Sr. Caritas who Educated “the Nation’s Children” Passes

The Sisters of Mercy, the St Catherine Academy student body and the Lawrence family are mourning the passing of former SCA Principal, Sister Caritas Lawrence. She passed away on Wednesday night with close relatives around her. She served as principal of SCA from 1984 to 1997. During some of those years, current Principal, Salome Tillett got to know her well. She told News Five today that the name Sister Caritas is synonymous with giving. The legacy and the loss, she said, are huge.

Sister Caritas Lawrence

, Deceased (Answering God’s Call)

“The most important thing in my life is to have an intimate relationship with God. I think living religious life would be a waste if you never got to have a good, intimate relationship with God.”

Salome Tillett

Salome Tillett, Principal, SCA (via zoom)

“Sister Caritas came along in a long line of excellent Sisters of Mercy who led the school and she had the fame of being the last Sister of Mercy. After Sister Caritas, the leadership of the school was passed on to lay administration, myself being the second lay person, noh? Sister Caritas hired me in 1992 when I came on board as a teacher and I will tell you, she was a force to reckon with. She wasn’t big in stature but her personality was huge. She was giant. She was always that person who looked out for every student. The more unfortunate the student was, the more they were her child. And there were little phrases that she used to always encapsulate her views. For example, she would say to us “We are serving the nation’s children.” That’s a phrase that even today, long after Sister left the classroom, we remember. We are serving the nation’s children. Or she would tell teachers and students that the Glory of God is a woman fully alive. She always made you feel like you’re a woman, you could do better. She emulated mercy for us. Everything she did, every day was mercy. Sister always took up for the students. No matter how wrong that student was, she would say give them the benefit of the doubt. The school took on her personality – that of concern for the poor, of advocacy for women, of always being a refuge. In her later years, you know when Sister retired from SCA at fifty-five, she went to do her Ph.D, so she came back Sister, Doctor Caritas. She was very proud of that and she continued working. She moved on to the Ministry of Education; she developed a prison ministry along with Father Brian from SJC. She did great work with the Maya Indians as a young teacher. In fact, I was talking to a couple of colleagues who are of Maya Indian descent and they said if were not for Sister Caritas, we would never have left our village. And Sister Caritas herself would joke that the men in the village didn’t like her too much because she helped the women to learn to read and to manage their money, and the men felt like, wait, these women were learning to be too independent because of her influence.”

Sister Caritas would have been eighty-one on October eighteenth. Tentatively, Monday has been set as the day of her funeral service.