Girl's comment saved 'I Am the Bread of Life' song from trash bin

Published: 2007-10-18

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- An unsolicited comment from a high school girl kept one of the most popular hymns of the Second Vatican Council era, "I Am the Bread of Life," from meeting an untimely fate. Mercy Sister Suzanne Toolan, who composed the song, said she had been asked to write a song for an event in the Archdiocese of San Francisco -- possibly a eucharistic event, she recalled --and was writing on deadline. At the Catholic girls' high school in California where she was teaching in 1966, Sister Suzanne used an unoccupied room next to the school infirmary to finish what became "I Am the Bread of Life." "I worked on it, and I tore it up. I thought, 'This will not do,'" she told Catholic News Service in an Oct. 16 telephone interview from her order's convent in Burlingame, Calif. "And this little girl came out of the infirmary and said, 'What was that? That was beautiful!' I went right back and Scotch-taped it up." The rest, as they say, is history. Sister Suzanne, who was to celebrate her 80th birthday Oct. 24, is an author now as well, getting credit as a co-author with Elizabeth Dossa, communications officer for the Mercy Sisters in Burlingame, for a book titled "I Am the Bread of Life."

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