Sister Larraine gathers with some of the Hispanic children from Church of the Epiphany.

            When Sister Larraine Lauter tries to pinpoint how she got such a heart to help the suffering, she thinks of her mother and of turtles at the five and dime.
            When she was 5 or 6, she was saddened to see tiny turtles for sale that were kept in cramped, metal containers. “I had this goal to save up my money to buy all the turtles and set them free,” she said.
           Her mother’s lessons were more grounded in reality.
           “One of my earliest memories is my mom taking us to this terrible, state-run nursing home for the mentally ill, people who had no one,” Sister Larraine said. “Her lesson was, ‘You will care and you will respond.’ Somebody has to teach you to care. She was willing for us to have broken hearts. A lot of people are afraid to do that to their kids.”
           In Sister Larraine’s 29 years as an Ursuline Sister of Mount Saint Joseph, she’s been a teacher, a pastoral minister, an environmentalist, a fundraiser, an advocate for immigrants, an artist, and a musician. But the theme running throughout all her ministries is a desire to help those who are living in the margins of society.
           “She’s not afraid to try anything to reach out to people who are suffering,” said Sister Rebecca White, who entered the postulancy with Sister Larraine 30 years ago. “She’s very tenderhearted.”
           Today, Sister Larraine handles Hispanic ministry at Church of the Epiphany in Louisville, Ky. Just in recent weeks her duties have expanded to become minister for social responsibility, which means she works with 20 social concerns committees.
           “I’d say the greatest thing she brings is experienced leadership,” said Fr. Jeff Nicolas, pastor at Epiphany. “She understands community. She brings her Spanish, her social justice knowledge and all her experience, but it’s her finely honed ability to lead that I find just wonderful. It helps my leadership.”
           Epiphany was a homecoming for Sister Larraine, who joined the parish in 2006 when she came back to Louisville to care for her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer.
           One enters the church along a curving, remote, tree-lined drive, leading to 20 acres of woodland. Deer can regularly be seen through the large office windows. Epiphany was begun in 1971 to fully implement the vision of Vatican II, Sister Larraine said. The church was designed to be inexpensive and flexible, a pilgrimage for travelers on their journey with God.
           “There’s a heavy emphasis with lay involvement, social responsibility, peace, and justice,” Sister Larraine said. “Ten percent of what (money) we take in is disbursed to good works. In my years in pastoral ministry, I learned so much from this place.”

Growing up

Sister Larraine gives instruction to guitar player Edgardo during choir practice for the Hispanic Mass at Church of the Epiphany.

            Lorraine Anne Lauter was born in St. Petersburg, Fla., but when she joined the Ursulines, she changed the spelling to “Larraine.”
            “I come from a Southern family, where you have to be named for people,” she said. “I’m one of four ‘Larraines.’ When I was born, my father was sure he spelled it correctly as ‘Lorraine.’ I changed it back.”
           She grew up about a quarter mile from the Gulf of Mexico, but her family moved to the Louisville suburbs when she was 10. Her father, Ron, was transferred in his accounting job with General Electric. In the 1980s he took up truck driving and was much happier, she said.
           “He was outdoorsy, we did a lot of camping when I was a kid,” Sister Larraine said. That’s where she got her love of nature and protecting the environment. Her mother, LaVay, babysat for a living while raising her three children. In her 40s, she became a real estate agent.
           The family lived on the remnants of a farm, where chickens, goats, dogs, and rabbits were common. She describes her home life as “ecumenical.” Her father was a Lutheran with suspected Jewish roots from his German father, and her mother was a Baptist who converted to Catholicism. She says she was formed by her parents with “a dollop of Ursuline formation on top.”
           Ursuline Sisters taught her in grade school at St. Margaret Mary, and she recalls some of her “leading lights” were Sister Aloise Boone, because of her justice advocacy, and Sister Mary Christopher Williamson, who taught her math in the seventh grade. “She was the only teacher who made math clear to me,” Sister Larraine said. “There was an expectation of kindness.” Both sisters are now deceased.
           “Sister Aloise talked my parents into applying for a scholarship” to Mount Saint Joseph Academy, and although she got an academic scholarship, it did not cover all the expenses. She worked off the rest of her board by cleaning a lot of dishes and a large amount of what is now the Mount Saint Joseph Conference and Retreat Center.
            “Up until then, every report card said, ‘Larraine does not live up to her potential,’” she said. “I was a very noncooperative child in school. When I got to Mount Saint Joseph, I thought I would try. In the first quarter, I got a D in algebra, and I didn’t care,” she said. “Sister Mary Ephrem (Clements) told me it was not an option for me to not care. That sense of high expectation was a great environment for me, although I was not always conventionally obedient.”
           She graduated in 1977, and that summer got a job working at GE making ovens. “I was making $5 an hour, that was big money in 1977,” she said. She bought a guitar and told her parents she planned to stay out of school for a while so she could make money. “By the end of the summer, I was ready for higher education,” she said.

