Remembering a Great Friend!
The former director of the St. Mary’s Medical Center School of Nursing (SMSON) has been gone for more than a decade. However, Sister Celeste Lynch’s dynamic spirit and giving nature are living on through the scholarship established in her name.
“She was only five-foot-two, but she was mighty,” said Sister Mary Grace Barile, former Vice President of Mission Integration for St. Mary’s Medical Center (SMMC). “She could light up a room just walking into it and smiling.”
“It seemed that she was the face of St. Mary’s for many years,” said Joey Trader, EdP, MSN, RN, CNE and Vice President of the Schools of Nursing and Health Professions. “She was loved by everyone she came to meet and know. She always brought a room alive. No matter who you were, she cared about you.”
Sister Celeste served as SMSON’s director from 1959-76, after working at the Pallottine Sisters’ first West Virginia hospital in Richwood. She also worked as nursing services director for SMMC before moving to St. Louis and serving as provincial superior of the U.S.A. Province. She returned to St. Mary’s in 1995 to lead Pallottine Health Services (PHS).
Sister Celeste died at the age of 88 in 2012, the same year she retired from PHS. Later, a donation established an endowment for the Sister Celeste Memorial Scholarship. The $1,000 scholarship is given to a student in their second semester and is renewable for two semesters.
Linda Stepp is the most recent recipient of the three students who have each received $3,000. She said it is difficult to articulate the scholarship’s true value.
“The reassurance that God went before me on this path, working all things for my good, is unquantifiable,” said the August 2023 graduate. “I know with certainty that this path is the one I was meant to walk.”
Sister Barile, who started in SMMC’s business office in 1969, said her mentor’s spirit and faith made Sister Lynch a great role model, and her example of leadership helped Barile prepare for the position she currently holds at PHS and as provincial.
However, Sister Barile said the most important thing Sister Celeste left behind was a spirit of faith, mission and purpose. “She was almost like a second mother to the students when she was at the School of Nursing,” Sister Barile said. “It wasn’t a job she was doing; it was a ministry to someone else in their time of need.”
