Sister Mary Bede Betz wasn’t alone when she passed away Dec. 12. Another sister was with her.
It was the end of a journey that began when she entered the habit in 1943 at Monastery Immaculate Conception in Ferdinand, Indiana. She was 18 years old. Seventeen years later, she moved with 112 other nuns to Beech Grove to help establish Our Lady of Grace Monastery.
She taught elementary school – between first and sixth grade – for 52 years.
Sister Bernardine Ludwig recalls teaching with her in a public school in southern Indiana. The school’s open floor plan meant teachers could hear each other over the wheeled bulletin boards that divided the classrooms.
“Any teacher that has ever taught and had to do traditional teaching in a wallless class area – they’d be the first ones I’d canonize,” she says.
Ludwig lasted two years before moving to another school. Betz stayed for decades.
“The fact that she had the patience and the love to put up with that for all those years, to me, was pretty heroic,” Ludwig says.
After Betz retired, she remained at the monastery in Beech Grove. She turned her attention to helping the homeless and poor. Between 2008 and 2014, she sewed 692 quilts from “scraps of material people gave her,” according to Sister Mary Luke Jones. Betz kept a record of the quilts with the date each was completed and a short description.
St. Vincent de Paul distributed the quilts. She never knew the recipients, but she sewed a blessed medal into each one. The medal, Jones says, was intended to protect those who used them.
Both Jones and Ludwig describe her as “prayerful.” Ludwig says she could spend an hour in prayer at times.
“I wasn’t there when she took her last breath, but I was there shortly after,” Ludwig says. “When I walked in, the first thing I noticed was that she had a smile on her face.”
It wasn’t a common sight, but Ludwig calls it an appropriate one.
“She brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people,” she says.
Originally published in Southside Times, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.