Sister Larraine gestures during the Hispanic Mass at Church of the Epiphany.

           She enrolled in Bellarmine College in Louisville, but thoughts of becoming a sister followed her.
           “I knew all the way through high school I was intrigued by the possibility,” Sister Larraine said. “I thought, ‘I need to get this out of my system.’ Those were the days when women in higher education, of working in leadership, were still sort of extraordinary. I had a sense that these are women who can go all the way. They will make use of every bit of education, all for the kingdom of God,” she said. “It was also a chance to work with people with compassion. I was vague on how, I just knew these women were doing it and I knew them.”
           She entered in 1978, a year after her Academy classmate, Sister Dianna Ortiz. She holds two marks of distinction: She’s the last graduate of the Academy to become a sister, and she was the last of the current sisters to enter as a teenager. The fit hasn’t always been smooth.
            “I’m not a conventional person. It can be a difficult dynamic,” she said. “I was very idealistic. I had a desire to respond to God’s love, and a be a conduit for that love. I entered at a time of drastic change, and we’ve been in transition ever since. I’m OK with change.”
           Sister Larraine was sad to see the Academy close in 1983. “Our academy was an honorable enterprise. It did the vision well for as long as possible,” she said. “If the demographics of Owensboro had been different, it could have been a day school. I think there’s a definite place for a separate gender high school in Owensboro.” Louisville has seven gender-specific high schools, Owensboro has none.

Art, teaching, and music

            Sister Larraine’s first job was teaching art at St. Bernard School in Louisville for six months while another teacher was on pregnancy leave, then doing the same at St. Francis of Assisi School in Loretto, Ky., the next six months. She then moved to Cathedral School in Owensboro, handling children’s liturgy and teaching art and music for the next several years, while taking classes at what was then Brescia College.
            “I was known to be artistic. I taught art but I didn’t feel like I was getting a chance to be an artist,” she said. That would change in the coming years.

Sister Larraine did all the glasswork in the Brescia University Chapel. Pictured is the divider for the tabernacle in the Eucharistic Chapel.

