There are many joy-filled memories of being sent. Nancy Murphy RSCJ remembers; “(A)t the invitation of our Superior General, Concepción Camacho, I left for Egypt and had the joy of getting to know the Egyptian people and of serving as a nurse in our dispensaries in Upper Egypt and in a settlement for trash collectors and their families on the outskirts of Cairo." " “It was in Egypt that I realized with a new awareness that as an rscj I was a world citizen. Our Egyptian sisters and rscj from many other countries taught me that.”
"Unfortunately, illness put an end to my time in Egypt , but the grace of that time will be in my heart forever. “
In 1988, the international Society of the Sacred Heart decided to go into a new country, as Philippine had done nearly two centuries before. The Society wanted to go to a young nation, one in which Catholics were a minority, symbolic of the situation into which Philippine found herself when she arrived in North America in 1818, intending to live and work among Native Americans. And so the Society looked to Indonesia, a young nation, where eighty-seven percent of its 238 million people are Muslims and just four percent are Catholics.”” (Heart, Spring 2005)
Anne (Nance) O’Neil was the first RSCJ sent to Indonesia. Nance is still there. Sally Rude, Brigid Keogh, Bonnie Kearny, Barbara Dawson, Sis Flynn, Stephany Veluz, Maureen Little, Sheila Hammond, Donna Collins and Nancy Murphy have served in Indonesia for varying lengths of time.
(From an article about Internationality in the Society of the Sacred Heart after Vatican II, written by Lolin Menendez in 2020)
