I don’t intend to turn this column into an obituary column, but we just lost two nuns in less than three months, and I must say something about the latest passing, that of our dear Sr. Mary Thecla Paolini, FSP, at 92. Even if you only met her briefly, you would never forget the encounter. 

She was big-boned, stood around 5’10,” had a permanent megawatt smile, and was as funny as a crutch. She was well aware of her imposing stature: “I’m built like a door!” she once told me. There were certain Thecla-isms you could count on. For example, if something felt a little off, she would say out of the corner of her mouth: “Right church, wrong pew,” but most of her zingers were, as one nun put it, “unexpected.”

Who was she before she became the beloved Sr. Mary Thecla? She was baptized Lucy, because she was born close to December 13, feast of Santa Lucia, but she was actually born on December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to whom she had a great devotion. 

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Her family called her “Mayor Lucy,” because she took her civic duties very seriously and would pick up the phone to report potholes, a bent street sign, or the need for a stoplight at an intersection. She used to sew her own (fashionable) clothes, and rumour has it, when she and her boyfriend took to the dance floor, they cleared it. 

In her early 20’s, she felt called to religious life, met the Daughters of St. Paul, entered within two weeks and never looked back. (The discernment and convent entrance process is not quite that speedy today.) Her name in religion was for both the early martyr St. Thecla and our Co-Foundress, Mother Thecla Merlo.

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I once asked her secret to staying so upbeat all the time, and she immediately burst into song: “So high, but I get over it! So low, but I get under it…!” 

She had her fair share of struggles and sorrows, but you’d never know it. She just had a positive outlook that everything would work out, and a joie de vivre to beat the band. One of our Sisters writing about her described her as “fun loving,” which about says it all. 

In fact, Sr. T was so positive that I think she never liked to say “no,” when you asked her something. Instead, she’d lilt: “Not really!” The only time I ever saw her sad was when we had to close one of our convents where she had been missioned. She burst into tears, and once she confided to me very solemnly: “I might be old, but I can still grow. I can still do better.”

Being 100 per cent Italian, one of her favourite things to do was feed people. She was always cooking. She said if she weren’t a nun, she’d have a food truck so she could feed people and travel at the same time. She ate not one but two apples a day to keep the doctor away (it worked). Wherever she was missioned, she collected many, many friends, and somehow managed to keep in touch with them wherever she was sent next.

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Our new provincial superior, Sr. Donna—who began her duties in January 2026—had two Sisters die on her watch already. When Sr. Donna went to visit Sr. Thecla in the hospital shortly before she died, Sr. Thecla cracked: “Well, you’re starting off with a bang.” Sr. T then returned to the mother house for hospice. She had just received Holy Communion from one of our Sister-Eucharistic ministers when the priest arrived to do the Anointing of the Sick. “Sister, normally you receive the Eucharist as part of this Sacrament. Do you want to receive again?” Sr. Thecla: “I want the works!” It sums up her whole life, and challenges us to go for God’s gusto the way she did. 

She didn’t change one whit right to the very end and continued to be her jovial self, showing me that, yes, she was the real deal. It wasn’t just confidence in herself, which she had in spades. It was her utter confidence in the goodness of God that allowed her to go out as she had lived: loving, laughing and embracing life to the fullest.