            “Sister Mary Diane (Taylor, chairwoman of the Division of Fine Arts at Brescia), was a major influence in my life and has become one of my longest friendships,” Sister Larraine said.
           Sister Mary Diane said Sister Larraine was an excellent art student and leader. “I don’t know of any medium she’s tried that she hasn’t excelled in,” Sister Mary Diane said. Just recently Sister Mary Diane used some of Sister Larraine’s oil on canvas paintings to help students in her design class.
           “It’s an unusual friendship, I’m considerably older,” said Sister Mary Diane, who’s been an Ursuline Sister for 56 years. “It’s just wonderful to have someone within the community who understands and appreciates art. I feel very fortunate to have had her as a friend all these years. She’s a joy to know.”
           Sister Larraine has helped parishes reshape their worship spaces, and done fabric hangings, such as in St. Michael’s Parish in Sebree, Ky. She helped with design work for the chapel at Brescia, and did all the glass work in the windows. She also did the glass in the tabernacle in the Retreat Center.
           One of Sister Larraine’s favorite creations occurred when she served on the design team for the chapel at the Owensboro Medical Health System HealthPark, which opened in 1998.
           “I painted the stars on the ceiling at that chapel. It was a great challenge to replicate the night sky on the night the chapel was dedicated,” she said. “It’s 25-feet high. I felt like Michelangelo working on my back. I was sad when it was finished because I enjoyed doing it so much. It took four to five days to complete.”
            Sister Larraine moved on to teach art and religion at Trinity High School in Whitesville, Ky., from 1987-90. She loved teaching, but had been trying to decide on a master’s degree. While helping the priest at Whitesville start RCIA, she spoke with the pastor at St. Columba Parish in Lewisport, Ky., near Owensboro, about trying pastoral ministry.
            She spent two years at St. Columba, then from 1992-2002 served as a pastoral associate and liturgist at Precious Blood Church in Owensboro. It’s the longest she’s been in one ministry.
            “Fr. Darrell Venters had the insight that what a church needs is good liturgy,” Sister Larraine said. “I really got to use music in liturgy there.” She plays the piano, percussion, and a little guitar.
            “She started a ‘folk choir,’ which she described as a ‘choir made up of folks who don’t think they can sing,’ and she taught them how,” said Fr. Venters, who is now at the St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center on the campus of Western Kentucky University. “We ended up with a phenomenal choir.”
            Precious Blood had a school then, and Sister Larraine taught the importance of recycling to the students, he said.

‘Loosed with the Gospel’

Sister Larraine painted this ceiling in the Owensboro Medical Health System HealthPark Chapel to depict how the stars aligned on the night the chapel was dedicated.

            In 2002, Sister Larraine was noticing more and more immigrants around Owensboro. She was riding a bike along a farm one day and happened upon a migrant camp, reminiscent of one she’d seen as a child. “It looked like 1965,” she said.
            “I prayed about whether I should do something about it,” she said. “I didn’t speak Spanish, and (Ursuline Sister Fran Wilhelm) was already working with Hispanics (with Centro Latino).”
            “The next day, I got a call from the Kentucky Housing Corp. saying they wanted to explore offering housing to migrant farm workers,” Sister Larraine said. “I’ve always felt like if you pray and the door opens, you’re meant to walk through. If the door shuts, that time is over.”
            She was told she’d have to create a nonprofit organization and have a board. “It was a very steep learning curve, I had to be involved in development and leadership,” she said.
            She’d been on a few mission trips to Honduras, and doubted she could learn Spanish. A few Hispanics began coming to Precious Blood, so she thought learning some songs in Spanish would be welcoming. “I started classes at Owensboro Community College and fell in love with the language.”
            That’s how Migrant Immigrant Shelter and Support (MISAS) got started, with Sister Larraine as its executive director. “There were a lot of uphill battles,” she said. “We looked at six or seven locations and had to fight the neighbors’ complaints at every one.” The housing corporation said the agency had to provide support programs to Hispanics as well as housing.
            “It was as much a foreign language as Spanish was,” she said.
            Sister Larraine’s actions were typical of the Ursuline spirit — see a need and do something about it.
            “We have more freedom to take action, it’s not that we’re better people,” she said. “If I decide to start a nonprofit and work with no salary for awhile, I’m not dragging a family along. That was part of Angela Merici’s vision, that women should be ‘loosed in the streets with the Gospel.’ There’s certainly a lot of joy in it.”
She immersed herself in learning the migrant world. “I’m a pretty fierce proponent,” she said. “There’s probably no greater fundraising challenge than raising money for immigrants. There are a lot of misconceptions about immigration. ‘Why are these people here without documents?’ By default, most immigrants are very vulnerable to exploitation.”
            She led MISAS until October 2006, two months after she learned her mother was diagnosed with cancer. “I worked hard to get good leadership in there,” she said. “My mother was not going to walk through cancer without me,” she said.

‘Faith no matter what’

Sister Larraine’s oil paintings on canvas that she did in her first painting class while a student at Brescia are still being used in Sister Mary Diane Taylor’s design class.

