The Nuns Who Built Catholic America Are Living in a Lutheran Care Home

About eighty nuns make up more than a third of the residents at Wartburg in Mount Vernon, New York. Their final years are giving the Church one more lesson in gratitude, care, and Christian witness.

Sister Ruth Murphy, Sister Ellen McGrath and Sister Jane Keegan, from left, gather with fellow residents at the Wartburg home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. About eighty Catholic sisters now live at the Lutheran-founded care center, more than a third of its residents. (Roshni Khatri / The New York Times)

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Sister Mary Stephen Healey is ninety-six, has had both knees replaced, and still gets up to dance. Happy hour at the Wartburg home in Mount Vernon, New York, comes every Friday at two o’clock. She leans on her walker and sways through “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

For fifty-nine years, the Catholic nun ran a school before retiring last year. Even still, she drives back three days a week over two crowded highways to teach Spanish.