Remembrance of the Life of Sister Mary Ann (formerly Sister Ann Michael) Cunningham SL
Posted on October 8, 2024, by Eleanor Craig SL
Sister Mary Ann (formerly Sister Ann Michael) Cunningham SL died Oct. 8, 2024, at Loretto Living Center on the grounds of Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Ky. Her niece, Sister Cathy Smith SL, and Sister Donna Mattingly SL were at her side. Other Community members gathered for prayers, concluding with a gentle singing of “Dona Nobis Pacem” – a fitting song for a woman who taught Latin and loved to sing. Mary Ann was 90 and in the 73rd year of her Loretto life.
The following remembrance of Mary Ann Cunningham draws primarily on her autobiographical essay in the Loretto book “Naming our Truth.” In that essay, Mary Ann shares an introduction of herself she wrote to a Vatican official in 1984:
“My name is Mary Ann Cunningham, a Sister of Loretto, and one of the signers of the Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion in the New York Times of Oct. 7, 1984. [The date of the ad was forty years and one day before Mary Ann’s death]. …I am the daughter of Connell and Nora Cunningham. My father was an Irish immigrant with a great passion for justice…. I am the eldest of their children. I grew up in Kansas City, Mo., attending schools operated by the Sisters of Loretto, whose concern for justice was in part responsible for my entering the community when I was 17 years old. The community educated me (BA in elementary education at Webster College, MA in Latin from St. Louis University, MA in Religion from Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart) and I have been a teacher for almost 30 years … mainly in secondary schools in the Western United States. This year I am working on the staff of our community as Coordinator of Justice and Peace.”
A single sheet in Mary Ann’s personnel file is titled “How I Came to Love Music.” It begins, “My father had a great tenor voice and he loved to sing. Irish songs, mostly, which he taught to us when we were very little.” Mary Ann wrote of particular songs and many influences through her long life. She gratefully names more than a half dozen Sister-music teachers and wonders, “Why are music teachers so impatient? It must be because they are in love with beauty and want us to be, too, right now!” She herself loved to teach others to sing.
Mary Ann wrote that in the novitiate, “daily practice of sacred and secular singing kept me sane! It was certainly more congenial to harmonize and pray the music at a service or to sing fun songs than to dwell upon one’s faults. … When I travel alone by car, I rarely listen to the radio. Instead, I roll along the miles singing the songs that are stored in my head and heart. Each is a trip in itself. Each calls up memories sad and happy, so ‘How can I keep from singing?’”
In another part of her autobiographical essay Mary Ann gives more detail about her earliest connections to Loretto: “I can never remember NOT being associated with the Sisters of Loretto. From my earliest days I remember how my aunt, Sister Anna Marie Plowman, on her periodic home-visits, sailed in, wrapped in yards of faintly-scented black serge. At the age of 5 I entered the primer class of our Lady of Good Counsel School where a succession of wonderful Sisters began to educate me. Next came four years of high school at Loretto Academy in Kansas City, where articulate and socially aware faculty members helped to form my own social conscience and consciousness.
“… How did I, once bashfully affable … learn and continue to learn to find my voice and myself? It was surely done within the Loretto Community, through education, experience, reading, the example of others, and especially through the collective wisdom and encouragement of our corporate voice speaking out through Assemblies. … In such a group, the question is not ‘How can we speak out?’ but rather ‘How can we be silent?’
“… Of course, I have not finished with this process. It is still not easy for me to raise my voice within the Community. Facing arrest or imprisonment is not nearly so risky as dissenting from strongly held positions in our Community struggles. To differ with friends and associates within Loretto will probably always conflict with my need to be liked and my desire to live and let live within the family.”
Mary Ann had a passion for justice and peace and could be eloquent on social justice issues. She credited her growth as an advocate to her experiences as a signer of the New York Times ad, which she called “painful and … chilling, … an experience not calculated to make one want to speak out again in the near future. But I can truthfully say that it changed me into a person, less carefree perhaps but more than ever committed to speaking out, especially on issues of importance to women.”
From 1987 for more than two-and-a-half decades, Mary Ann edited “CouRAGE,” the newsletter of the Loretto Women’s Network supporting the Loretto Assembly principle “that women are not meant by God to be subordinate to men but their full equals, and partners in the building and shaping of the world.” In her editing, and through the cartoons she chose, the songs and poems she wrote, Mary Ann critiqued without harshness, preferring to write with humor and irony, to point out contradictions so as to create fresh perspectives. In the words of the Loretto Women’s Network, Mary Ann sought “to speak the truth as we saw it, challenge each other, grapple with issues, poke a little fun and (in all caps) ‘RESIST PATRIARCHY.’”
Mary Ann was as much an actor for justice as a writer about it. The obituary of Mary Ann’s life, prepared for newspapers and the Loretto website, lists many of her activities on behalf of peace and justice. Please listen to the list and, if you are able, at the sharing time tell us details of one or another of these activities that you experienced with Mary Ann:
“Mary Ann was involved in anti-war protests during the Vietnam War. She and Mary Ann Coyle traveled to Mississippi in the mid-1960s to register disenfranchised Blacks. In the ‘70s and ‘80s she worked to change U.S. policy in Central America. She was one of three organizers of the ‘Peace Train,’ which carried Loretto students and others to Washington,D.C., to protest nuclear weapons. She never missed the annual Denver Marade in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Mary Ann spent time in jail for her civil disobedience in connection with the Rocky Flats protests in Colorado and for her part in making a huge sign reading ‘Stop Military Madness’ to hang on defense contractor Martin Marietta’s fence. Over the years, she stood firm against militarism and was present at multiple SOA Watch protests to witness to Loretto’s commitment to work for justice and act for peace. In 2015 she received a lifetime achievement award from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.” Mary Ann’s final public protest was the 2020 MLK Marade in Denver. Many of you made Mary Ann’s participation possible in her final years by pushing her wheelchair.
In her storytelling and her writing, Mary Ann often reminded us of the Loretto “wisdom women” who journeyed ahead. She herself was a “wisdom woman.” Younger Loretto women found in her a sympathetic and firm mentor. She served on the membership team and later on the acquaintance team, and wrote small personal notes on the copies of “CouRAGE” she mailed to hundreds. Mary Ann created her path by walking it and shared with many the courage it took to walk that way. She raised our spirits and grounded our Loretto “identity” in the God of relationships, hospitality and reaching out to others. Mary Ann created her path by walking toward a more loving, caring world, by working for justice and acting for peace because the Gospel urged her.
Mary Ann donated her body to science. Her wake took place Oct. 20, with a memorial prayer service on Oct. 21, both at Loretto Motherhouse.
May she rest in peace.