            LaVay Lauter was sick often when Sister Larraine was young, so as the oldest of three children, Sister Larraine was given much responsibility at a young age. Being the oldest daughter is a “sacred role” in her family, and she called being with her mother during her cancer “a sacred journey,” and “a privilege. It’s sort of a terrible beauty.
            “I’m a very positive person, but I’m also very practical,” Sister Larraine said. “She was stage 4 when she was diagnosed, so I knew it would be tough. I knew she’d need a lot of positive support. I had pastorally walked with people with cancer, I knew what the odds were.”
           One big need Sister Larraine sees is to advocate for the poor in health care. “My mom was my cheerleader. She was passionate for immigrants,” Sister Larraine said. “I’ve got this steely core when it comes to the rights of people who are suffering. You just have to have that.
            “My mother was an amazing model of ‘faith no matter what,’” Sister Larraine said. “She prayed for healing, but she held onto faith until the very end.” LaVay Lauter Lewis died March 25, 2008.
            It was the end of a period that involved too much death for Sister Larraine. In December 2006, Sandy Compas, a former Ursuline Sister and one of Sister Larraine’s best friends for 25 years, died in a car accident. In 2007, the chaplain at Churchill Downs, where she ministers to Hispanics, asked her to help translate for a woman whose 4-year-old son, Ivan Aguilar-Cano, was murdered. Sister Larraine found herself in the midst of a highly publicized case.
           In the midst of all the death she’s been around, in January 2008, Sister Larraine was present when a Hispanic woman she works with had a baby. “Out of all this death came new life,” she said with a smile.

Next step

            She moved back to the empty 140-year-old house and “farmette” where she grew up, and is restoring the home. Her siblings and her 6-year-old niece “who is the light of all our lives” live nearby. “It was my mother’s dream that it would be a place of refuge for mothers with newborns,” Sister Larraine said, and so far one such mother has stayed with her.
            Next up is turning the property back into a farm, starting with a Nigerian dwarf goat she will get soon to begin milking. “By April I will have six to eight goats,” she says in her way that leaves little room for doubt.

Sister Larraine joins other sisters under 50 years old as they "point to the future." Back row (from left): Sisters Nancy Liddy, Rebecca White, Larraine Lauter, Martha Keller, Alicia Coomes, and Michele Ann Intravia. Front Row: Sisters Carol Shively, Dianna Ortiz, Monica Seaton, and Mary McDermott.

           Sister Nancy Liddy, her friend for 17 years, said Sister Larraine has always had affection for odd animals, including a hedgehog. “You don’t find many people who are consistently kind,” Sister Nancy said. “She’s kind to children, kind to animals, and kind to the earth.”
           Sister Larraine has never ministered outside Kentucky, but she thinks someday she will be called far away. She goes to Honduras a few times a year with some Methodist missionaries, and has built relationships there with Catholics she’s met. Other than Haiti, Honduras is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
           Sister Larraine helped raise money to build a church there, and she met Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, a strong voice on social justice issues, and whom many consider a future candidate for pope.
            “Maybe someday I’ll do development in Honduras,” she said. “I feel pulled to Honduras.”
            She’s also interested in the future of the Ursuline Sisters. During Community Days this year, Sister Larraine gathered a group of 10 sisters to have their picture taken. The one thing they had in common? They were the only sisters younger than 50.
            “I don’t think religious life always means big numbers,” she said. “We should be open to whatever membership God brings us, then be at peace. I’m thrilled we have these two new communities to bring a fresh, but seasoned perspective.”
           The Ursuline Sisters of Belleville, Ill., merged with Mount Saint Joseph in 2005, and the Ursuline Sisters of Paola, Kansas, are in the process of merging. When completed, the Ursulines of Mount Saint Joseph will number 186. “I have no doubt,” Sister Larraine said, “that those of us who are younger will walk through a lot of changes.”
           No doubt Sister Larraine will be happy that the sisters will continue to care and respond.