Maryknoll Sister Mary Elizabeth Driscoll, who taught in Catholic grade schools for a decade in post-war Hawaii, died peacefully on Oct. 2 at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. She was 90. She had celebrated 70 years as a Maryknoll Sister on Sept. 7.
Hawaii was Sister Mary Elizabeth’s first assignment as a Maryknoll Sister. She had taken the religious name Sister M. Edmund Damien and made her final vows while in the Islands.
Mary Driscoll was born on July 26, 1923, in Portland, Oregon. She entered Maryknoll on Sept 7, 1943. She made her first profession on March 7, 1946, at the Maryknoll Sisters motherhouse in Ossining, N.Y.
In 1946, Sister Mary Elizabeth was assigned to Hawaii where she taught at St. Anthony School in Wailuku and Maryknoll School in Honolulu. She professed her final vows on March 7, 1949, in Hawaii.
Returning to the mainland in 1955, she worked for the next several decades in a variety of ministries. She was an educator in New York City’s Chinatown, an assistant novice mistress in New York and a novice mistress in Massachusetts.
She moved to the U.S. Western Region to serve as region coordinator and teach learning disabled children in public schools.
In 1964 she received a master’s degree in theology and later became certified to teach children with learning disabilities.
Sister Mary was assigned in 1982 to the U.S. Eastern Region in Kentucky where she worked with poor families and the elderly, tutored school dropouts and volunteered as a parish pastoral visitor.
In 2010, she moved to the Maryknoll Sisters Center in Ossining and worked for 10 months as a volunteer tutor at a nearby elementary school.
She retired to the Sisters’ residence in Monrovia, Calif., in 2010 before returning to the Maryknoll Sisters Center in New York on Aug. 1, 2013.
Sister Mary was admitted to Phelps Memorial Hospital on Sept. 30 for emergency surgery. She died there two days later.
Her funeral and burial in the Maryknoll Sisters’ Cemetery in New York was scheduled for Oct. 8.
