Religious Milestones: Little Servant Sister Mary Ann Nowicka, 70 years

It went through me like an electric wire, like a spark” is how Sister Mary Ann Nowicka described the moment she decided to follow a call from the Lord to enter consecrated life. Now, seven decades past that fateful decision, Sister Mary Ann, a member of the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, still smiles as she recounts her faith journey. 

Born in central Poland as Anna Nowicka, the young Catholic had little exposure to religious nuns or priests because of Communism’s grip on her country. “There was no Polish Catholic school, no sacraments, no nothing,” she said. “We went to regular public school run by the Communist government.”

By the seventh grade, she learned of an acquaintance enrolled in religious school and begged her parents for permission to study there as well. “I said I just wanted to go to the nun school, not be a nun,” Sister Mary Ann said with a laugh.

Showing a visitor to her room at the St. Joseph Senior Home, Woodbridge, she continued, “There was a statue of the Blessed Mother there, bathed in sunshine. At that moment, I heard in my heart her say, ‘You will remain here.’

“At that moment, I prayed for the vocation and perseverance.”

Sister Mary Ann entered the community in 1953, became a novice the following year, and took her final vows in 1956. She began her ministry as a teacher of pre-kindergarten students, but in 1961, she said, “The government made nuns in the whole country stop teaching and gave the schools to the Communists.

Her community assigned her as a missionary to Zambia, where she taught sewing and embroidery to students in grades five, six and seven despite not knowing the language.

Following a stop at the order’s New Jersey motherhouse, she then embarked on her next assignment in Holyoke, Mass. There, she spent 10 years working in parishes and teaching instructions to students receiving their first sacraments.

After completing an associate’s degree at a university, Sister Mary Ann opened a kindergarten in Holyoke and directed in-school plays twice a year with her young charges.

She then was assigned to Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, Milltown, where for seven years she taught second graders at its now-closed parochial school.

Her own studies resulted in the completion of her bachelor’s degree in education. Sister Mary Ann also taught at schools in the Diocese of Camden, then returned to Our Lady of Lourdes for six years until she retired from active ministry… or so she thought.

“I still wanted to do something,” she said. “I didn’t want to sit still and wait for death.”

Sister Mary Ann began a ministry of service to those patients in her order’s St. Mary hospital and nursing home in Cherry Hill.

“I was not a nurse,” she cautioned, “but I distributed Communion, led discussion groups and visited with patients and families whose loved ones were near death.”

Sister Mary Ann cherished the contacts she made in this ministry and joined them in praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet, made known by fellow Polish religious, St. Faustina Kowalska. “Even when I was a patient in the hospital, I was passing out the chaplet because it is so important,” she concluded from her room at St. Joseph Senior Home.