Sister McGeady, former Covenant House CEO, now keeps different pace

Published: 2004-01-12

ALBANY, N.Y. (CNS) -- After 13 years as CEO of Covenant House, an international shelter program for homeless and runaway youths, Sister Mary Rose McGeady has started a new phase of her life -- retirement. The 75-year-old Daughter of Charity, who retired in June from Covenant House, no longer spends a third of her time on the road visiting the organization's 15 U.S. sites to encourage the staff and teenage residents; she now keeps in touch through e-mails from her computer at her order's provincial house in Menands, in the Albany Diocese. Looking back over her decades of working with young children, she said that one of her most valuable lessons was learning to take some time between a crisis and her reaction to it. The children often acted out badly, but she learned to respond by saying, "What you did was a very serious thing, but we're not going to deal with it now. We'll deal with it tomorrow. It gave me distance from the crisis, and the kids would be so anxious about what was going to happen tomorrow that they would come to me and apologize!" Sister McGeady told The Evangelist, diocesan newspaper of Albany.

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