Saying Good Bye to the Toledo Provincial Center, Toledo, USA

August 5, 2015

The Toledo Sisters of Notre Dame are in the process of selling an 18 acre portion of the Toledo Provincial Center property. “Lengthy discernment and prayer led us to the realization that in order to sustain ourselves as a religious community, and to continue our mission and ministries, we had to find a way to ease the drain on our resources and to downsize,” said Sr. Mary Delores Gatliff, Toledo Provincial.

The Provincial Center campus became an obvious area of focus with its energy inefficient buildings such as the huge Provincial Center house which is simply no longer needed. Currently only 50 of our 182 Sisters live in the 105,000 sq. ft. building. “We want to be good stewards of our property and finances,” Sr. Mary Delores added.

Sisters will be moving to a new Sisters of Notre Dame Center on the 94-acre Lial property where the Lial Renewal Center and Lial Catholic School are located. The Lial campus is about 20 miles southwest of Toledo. The construction of the new Center will be complete later this fall. As the move approaches in November a good bye ritual took place in July when most of the SNDs were in Toledo.

“We asked our sisters to close the door to our PC home in spirit. Sisters walked the grounds, visited rooms, consciously experienced various senses as they entered a space and recalled memories. A brief ritual was held in the main chapel, inthe dining room/kitchen, on the fourth floor residence and outside on the campus,” explained Sr. Mary Rosellyn Theisen, who planned the good bye.

A new chapter . . . “Today we turn a page, not a beginning or an end
But the next part of the journey
Our call if borne of faith, for every step of the way
Now we travel on together. . . . (Joyce Johnson Rouse©2011)