Eight nuns died of COVID-19 at WI Convent, four on same day

Eight elderly nuns from a Wisconsin convent died of complications from COVID-19 last week – four of whom died the same day.

The women were all in the late ’80s and’ 90s and resided at Our Lady of Elm Grove, a nursing home for sisters in suburban Milwaukee, authorities said.

“Even though they are older… we didn’t expect them to leave so quickly,” said Sister Debra Marie Sciano. “It was just very difficult for us.”

The congregation that runs the house discovered on Thanksgiving Day that one of the 88 sisters living there had contracted the deadly disease, said Sciano, the provincial head of the Sisters of Schools in Notre Dame Province in the central Pacific.

Several more positive tests followed, and on December 9, sisters Rose M. Feess and Mary Elva Wiesner died.

Sister Dorothy MacIntyre died on December 11 and Sister Mary Alexius Portz died on Sunday, according to the congregation’s website.

Four of the eight – sisters Cynthia Borman, Joan Emily Kaul, Lillia Langreck and Michael Marie Laux – all died on Monday.

All of the women worked as educators, including Wiesner, who taught in Catholic elementary schools for over 40 years and worked as a home gift shop coordinator.

Some had been missionaries and musicians or had worked on issues of peace and justice. One of the sisters was a published poet and another spent her summers working on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.

The tragic outbreak comes after six nuns at Notre-Dame des Anges Convent in Greenfield, Wisconsin, also a care home for Catholic sisters, died in August from the coronavirus.

In July, seven nuns died at a Maryknoll Sisters’ Center in Ossining, New York, and 13 died in a convent near Detroit, Michigan.

Last month, 76 Catholic nuns from a convent in Germany tested positive for COVID-19, forcing health authorities to quarantine the entire monastery.

The Waukesha County Department of Health and Human Services said county disease investigators have been working with the School Sisters of Notre Dame facility since they were contacted about the outbreak.

Sciano declined to say how many other sisters have tested positive, citing privacy concerns.

With pole wires