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Praying
Daughters of the Holy Spirit Sisters, left to right: Jacqueline Robillard, Gertrude Lanouette and Marian St. Marie prayed during the final Mass celebrated in the chapel of the former DHS United States Provincial House in Putnam. The April 6 Mass was celebrated to decommission the chapel and to formally end more than a century in the building by the DHS. The sisters recently sold it to the Putnam Science Academy. Photo by John D. Ryan.




By John Ryan
Special to the Town Crier
PUTNAM — For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.
Those words from the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes set the tone April 6, at the final Mass celebrated in the chapel of what was until recently the United States Provincial House of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit. After more than a century living and working there, and with the remaining sisters aging, the Daughters recently sold their circa 1868 Victorian Italianate mansion on Church Street to the Putnam Science Academy.
For over a year, about 60 retired sisters have been moving out, with many going to live at the St. Joseph Living Center in Windham, with the rest heading for new homes located from Putnam to California. About 15 sisters still live nearby.
The Mass was celebrated to decommission the chapel and to formally end more than a century in the building by the DHS. It was also a chance for the sisters and their friends to remember what they were leaving behind.
“When I was a young child, in the time before day care, sometimes my mother would leave me with the sisters for a few hours when she was working,” said the Very Reverend Laurence A. LaPointe during his homily. LaPointe gave the homily and assisted the main celebrant of the Mass, Rev. Edward Dempsey, of Woodstock, a retired priest in the Diocese of Norwich and a long-time friend of the sisters.
LaPointe, 74, a Putnam native, has been deeply involved with the Daughters of the Holy Spirit throughout his life. Today he’s the pastor of the Corpus Christi Catholic Community in Windham. He told the crowd of more than 150 people filling the chapel that the time has finally come to move.
“When the Israelites left Egypt, they settled into the trip just fine when God gave them manna and quail to eat,” LaPointe said. “But after awhile the missed their onions in Egypt, and we’ll miss this place. But we’ll take the spirit of it with us.”
Founded in Brittany, France, more than three centuries ago, in 1706, the Daughters of the Holy Spirit first sent a group of sisters to Hartford in 1902, invited by the Bishop of Hartford, Michael Tierney. The bishop wanted the French-speaking sisters to help Connecticut’s many newly arrived French-Canadian immigrants, serving primarily as teachers, laundresses and seamstresses. They soon branched out into Vermont and Massachusetts, and in 1916, they bought the Morse Mansion in Putnam. They moved in a year later, turning it into the headquarters of their United States province.
Locally, the Daughters are best known as teachers, founding and operating a high school, the former Putnam Catholic Academy, from 1928 until it closed in 1977.
Florence Parker, 84, of Putnam, graduated in 1952. She was Florence Ostiguy at the time. It was then a girls-only school, run at the mansion. The retired certified public accountant remembers her time there fondly.
“I started in the fall of 1948,” Parker said. “I was practical. I wanted to make sure I could get a job when I graduated, so I wanted to learn something useful. Sister Albert Celine had worked on Wall Street before she took her vows, and she taught me bookkeeping. I never learned a better bookkeeping method than what she taught me; I still use it now. The accounting school I attended later was easy, but Sister Albert Celine was hard. She helped me to have a successful career.”
Although most of the Daughters are retired, the order still has sisters working in various ministries throughout the country.
At the end of the Mass, the head of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit in the U. S., Sister Gertrude Lanouette, extinguished the candles on the altar and then lit a new candle to carry away, symbolizing the new, upcoming chapter in the history of the province.
The last of the office staff will move out of the building by next week, relocating the sisters’ American headquarters to newly-rented office space in Putnam.

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