This story appeared in the St. Mary's Web site in the year 2000.

Sister Mary Rosalyn Di Modica is ninety years young, and still sewing! She has lost count of the number of dolls she has made and sold. She is a busy lady, between her "cottage industry" and visits from her boys and girls, now in their seventies, who come back to see her. 

Born August 2, 1910, in Hammond, Louisiana, the first girl, second child of Joseph and Cora Di Modica, Mary Teresa was ten when her mother died. The father farmed, took care of the two children and nursed his sick wife through a long illness. When Cora died, he married Laura Ciolino, a young widow from Italy whose husband had died in the first World War. Her children were ages two and five. The couple had three more children, in what today would be called a "blended" family.

When Mary Teresa was in seventh grade, beautiful, young Sister Mary Dominic asked the girls "Who would like to be a sister?" and all the hands went up. Mary was given a scholarship to the Dominican Academy in New Orleans, sixty miles away, where her Aunt Rose was working and learning English. Mary would often interpret for her aunt.

Mary skipped to eighth grade, because the academy had no seventh graders that year. Five years later she entered the convent. In 1928 she began teaching at St. Leo the Great School, and taught mostly primary grades in the Dominican Sisters' schools until 1995, when she retired to the motherhouse.

She began making "sister dolls" to help raise money for the Dominican College Library, which had just moved to an old mansion in 1948, and needed "everything." She sold them for $5.00 each, and until recently was selling them for $25.00. The dolls are meticulously crafted by this nonagenarian, who doesn't want to raise her prices, because maybe someone couldn't afford it. "I feel sorry for people," she says softly. There are those who maintain she is a nun-doll. The sisters are not advertising her work, because they are concerned that she works too hard, but those who have the dolls consider them collector's items. 

Her greatest challenge, she said, was teaching the altar boys their Latin in after-school hours. Sometimes they would catch the priest in a mistake, so she must have done well. She has enjoyed traveling to Europe, to Lourdes, France, and Ireland, where her Dominican community originated in 1860, and twice to Italy (where on the second visit she kept a promise to come back, spent six weeks, and visited many cousins) and to Medjugorje in Yugoslavia. She lost count of her trips to see her brother and his family in Chicago.

When asked what was her happiest time, she said with a chuckle and a twinkle of the eyes, "It's all been happy to me!" and added thoughtfully, "I had joy in doing everything for God."