Celebrating a Life Well Lived!

24 JUNE 2016 | GENERAL INTEREST

The Missionary Franciscan Sisters are saddened by the loss today of Sr Noela Leamy mfic who died peacefully in Holy Spirit Hospital after a long illness.

Sr Noela had a great passion for education in its many facets and spent many years working in a variety of educational and administrative roles in Papua New Guinea and Australia. She was one of the foundation Sisters who established St Clare’s, a secondary boarding college for young women, in Aitape in the West Sepik District of PNG.

Sr Noela worked as the National Director for Christian Schools in Port Moresby, and served for seven years at St Benedict’s Teacher’s College Kaindi in Wewak in the East Sepik Province. Her tireless work and commitment to Catholic Education bore fruit when the PNG parliment allowed religious education to be taught in school. Religious Education in PNG owes Sr Noela a debt of gratitude for all she achieved in her time in the role of National Director.

Sr Noela also generously embraced a number of congregational ministries, serving on the General Council in Rome, as Provincial Councillor in Papua New Guinea and also in Australia. She was Treasurer for a term and Provincial Secretary for a time in the Australian Province.

In her retirement years Sr Noela developed and interest and proficiency in reflexology and Healing Touch, two alternative therapies which she used with wonderful outcomes in nursing homes and with the elderly Sisters at our Kedron convent.

Sr Noela worked tirelessly for ACRATH and other organisations that support trafficked and marginalised women. She saw that education was a positive strategy in the quest to empower women. Sr Noela maintained a lively interest in all the affairs of our Province, in world and national politics, in new theologies and spiritualities, and in a variety of other creative pastimes. Two days before she died Noela asked for a laptop so that she could continue to read and follow the events of the congregation and world online.

Sr Noela was greatly respected and loved and she will be greatly missed by her family and friends, as well as by the Sisters.

Sr Catheirne White mfic.