By Suzanne Haugh, Staff Writer

ATLANTA—Peering out through her thick-lensed glasses, Sister Angela Abood, CSJ, speaks freely of her calling to become a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet as a seventh-grader in Valdosta.

Nothing stopped her from entering the novitiate in 1951 when she turned 22, even her parents’ reluctance to see her board the train to St. Louis, Mo., to begin her formation as a nun. She has journeyed mainly in the company of children throughout her ministry, with stops along the way at St. Anthony’s School, Atlanta, where she organized a day-care center, and at the Village of St. Joseph, now closed, where she worked with troubled youth.

“I left part of my heart there when it closed,” she says, adding, “I left part of my heart at St. Anthony’s too.”

This year Sister Abood, now retired, marks her 50th year of ministry as a sister. For this MARTA-savvy Georgia peach there is little that slows her down from seeing to the needs of others, even though she is legally blind.

“She’s out on the mean streets of Atlanta all the time,” says Athens native Sister Loretta Costa, CSJ, who was 13 when she first met Sister Abood, then 8, while visiting her grandmother in Valdosta. “She’s got friends among the street people. She’ll be by Underground Atlanta or going to the Shrine (of the Immaculate Conception) and they’ll all know her name, ‘Sister Angela.’”

Sister Patricia Clune, CSJ, principal at Queen of Angels School, Roswell, can also testify to the street smarts of Sister Abood. She was downtown on jury duty around noon one day. “I looked across the street and there’s Sister Angela. She keeps MARTA in business, whether it’s the bus or train. She was coming down to the Shrine for noon Mass. She loves the city and gets in a couple of times a week.”

Sister Clune admires her fellow St. Joseph of Carondelet sister and says she is a remarkable woman with a wonderful sense of humor and a kind heart. “I think she lives the Gospel values on a daily basis. She lives the Beatitudes in my estimation.”

Sister Abood’s failing eyesight has not in the least bit slowed her down, even when faced with the challenge of managing active preschoolers. Both nuns taught at St. Anthony’s, living with eight other sisters, and Sister Clune can still picture “Sister Mother Hen” coming out of the child-care center onto the playground “followed by her little pipsqueaks.”

“She taught everything, in a sense, from memory” because of her poor eyesight, Sister Clune recalls. “She knew the skills the kids needed to learn and taught them.”

Sister Abood has drawn from her own public school experience and education under the Sisters of St. Joseph. Born into a family of Lebanese immigrants who had settled in Valdosta, Sister Abood remembers celebrating home Masses along with her two brothers and younger sister in her early days because there was no Catholic church or school in the area. Being the child of immigrants and being Catholic in a city of mainly Baptists left her feeling “not too accepted,” recalls the nun who now feels “accepted beautifully” at a senior living complex, where she resides, run by the Baptist Church in Decatur.

The Sisters of St. Joseph opened a school in Valdosta in the forties where Sister Abood completed grades 6-8. The example of the sisters had a great influence on her and cemented her desire to join the order one day. Not until the age of 22, after working as a hostess in her uncle’s restaurant and in a theater, did she leave to pursue her vocation despite her parents’ pleas to stay.

“It was just like death,” she recalls of her parents’ attitude toward her calling and their perception of the rigid, hard life many sisters endured then. “It was very difficult. Lebanese are very close people and they don’t let go.”

Years later, after completing her novitiate and professing final vows in 1953, her parents accepted her life as a nun. “I never gave them trouble,” she said.

Sister Abood’s first year ministering brought her back to the South working at St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in Washington, Ga.

“I thought I was going to go nuts in Washington,” she confides. “I was so isolated and on duty 24 hours a day working with disturbed children.”

She remembers the challenge of having to have a group of boys dressed in their Sunday best for 7 a.m. Mass every morning and then having them changed before going to breakfast.

“It was hard for me. I left the quiet of the novitiate, the silence, to go into all the noise of 100 boys in the dining room, but I worked through it.”

After a year, Sister Abood joined Sister Costa in Milledgeville at Sacred Heart School, a three-room schoolhouse. Her time there was “delightful,” she says, but the low enrollment eventually forced the school to close and Sister Abood was sent to Augusta for a new assignment teaching religion and managing a kitchen that serviced 25 nuns.

“I was pooped those days trying to keep all of that going—and in a habit,” she admits. Still, she calls those “happy days,” but often hot ones.

“In August when it was 101 degrees I would tell people that if there was a mission in Alaska, I’m going.” She speaks of how sisters looked for “white cards” to come in the mail to inform them of changes in their ministry or location.

“They didn’t always come each year so you had no idea,” she says. Sure enough, her wish for a colder climate was granted. After four years in Augusta, she traveled to Negaunne, Mich., where she taught at St. Paul’s School. “I love cold weather,” she says.

But with her father very ill, she returned to Valdosta and started in a position at her alma mater, St. John the Evangelist School, teaching first and second grades. “Everything seemed so big when I left, but it was so little when I came back,” she recalls, thinking back to her graduating class of four students.

In 1972, Sister Abood moved to Atlanta and has never left. In her 30 years in the city working primarily with children she has served at St. Paul of the Cross School, St. Anthony’s School, the Village of St. Joseph and at the Department of Catholic Education.

“I love children, working with children,” she says and recalls ministering to troubled youth at the Village in the 1970s and again in the late 1980s. She remembers the drugs and abusiveness some endured and how she tried to be an uplifting presence for them.

“Some kids really suffer,” she acknowledges. “I felt for the kids very much.”

Sister Costa was alongside Sister Abood ministering at the Village. “She is a faith-filled lady, she had to be, and she imparted that to the kids,” Sister Costa says, adding that the kids’ love for the sister was evident. “I can still see her with her guitar and with the kids, playing.”

The two nuns are residents of Clairmont Oaks in Decatur, which was the site of a jubilee Mass in honor of Sister Abood, celebrated by Father John Adamski, pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Atlanta.

“Sister Angela has always been a very outgoing, vivacious and generous person doing what she can to help others,” he said in a phone interview following the event. Father Adamski was instrumental in Sister Abood’s current interest in and service to those with HIV/AIDS.

At the Mass, Sister Abood says she thanked God for her 50 years of ministry and her parents for the gift of life. She also recognized the support of the sisters “that keep me going, and the love and care and dedication they show . . . There were hard years, you can’t live with 10 women and not have had hard times, but it’s all worth it—the peace and sense of love and care.”

The event has prompted reflection on her life and her presence in others’ lives. “It made me realize that I’ve given something to them. It’s a very good feeling that in some way I made God present to other people, especially kids.”

While still a faithful patron visible along MARTA bus and train routes, her spirit resembles more of someone thrilled with riding a roller coaster.

“Be ready for everything in Religious life,” she says, “if you give your life to God.”