Dominica Antonine "Lena" Losavio
April 18, 1923 - January 27, 2000"Please pray for me, that I may be kind and gentle with everyone I meet."
Sister Mary Madeline was among the pioneers at Our Lady of Wisdom Health Care Center, where she lived the last month of her life. For years she had been walking miles every day, and seemed to be in good physical shape for her age, seventy-six. At "Wisdom" she was finding her way, doing her best to help out in the dining room after Mass one morning when apparently without warning, God called her home.
Dominica Antonine, called "Lena," was sixth of ten children born into a warm, Italian family in Baton Rouge. Her father, Sam, had emigrated from Palermo, Sicily, and was among the first settlers on Highland Road. He was thirty when a friend introduced him to a lovely young girl of eighteen, Vicenza "Virginia" Catelana, from a sugar plantation in Union, Louisiana. They were soon married. In between caring for their children, Mama ran the family grocery, and later the children helped. Papa had been a blacksmith, and took up the laundry/dry-cleaning business. Highland Cleaners did all the cleaning and laundry for the church and priests of St. Agnes gratis, and for the sisters after they opened the parish school in 1936.
Young Lena attended public school, as there was no St. Agnes yet. She had trouble with her vision, and in a family of high achievers, of whom she was always proud, she was the one who was unhappy in school. Her oldest sister taught her skills in cooking, baking, and pastry; with a natural artistic ability, and a gift for managing time and detail, she excelled. Lena grew to strikingly beautiful young womanhood. Father Patrick Gillespie nurtured her vocation to religious life, overcoming her parents' objections. Her childlike devotion to "Father Pat" carried over into a lifelong, trusting affection for priests.
At eighteen, Lena went to Rosaryville, the novitiate of the Dominican sisters, recently moved from New Orleans. She entered in June, 1941, and when Mildred Cazale (who became Sister Mary Damian) arrived on September 8, she recalls a special, decorated cake in honor of herself, the new postulant, and the Blessed Mother's birthday, baked by "Sister Antonine," already chief cook for the Rosaryville community.
Her health was always a cause for concern, but she became a valuable member of the community, managing food service in convent or school at St. Mary's in Greenville, Dominican College, at St. Agnes, Mater Dolorosa (Independence), and at Dominican High School for many years, where she fed hungry girls by tens of thousands. She was in her element when she was able to give of herself, nurturing and delighting others with her creativity. Through the years she catered banquets for priest-friends, some of whom showed up at her funeral in silent tribute. Though limited by her visual handicap, she had a little-known talent for art and music. Somewhat shy and reserved, "Maddie," as she was affectionately called by sister-friends, loved people, and loved to be loved. She had a great capacity for joy. She found joy in traveling to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, to Honduras to visit friends, in going to the health spa for the sauna, (before it was the "done thing," though being trendy was not an issue with her), attending classes at Loyola with Sister Mary Jordan Langenhennig, and in walking outdoors with her friend Sister Mary Anna Taggart, the two of them known to every passerby in the neighborhood of Audubon Park.
Sister Mary Jordan in preaching at the funeral Mass related how when Maddie was feeling hurt, she would admit so to her most trusted friend, but never reveal the source of the hurt. After releasing the feeling, she would go down to the chapel, to sit in silence and be with her God. Whenever she would meet someone she trusted, she would say, "Please pray for me, that I may be kind and gentle with everyone I meet." We could take a lesson.
