Sista Vicki, in Medugorje in 1995.
"The Rosary and the Scapular are inseparable."
-- Testimony by Lucia, to whom Our Lady appeared at Fatima.
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray,
will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the
stray? And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it
than over the ninety-nine that did not stray. In just the same way, it
is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be
lost. MT 18:12-14
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Sista Vicki's father, who boasted descent from
the princely houses of Ukraine when it was known in ancient times as Rus,
landed on the shores of America in New York on August 9, 1950. For a time
in the 1950's, he studied for the priesthood at St. Basil's College, the
only Ukrainian Catholic Rite seminary in the U.S. Deciding later that the
priesthood was not his vocation in life, he lived in various cities until
he eventually settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. There he met and married her
mother.
Sista was Baptized Victoria Louise in St.
Peter
in Chains Cathedral in Cincinnati on February
22, at the age of 13 days old. As a child she attended parochial, and then
later public schools as the result of financial hardships imposed on the
family due to her parent's divorce. By the time she entered a technical
college in her late teens, she had almost completely abandoned her Faith,
but never stopped believing in God. The death of her beloved father in
1989 became the catalyst for a series of events which would eventually
lead her back to her Catholic Faith. Disallusioned with the emptiness promulgated
by secular and popular culture, in the Church she found the answers she
was looking for in her quest for knowledge about life, death and God. In
the mid 90's, she requested permission to be admitted to Secular Franciscan
Order, which curiously, was a return to her childhood roots and it's early
Franciscan influence. She was Professed into the Third Order of St. Francis
in a solemn Mass of Profession on April 19, 1997, taking the name of Sr.
Mary Francis out of devotion to Our Blessed Mother and St. Francis of Assisi.
Sista has been happily married to Chick, her husband
of 17 years who
is a 1993 convert to the Catholic Faith and she
has one child, a daughter who is 26 years old. She is an active parish
member at St. Aloysius Church in Columbus, Ohio where she is also Respect
Life Coordinator,
a reader at Mass, a CCD instructor and leads
rosary devotions for Marian Feasts and The First Five Saturdays Devotion.
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