph House paid the remainder.
Our gratitude for your support goes deep in our hearts. We are united with you in bonds of prayer and love. May God’s blessing be with you.
Your Little Sisters of Jesus and Mary
Prayer Requests: Send us your special intentions and the Little Sisters will pray for you: Contact Form.
Donations: Your contribution will help people in need: Donate.
Here is a newspaper article from 1989 that shows the lively spirit of Sr. Connie:
Changing Habits: Nuns see mixed messages in dwindling numbers
By Tom Nugent
The Northeast Times Reporter
March 22, 1989
Something was missing
Sister Connie, who loves to laugh, told a story on herself the other day.
But first, she told her age.
“I’m 48 — and feeling great!”
Sister Connie’s age is an important part of this story, because she only joined the Little Sisters of Jesus and Mary about three years ago.
She is a powerful example of the “new nun” that everybody keeps talking about in the Catholic Church.
Like many of the new nuns, Sister Connie was a well established professional (she also has a master’s degree in theology from the St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute), long before deciding to put on the plain, denim habit and the blue kerchief of the Little Sisters.
After 13 years of teaching school in Baltimore’s inner city, Sister Connie (her order prefers not to use surnames) realized that something big was missing in her life.
So she went and talked to a very interesting woman named Sister Mary Elizabeth. Sister Elizabeth, as it turned out, had been a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor — but had withdrawn from that order several years ago, because she didn’t think the nuns were doing enough to help the battered souls who inhabit the streets of the inner city.
So Sister Elizabeth founded a brand new order, and recruited four other nuns, and planted them in a tiny convent on E. Lombard St., in the very heart of the Butcher’s Hill war zone.
The Little Sisters of Jesus and Mary spend their days trying to help the drug addicts, the alcoholics, the broken families, the poverty wracked old people who live in the crumbling rowhouses which surround their convent.
After Sister Connie spent a few hours with Sister Elizabeth, she realized that there would be no escape: She was going to have to put on the denim and the blue kerchief.
But how do you give up everything, and run off to join the convent — at age 45?
“I sat down and asked myself: ‘What am I gonna do now?’ You know, there aren’t too many options for women in the Church today. And the idea of religious life came to me a couple of times, and I squashed it immediately.
“And then I went down to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. It was so confusing to me! I didn’t know which way to go. And I put my life on the altar. I did. I let go.
“I won’t say it was easy, to let go of my things,” said Sister Connie the other day, over a cup of coffee.
“No,” murmured the deadpan Sister Elizabeth, whose sense of humor fully matches Sister Connie’s. “She arrived with a moving van.”
“That’s right!” roared Sister Connie. “I brought a moving van to the convent, to become a nun!”
She remembers how the other nuns looked at her. . .a bit. . .oddly.
Then they all went into chapel, to sing hymns. The first hymn was called “Be Exalted.”
Sister Elizabeth had an idea after eyeballing Sister Connie and her moving van. She suggested they change “exalted” to “exhausted.”
Now everybody roared.
Struggle!
Sister Connie of the Little Sisters of Jesus and Mary taught school in Baltimore’s inner city for 13 years before becoming a nun at the age of 45.
Sister Connie remembers that she was ashamed, at first, to hold the “begging basket,” and to ask people for money for the poor.
“It was all very foreign to me. I said, ‘I can’t do this. I have all these degrees, and everything! I can’t hold the basket!’”
But then she walked, for the very first time, into a shack on the Eastern Shore. (Her order also offers services to the poor around Salisbury.)
“It was a family of six, living in one room. And they had a mattress on the floor, and an electric frying pan on the floor. It was like the Third World.
“And it was such a shock, when I saw that — a block from Rte. 50 — and I felt like laying down on the floor, and saying, ‘My God, I didn’t know.’ And all at once, it was okay.”
She looks at you.
“I’ll hold that basket!”
She roars.
“Yes, indeed. For those people — I’ll hold that basket.”