BY PAULA DAY

A love of teaching and working with children energizes Sister Susan Ambroch, IHM, a jubilarian honored by the archdiocese for 25 years’ service to the Church as a woman Religious.

A member of the congregation of Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary based in Immaculata, Pa., Sister Ambroch will complete her first year at Sts. Peter and Paul School in Decatur this June.

I love teaching children (with) their simplicity, their honesty, their sense of God,” remarked the seventh-grade religion and math teacher.

“The children here have been nurtured by their parents and the school to express what they feel at the deepest level, and they do so unabashedly.” This “radical honesty,” as Sister Ambroch called it, and what she sees as a “God-centered” element in her students’ lives, have convinced her that Sts. Peter and Paul is an “extraordinary school.”

The congregation of the Immaculate Hears of Mary is a community dedicated to Christian education. Their charism is one of “simplicity with an option of service to the poor,” Sister Ambroch explained. Eight members of the community serve in the Atlanta archdiocese at Sts. Peter and Paul and St. Joseph’s School in Athens. The sisters are located principally in the Philadelphia area, but they have settlements in California, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut as well as in South America. Sister Ambroch served in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia before coming to Atlanta.

Born in Wilmington, Del., she is the second daughter of Mary and Benjamin Ambroch, and one of four children.

Her elementary and secondary education was in Catholic schools in Medford, N.J. An active, involved teenager, she recalls, “Deep within my heart nothing filled that empty space except a relationship with God….Nothing satisfied me except the Lord, I didn’t care what I did, I just wanted to be the Lord’s.”

A visit to the motherhouse of the Immaculate Heart of Mary congregation at Immaculata, Pa., focused her decision to become a Religious. “I was extremely impressed with the sisters,” she recalls. “I wanted to live in a community of women who were not only in love with the Lord, but were in love with each other.”

She entered the congregation on Sept. 8, 1965. At Immaculata College she earned a theology degree with certification in elementary education and secondary mathematics. She then earned an M.A. in school supervision.

Sister Ambroch celebrated her jubilee in Sts. Peter and Paul Parish and with her family and community last fall. The congregation celebrates jubilees on the anniversary of the sister’s first profession of vows. The school honored her at a special Mass offered by Father Richard Wise, the pastor of the parish. Students performed a skit centered on the Good Shepherd theme. At Thanksgiving, family and friends gathered in her home parish of St. Mary of the Lakes in Medford, for a jubilee celebration.

Summing up her experience as a Religious, Sister Ambroch said, “I have experienced God on earth through my consecration and the lived reality of my vowed life.”